Bingaman: New pacts mean
more funding for county
U.S. Senator Jeff Bingamen walks with director of NCI Loren Sekayumptewa during a tour of the facility on Wednesday. Bingamen said he would like to try to get more funding for better facilities and programs for the center during his visit. — Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The nation’s financial crisis may have a silver lining.

As part of the legislation to provide funding to handle the current crisis, Congress also provided more funds to two programs that exist here in McKinley County — the Payment in Lieu of Taxes and the Secure Rural Schools.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., came to Gallup Wednesday to report the increases and to take a tour of NCI, the local detox facility.

The PILT funds go to areas where there is a lot of federal land, which reduces the reduces the county taxation base. The PILT grant is meant to make up a portion of those lost funds.

The program has had mixed support in Congress. Senators in those state that have a lot of federal land are big supporters while those senators in states with little federal land are not. As a result, the program has only been partially funded in recent years.

Bingaman said historically the program has been funded only at about 65 percent, which is why McKinley County received $580,566 for this year. With the additional funding, however, he estimated that the county would receive an additional $348,686 which county officials can use for any purpose they want.

This would give McKinley County almost $930,000 for the year and Bingaman said the bill authorizes a slight increase of this year’s funding every year through 2012.

But it’s the Secure Rural Schools program that the county will benefit the most.

This program was set up by Congress to compensate counties which have seen their lumber industry affected by new regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

McKinley County Commission Chairman Dave Dallago said at one time the county had timber sales from the Zuni Mountain area but that ended several years ago because of environmental regulations.

The county only received about $33,000 from the program this year mainly because of the formula Congress devised which gave 70 percent of the monies to states in the Northwest, even though legislators from other parts of the country complained about the disparity.

New legislation approved recently by Congress will increase McKinley County’s share of the program to $565,000 and again, there are no restrictions on how the monies can be used.

When asked how the legislators from the Northwest states liked the formula change, Bingaman laughed and said they didn’t. “But they had no choice because the program was due to elapse and they needed our support to have it continued,” he said.

Because the formula on how much each state and each area will receive changes each year, Bingaman said it would be impossible to guess how much McKinley County will receive next year.

Dallago said the county appreciated what Bingaman has been able to do on behalf of the county. “He’s gone out of his way for us,” he said.

County Manager Tom Trujillo said no decision has been made on how to use the extra $800,000. The county is in the process of deciding its priorities for requests for state grants from the state Legislature next year and Trujillo said part of these funds could be used for matching funds for these grants.

“I’ll be meeting with each commissioner separately in the next few days and we should have a better idea of what to use the money for by next week,” he said.

When Bingaman toured the NCI facility Wednesday afternoon, he praised officials there for trying to alleviate the alcohol abuse problem in this area. NCI officials told Bingaman that they were hampered by lack of funds and he pledge to do what he could to find new funding sources for the agency.