Consider this: Your neighbor’s house is a real fixer-upper in need of lots of improvements. It’s in such a terrible state it could even catch fire and that could spread to your home. And it turns out your neighbors have much more money than you do. Way more. More than 10 times as much. They practically print it. They choose to spend it on other things.

Would you pay up to help your neighbor fix up their home?

That’s not the same thing as Oregon’s relationship with its federal forest lands. It’s pretty similar.

Federal forest managers manage 60% of the forest lands in Oregon. Millions of acres need landscape treatment. And Oregon is paying the federal government millions to do the work.

If we go back to 2020, wildfires killed 11 people in the state. More than 1.3 million acres were burned. And 3,522 buildings were wiped out. Families were displaced. About $130 million was spent putting out fires. There was an indirect loss of an estimated $6.24 billion. Those numbers come courtesy of the state’s Legislative Fiscal Office.

We know people debate about what to do on federal forest lands or any forest land. Some say do nothing and let what happens naturally on federal forest lands happen, so forests can become more natural. The problem is what will naturally happen is that wildfires will naturally take more lives and destroy more homes.

Thinning can help. And restoration efforts that seek to return the forests to a more natural state are just smart. That won’t stop or slow every wildfire. It can help.

Oregon has a partnership to get some of that work done. For the 2021-2023 period, the state chipped in $6.5 million, which would leverage $8.25 million in federal money and revenue.

Let’s repeat that: Oregon pays the federal government $6.5 million for the federal government to take care of its federal forests.

We don’t doubt that the money goes to good things. It goes to support the work of forest collaboratives, such as the Deschutes collaborative, which does all sorts of work to try build consensus around restoration work. The money is helping to pay for a look in the Deschutes National Forest at user-made roads and trails. It supports actual treatment work.

But Oregon has enough problems of its own that we have to wonder why it is paying the federal government to better manage the federal government’s forests in Oregon.

Shouldn’t the federal government be paying? Shouldn’t we get the money back we have already poured into it?

Maybe Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Rep. Cliff Bentz and incoming Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer could set aside any partisanship that divides them and do something about it.