Idaho Legislature discussing PILT funding

BOISE — Idaho lawmakers are looking at some potential changes that could have a big financial impact on Shoshone County.

Ken Ivory, a Republican from West Jordan, Utah, who served in Utah’s House of Representatives until last August, addressed the Idaho Legislature last week concerning his home state’s continued efforts in their rural communities by re-evaluating federal payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) on public lands.

PILT are Federal payments to local governments that help offset losses in property taxes due to the existence of nontaxable Federal lands within their boundaries.

In Shoshone County, these are the monies from the federal government to overcome the loss of funds that arises due to the inability to tax the federal forest lands we are surrounded by.

Initially created as a tax equivalency to property tax, it has fallen grossly short of that in recent years.

In 2018, Ivory himself sponsored a bill to re-evaluate the value of PILT payments made on Utah’s 35 million acres of federal lands in hopes of convincing the federal government to update payments that had fallen behind, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed by the governor in March 2019.

Idaho District 7 Sen. Carl Crabtree is keeping special eye on this situation as his district consists of Clearwater and Shoshone counties, and a portion of Bonner County, meaning there are roughly 7,000,000 acres of federally owned lands in District 7.

He was both interested and skeptical of what he heard during Ivory’s presentation and explained it during one of his weekly teleconference press briefings.

“They’re looking to see if there’s a better way of evaluating the real value of those lands,” Crabtree said. “We’re getting about a dollar an acre, when we get it. According to these people, it could be an average of $120 to $200 per acre is what it’s really worth. It was very interesting, but I think if we can barely get a dollar per acre, how are we going to get $120?”

At this point, this is merely a discussion at the legislative level, but Shoshone County is roughly 75% federal land. In 2018, it received $1,213,862 for 1,231,988 acres of federal land. In 2019 however, that dollar amount steeply declined to $480,158 while the acreage grew to 1,232,116 total acres.