The budget the Washington Senate passed this week cuts $300,000 from the Columbia River Gorge Commission’s 2012-13 operating funds, a cut the Oregon Legislature would have to match under terms of the bistate compact under which the agency operates.
A $600,000 cut in the budget would amount to a 72 percent reduction on top of the 25 percent reduction the agency has sustained over the past two years.
The commission already has reduced its office hours to four days a week and reduced its small staff from the equivalent of 10.5 full-time employees two years ago to six. Those remaining have taken cuts in pay, hours and benefits.
Executive Director Jill Arens said an additional 72 percent cut would leave the agency with no office and just one part-time staff member to enforce the provisions of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act. The act marks its 25th anniversary this year.
“Maybe it could be a person in a car with a mobile phone and laptop,” Arens said in an uncharacteristic burst of dark humor.
The rest of the agency’s $238,000 annual budget would go to fixed costs like self-insurance premiums and contractual obligations, including a contract for geographic information system software “that we can’t get out of,” Arens said. “I don’t know where we would store things, but we would have to store them somewhere.”
On a more serious note, she said, “The litigation this would spawn would be a lot more expensive than the savings.”
Congress could sue the states, which are required under the act to fund the commission “to adequately carry out the responsibilities of the act,” she said. ”The counties could sue. They’re left holding the bag” for enforcing the act’s provisions.
The House and Senate budgets for the 2011-12 year both dedicate $410,000 to fund the commission, Arens said. “But when the second year rolls around, the House budget is $419,000 and the Senate budget is $119,000.”
Senate budget-writers also made incorrect assumptions, she said. First, they assumed that Oregon would continue to fund the commission at current levels. Second, they assumed that the $300,000 cut from the commission would be absorbed by the Department of Ecology.
Gov. Chris Gregoire proposed in her budget that the Gorge Commission budget be incorporated into the Ecology budget, but the Legislature has not approved the consolidation.
“There’s no money in the Ecology budget for us,” Arens said. “Ecology can’t absorb this.”
Separately, there has been discussion of combining Ecology, Parks and Recreation and the Department of Natural Resources into a single agency. A bill to create a $30 annual pass allowing the public to access lands managed by all three agencies passed the Senate Wednesday with bipartisan support.
State Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, said he is working hard to get the Gorge Commission funding restored and expects to be successful.
“It was pulled into the discussion about consolidation of the state’s natural resource agencies,” he said in an email. “It should never have been part of those plans, and I think people understand that now.”
Michael Lang, conservation director for Portland-based Friends of the Columbia Gorge, said his organization hired former House Speaker Joe King to lobby on the commission’s behalf in Olympia this year and has been actively working to support the commission’s budget in both states.
‘This has caught us off guard,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the commission’s budget has been threatened. In the 1990s, Republican legislators in both states slashed the panel’s budget in retaliation for controversial land-use rulings. In the 2010 session, a House supplemental budget eliminated funding for the commission, but the money was later restored.
According to its website, the Gorge Commission was established in 1987 to develop and implement policies and programs that protect and enhance the scenic, natural, cultural and recreational resources of the gorge, while encouraging growth within existing urban areas allowing development outside urban areas consistent with resource protection.
