As counties and municipalities across the country begin their budget sessions for the upcoming fiscal year in earnest, they will be looking at one recent set of recent figures especially carefully.

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that Idaho’s 44 counties will receive a total of $41.2 million in Payments in Lieu of Taxes for 2024. Those payments help offset the costs of maintaining essential services in areas with tax-exempt federal lands, according to a press release from the department.

The amount of each payment is based on the number of federal acres and the population within each county. For example, Ada County received $995,859 for its 298,118 acres, Blaine County received $2,885,766 for 1,325,118 acres and Lewis County received $10,314 for 3,081 acres.

The payments cover lands across the U.S. managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation Commission.

“Payments in Lieu of Taxes payments help local governments carry out vital services, such as firefighting and police protection, construction of public schools and roads, and search-and-rescue operations,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget, Joan Mooney, said in the release. 

Since the payments began in 1977, the Department of Interior has distributed nearly $12 billion to states, including the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands. The department generates over $22.2 billion annually from commercial activities on public lands, a portion of which is allocated to states and counties, with the remainder deposited into the U.S. Treasury to fund various federal activities, including Payments in Lieu of Taxes.

Individual payments may vary each year because of changes in federal land acreage, previous revenue-sharing payments and adjustments for inflation and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

For 2024, Oneida County’s PILT total is $1,000,294, Caribou County’s total is $643,480, Franklin County is $384,662, Bear Lake County is $809,601, Power County is $981,813, Bannock is $667,720, and Cassia County is $2,963,694.

Essentially, the idea behind the PILT payments is that land which is owned and managed by the federal government is by that token not available for taxation or commercial purposes as a revenue source for counties in which the land resides.  As a way of compensating the counties for the potential lost revenue, the PILT system allows for public lands to be maintained without exerting an undue financial burden on the states.  

There are many who make the case that federal ownership of the land itself is a burden, but that question is separate from the remunerative goal of the PILT funds.  For many of the counties in Southeast Idaho, Cassia, Power, and Oneida especially, the ability to provide essential services to residents of the county is in many ways tied to the funds, which constitute a significant portion of the annual county budgets.