World Photo by Jolene Guzman More than 80 people squeezed into the jury assembly room at the Coos County Courthouse Friday for the swearing in of newly elected officials.

Coos County will start out 2009 with a new commissioner on board, but the main worries on the minds of county managers remain the same: dollars and cents.

“We are moving towards a perfect storm right now,” Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean said.

 The economy is slow and so is the timber market, which could make a dent in two of the three main sources of income for the county: tax revenue and the County’s Forest Fund. And the third, the reauthorized federal timber payments, are less than they used to be and getting smaller each year until disappearing altogether in four years.

New Commissioner Bob Main vows to pursue other funding alternatives, while Stufflebean and Commissioner Nikki Whitty say they want to find the financially feasible level of county government for the long term.

State funding cutbacks already took a slice out of the county department budgets for this fiscal year. The outlook for next year is unclear. Whitty and Stufflebean say when it comes to spending federal reauthorization money, Coos County should proceed with caution. 

Revenues to the County Forest Fund might be slow flowing. Despite a higher than expected sale price (almost $4 million on 12 million board feet of timber), last year’s spring timber sale provided logging companies with more time — two and a half years — to harvest timber.

“We had to do that to get a decent sale,” Whitty said.

If logging companies wait to harvest, then the county’s short-term financial outlook darkens.

“If that does happen, we will lose all that revenue,” Stufflebean said.

Commissioners transfer money out of the fund based on a five-year average, but Stufflebean worries whether taking the entire transfer this year is prudent, since there’s a chance no revenue will replace it.

“The timber market is in the tank,” Whitty said. “I would propose not taking any.”

Main has another idea. He still wants to pursue the $9 million tax bill he proposed sending to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management last year as the county assessor. After the federal in-lieu payment expired at the end of June, Main considered taxing the BLM on its property in Coos County. He said the paperwork never made it out of the assessor’s office.

“If we do get that, it would be $3 million more than the county got in federal payments,” Main said. “That’s really what I want to do — get more funding without more taxes.”

If Main’s plan doesn’t pan out, budgeting at the county level depends much on what is done at higher government levels, Whitty said.

“I’m hoping we can maintain a pretty status quo budget,” Whitty said. “If the state orders cuts, then it’s anyone’s guess.”

That might include funding to the public health and mental health departments and county law enforcement divisions.