We took some time on Tuesday to go through the 122-page initial report on federal timber payments from a task force appointed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski. The report is worth a look. Its conclusions are sobering.

The report contains 54 recommendations. Not one of them is likely to ease the pain that Oregon counties will suffer because of the loss of the federal payments. You'll recall that the payments are intended to cushion the blow to timber communities as logging in national forests has diminished.

In fact, the report's No. 1 recommendation - having Congress renew for four more years the timber-payment program - doesn't seem likely to happen. Members of Oregon's congressional delegation (in fact, members of Congress from throughout the West) have been hammering away on the latest attempt to renew the payments for months. Attempts to win a four-year extension and a one-year extension both have failed. The last of the money from a safety-net program runs out in less than a week.

It's clear now - and really, it's been clear for a while - that most members of Congress simply aren't interested in extending the payments. Many counties, including Benton, have been planning for the worst for years, but smaller counties generally will be less able than more-populous counties to weather the storm.

So that puts a lot of pressure on the report's remaining 53 recommendations. Recommendation No. 2, for example, calls for the hardest-hit counties to bolster their tax base by enacting local-option taxes. But those require approval from voters in counties already suffering sluggish economies; it's not an impossible task, but it's a long shot.

Another proposal addresses ways in which the counties and the state can continue to fund Oregon State University's Extension Service, an important resource throughout the state and an issue of some importance here.

Many of the other recommendations call for a variety of initiatives to give counties some financial breathing room. You'll hear more about these recommendations during the next legislative session.

Other recommendations in the report call for better management of the federal forests, with an eye toward increasing logging in the forests. No one thinks that the cut in the national forests ever will return to the levels of the past. However, you can build a case for increasing the cut in a sustainable, sensible fashion, and that's a goal that Congress should pursue. Sen. Ron Wyden's recent proposal to do that is a good first step.

But that's a long-term solution for a situation that's likely to get worse before it gets better. The report identifies six counties (Lane is among the six, but not Benton) that could fail financially within a year or two after the payments end. So the final recommendation in the report talks about the need for legislation to establish financial-control boards and other procedures to deal with counties in financial distress.

Given that the payments seem unlikely to be continued and that many of the other recommendations are long-term solutions at best, it only makes sense to prepare for the worst.

ON THE NET: To read the report from Gov. Ted Kulongoski's task force on federal timber payments, go to this Web site: http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/docs/federal_forest_payments_062008.pdf.