Washington continues to acquire only part of the 
forest lands forfeited to the counties, there will be 
no reduction in the area of county-owned forest 
land and in fact it will increase in practically every 
county in the region. In Washington and north- 
ern Oregon the areas reverting to the counties im- 
mediately will be principally cut-over lands with 
or without reproduction, and within the next 
decade or two these will be supplemented with 
some remote and low-grade commercial timber- 
land. In southern Oregon the reverting areas will 
include not only cut-over land and second-growth 
land but considerable areas of old-growth timber. 
Extensive public purchases of forest land in the 
near future would probably retard the reversion of 
tax-delinquent land to the counties. County- 
owned forest lands will consist of scattered areas 
for many years but in certain counties may eventu- 
ally be consolidated into blocks. Owing to de- 
creasing tax bases and to the difficulty of adminis- 
tering an irregular patchwork of lands, many 
counties will undoubtedly sell any or all of their 
lands at almost any price, seeing only the oppor- 
tunity for immediate cash return, overlooking the 
greater future county burdens involved in such 
sales. Other counties, more far-sighted, may 
adopt policies designed to hold their lands and 
keep them off the speculative market. Since much 
of the tax-reverted land in the southern Oregon 
counties carries merchantable timber, it is possible 
that these counties will give more consideration to 
holding and managing their forest lands than will 
the northern counties. If the States fail to assume 
responsibility for the county-owned lands, the in- 
dividual counties should direct their efforts towards 
permanent forest management of these lands. 
All county revenue in both Oregon and Wash- 
ington is obtained from the general-property tax. 
Funds raised by this method have barely sufficed 
for carrying on the ordinary functions of govern- 
ment, and at present the only statutory method 
by which counties can substantially increase their 
income is to raise property-tax rates to points that 
in many instances would be confiscatory. Under 
these circumstances it is doubtful that the counties 
will spend very much for administration of their 
forest land, particularly in western Washington 
and in northwestern Oregon where county-owned 
132 
forest land consists chiefly of areas either recently 
cut over or occupied by small second growth. So 
long as counties have to provide road and school 
services and are limited to the general-property 
tax for revenue, it will be increasingly difficult for 
private owners to carry timberland, particularly 
in the counties where there is but little industry 
and the farm areas are so small and so poor that 
the taxes they pay are inadequate to meet the costs 
of government they create. Under these circum- 
stances county spokesmen will continue to assert 
that public ownership of large areas of timberland 
is contributing greatly to county fiscal problems, 
overlooking the fact that if these same areas of 
publicly owned land had been turned over to 
private ownership many years ago they would 
only have aggravated the problem of oversupply 
of private timber, and many of them would un- 
doubtedly have reverted to the counties long ago. 
Integration of Public Lands and Policies Desirable 
Except in the spruce-hemlock districts just men- 
tioned, and possibly in the Douglas-fir forests in 
southwestern Washington, sustained-yield practice 
would be chiefly a matter of integrating policies and 
procedures of the various public agencies adminis- 
tering forest land. 
Although there may be individual instances of 
sustained-yield practice on private land under the 
present conditions of unstable private and mixed 
public ownership, adoption of such practice on a 
complete region-wide basis is impossible so long as 
these conditions prevail. Most private owners will 
find it difficult to practice sustained-yield manage- 
ment unless on the basis of cooperative arrange- 
ments with a governmental agency having timber 
and the authority to enter into long-time agree- 
ments. 
Under a liquidation program an operator might 
prefer that the publicly owned timber upon which 
he partly depends for raw material be controlled 
by several different public agencies; but under a 
sustained-yield program the average operator en- 
tering into a cooperative agreement involving fu- 
ture supplies for his mill and the handling of his 
land would prefer to deal with one public agency 
rather than several. In addition, therefore, to a 
merging of private properties, some consolidation of 
