JOHN DAY, Ore. — The COVID-19 stimulus bill that Congress recently passed includes a new two-year aid program that will provide $2 billion to counties with declining federal timber revenue and to Native American tribes.

“It will be a big boost to our county and all of our communities,” Grant County, Ore.,  Commissioner Jim Hamsher said in an email Tuesday.

Grant County is one of many timber-dependent counties in Oregon and other states that have received payments through the Secure Rural Schools Act.

The new payments included in the COVID-19 relief law will replace SRS payments for 2022 and 2023.

The SRS funneled federal dollars to timber-dependent counties in the West to pay for local services after the amount of logging on federal land decreased dramatically in the 1990s.

In Oregon, the amount of timber harvested from federal land in 1989 was about 4.3 billion board-feet. In 1996, the federal timber harvest was 690 million board-feet  — a drop of 84%.

The original law, which U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sponsored, was intended as a six-year program but has been reauthorized seven times.

It has now expired, and counties will receive their final payments later this year.

Wyden put the money for timber-dependent counties and the tribes in the COVID-19 relief package. He also said March 10 that over the next two years he and a bipartisan group of senators will continue to work on getting SRS reauthorized.

The new payment program is fundamentally different from the old one. In addition to allocating tribal governments annual payments of $250 million over two years for the first time, the law changes the formula for allocating money to timber counties.

Each year, the program has awarded each county federal dollars using a formula based on its share of timber revenue from the 1980s and early 1990s.

This meant states with more federal land received the lion’s share of the funds. Congressional research indicates that Oregon received about 20% of total SRS payments in 2019.

Under the new program, the funds will be based on a county’s poverty level, unemployment rate, property values and other economic indicators.

The program calls for the treasury secretary’s office to determine a formula for awarding payments to individual counties.

Wyden said he spoke with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week and “she is very much aware” the new program is something “quite different.”

He said the only thing Yellen will be directed to do is to make sure the rules are based on economic need and that no money is spent on lobbying.

Wyden said the program is a “fresh approach” designed to get timber counties off a “financial roller coaster.”

Hamsher said he would need to see the formula’s specifics and how it will affect Grant County. He said he would still like to see it based on timber receipts from the past.

“You still have the same road systems,” he said. “But you’re don’t have the money to maintain them.”

County Judge Scott Myers said Congress needs to come up with a permanent fix for timber-dependent counties.

“We are permanently harmed by it unless they permanently fix it,” Myers said. “And this isn’t a fix.”

Myers said counties would be “permanently ignored” when it comes to their relationship to the loss of tax revenue on public lands.

Wyden said the goal is to come up with legislation that will have “predictability, certainty and broad political support.”

In addition to SRS money, counties receive Payments in Lieu of Taxes for federal land within their boundaries. The federal government doesn’t pay property taxes to counties. PILT offsets those property tax losses.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said Grant County received $700,000 from PILT and $3 million from SRS last year.

Merkley said he and Wyden have had to take “extraordinary means” to keep SRS alive because Oregon is one of the few states that benefit from it.