Baker County to receive $922,571 in federal rural schools funding

Where will the $922,571 go? In Baker County, the new federal rural schools payment is money that can keep road work, emergency management and public safety from landing more heavily on local taxpayers.

Baker County is slated to receive $922,571.29 in the latest round of Secure Rural Schools funding, drawn from 2025 U.S. Forest Service revenues tied to the Wallowa-Whitman, Malheur and Umatilla national forests. The payment is larger than the more than $877,000 the county was expecting in February, and more federal support is still expected when Bureau of Land Management payments are announced.

The program exists to soften the blow in counties with large amounts of federal land that do not produce property tax revenue the way private land does. The Forest Service says Secure Rural Schools supports schools, roads and other municipal services in more than 700 counties and Puerto Rico, with payments split into three parts: Title I for roads and schools, Title II for projects on federal lands and Title III for county projects.

That structure matters in Baker County because local government is still tied to federal land decisions and federal timber receipts. The program lapsed in September 2023, leaving counties in Oregon and across the country without payments since early 2024 until Congress reauthorized the program in late 2025. Retroactive FY2024 payments were distributed to states on Feb. 20, 2026, after the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act of 2025 became law on Dec. 18, 2025. Congress extended the program through fiscal year 2026.

Baker County officials said in December 2025 that the reauthorization should bring more than $500,000 a year to the county budget, with money helping the road department, emergency management and public safety. They said the payment stream helps keep roads safe, supports schools and helps cover wildfire response and other public-safety needs without shifting those costs to local taxpayers.

The county’s dependence on the money is rooted in geography. Baker County has about 2 million acres, and roughly half of it is federal land. A county land-use document lists 1,018,467 acres of federal land, including 642,986 Forest Service acres and 368,522 Bureau of Land Management acres. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest alone spans 2.4 million acres in northeastern Oregon and western Idaho, and its supervisor’s office and Whitman Ranger District are in Baker City.

The scale of the federal payment reflects a long decline in timber receipts. During the 1980s, the Wallowa-Whitman averaged about 196 million board-feet of timber a year. That fell to about 42 million board-feet in the 1990s, with a low of about 23 million board-feet in fiscal 1993. The latest check is larger than earlier expectations, but Baker County still relies on federal transfers to keep core services from slipping into local cuts.