Family loggers in Wallowa County will be allowed up for air one more time. Passage of House Bill 3112 gives the average family logging company a savings of approximately $2,500 in taxes next year. The personal property bill, which goes into effect in January 2010, is an extension of a 1999 bill that exempted some newer logging equipment from taxes.

Machinery exempt from taxes will include newer cats, skidders, log loaders, processors (single-grip harvesters), delimbers, skyline and swing yarders. Trucks, chainsaws and milling machinery are not eligible for exemption, Weideman said. “It has to be tractor wheel machines used exclusively for logging.”

The new incarnation of the bill extends the tax exemptions for six more years and allows loggers to continue to exempt property manufactured after 1992.

“A normal logger has five pieces of equipment with a value of $750,000 to $1.5 million,” said Wallowa County logger Mike Weideman, owner of BTO Logging of Enterprise. “So, he would save about $2,500 per year in taxes (on eligible machinery). That’s not a lot of money, but to a logger, that’s money in my pocket rather than out.”

Weideman, who is also president of the American Loggers Council, representing 30 state and regional associations, cites several studies that argue the necessity of the tax exemptions.

“Fifty percent of the logging equipment is idle according to a study done by the Association of Oregon Loggers,” he said. “Nationally 40 percent of the logging equipment is idle according to the American Loggers Council. On a scale of one to 10, logging in Wallowa County is at about three. A good share of our loggers are going to Union County, working out of Pomeroy, Washington, out of Baker County. Basically there’s no logging in the county. It doesn’t make sense to pay personal property tax on something that is doing nothing.”

The original bill exempting the equipment was about to sunset when Congressman Greg Smith began fighting for both an expansion and an extension of the bill. In a televised speech before congress Smith argued that the bill was essential. “The men and woman in Wallowa County, and Union County, and Umatilla County and Morrow County are dependent upon this bill,” he said.

Smith’s reasoning prevailed.

“Greg Smith was instrumental in getting this done and deserves a lot of credit for getting it across the finish line,” said Jim Geisinger, head of Associated Oregon Loggers. “We couldn’t even get a hearing in the natural resources subcommittee of the ways and means committee. Smith got us that hearing and the bill eventually passed the house by an overwhelming majority and the senate unanimously.”

Both Weideman and Jim Geisinger, head of the Associated Oregon Loggers, credit Smith with pushing HB 3112 through for loggers.

Large companies like Boise Cascade will probably not benefit from the bill at all, Geisinger said because they no longer do their own logging. “They contract out with small companies,” he said. “The beneficiaries will be small family logging companies.”

Geisinger is not done fighting for tax exemptions, he said. “Our objective is to make this equipment permanently exempt; family owned contractors need all the help they can get.”