More Green Required Besides Trees, Grass : Needy County Faces Bankrupt Future

SOUTH BEND, Wash. —  People in Pacific County boast about the surf on their shore, the history in their hills and the oysters in their estuary, but they have finally had to admit that a little piece of paradise is about all they’ve got left.

By January, the county might be so broke its government will simply collapse, a prospect that its 17,200 citizens greet with reactions ranging from skepticism to indifference, with a little black humor on the side.

“The light at the end of the tunnel,” some county officials say, “is the train coming this way.”

This year’s county budget is $7.6 million, down from $9.5 million last year. At the end of this year, the county expects to have only $600,000 left.

Not everyone worries. People who live here agree that money is a nice green thing, but so are the pines blanketing the Willapa Hills. Then there is the Pacific Ocean bumping up against 28 miles of tranquil beach on Long Beach Peninsula.

And there are the oysters. South Bend, about 120 miles southwest of Seattle, calls itself the “Oyster Capital of the World,” and on a typical spring day 100 openers can shuck 250,000 of the slimy morsels at the Coast Oyster Co.

‘Paradise’ to Some

“It’s never too hot. It’s never too cold. The grass is green. You couldn’t starve a person here if you tried to,” said County Commissioner Dave Wolfenbarger. “It’s paradise.”

When he was a child during the Depression, his parents would load up their Model T with vegetables and trade produce for shoes in town. Today, loaded logging trucks still rumble along county roads, and the county grows more oysters than anywhere else in the world, but such bounty doesn’t pay the bills like it did in the 1930s.

Recently, Wolfenbarger and his two fellow commissioners asked the state Legislature to rescue the county either by reducing the services it must provide, such as maintaining the jail and courts, or allowing it to file for bankruptcy.

“We simply sent them notice to remind them that there’s a major portion of government called local government which serves the people, and don’t ignore it,” County Administrator Vyrle Hill said. “Because your ignoring it in the recent past has placed almost all local government on its knees.”

A legislative commission has been studying the economic woes of local governments ever since Pacific County announced it was in trouble two years ago.

Timber revenues, once a third of the county’s tax base, have dropped from $2 million in 1981 to $250,000 in 1986 because of a state-mandated change in a forest excise tax formula. The county lost an additional $250,000 a year when Congress eliminated revenue sharing last year.

At the same time, the county’s insurance premiums jumped from $62,000 to $250,000. Telephone deregulation in 1984 pushed its phone bill up 1,000%. During a recent strike at Weyerhaeuser, mill taxes that usually brought the county $500,000 amounted to $67.

On May 19, voters will decide whether to support a $600,000 tax levy for law enforcement. A similar levy failed in November, and if this one also loses, the sheriff’s department, already down to five officers from 10, will drop to three.

Vows to Recover

“Pacific County isn’t going to roll over and die. We’ve been kicked and we’ve been put down, but we’re not going to stay that way,” Wolfenbarger said. “If we can modernize our form of government in order to answer the needs of today, and keep welcoming the folks who want to come here and live and share our quality of life, we’ll be in good shape.”

But the people the county attracts aren’t the ones who pay many taxes.

“By the time you take out of the population those who are less than 20 years old and those who are more than 60 years old, you don’t have many people left to pay the bill,” Wolfenbarger said.