2020 Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILT) Gateway community dividend Letter

On October 21, 2020 nearly 70 county commissioners, mayors, and council members from public land gateway communities in 11 western states sent a letter to their congressional offices asking them to add a Gateway Community Dividend to the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program.

In 1976 Congress created the PILT program, which requires the federal government to make annual payments to local governments to compensate them for property taxes not collected on lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service and some military installations within their jurisdictions.

Congress generally funds PILT for only one year at a time, which makes budget planning difficult for counties because they don’t know how much the payments will be from year to year.

In 2019, counties across the country received more than $514 million in PILT payments. Based on estimates, a new Gateway Community Dividend would provide an additional $207 million annually to counties - funds that will help communities maintain critical infrastructure and provide essential services for both residents and visitors.

The letter states: “To help gateway communities deal with additional costs, Congress should expand the PILT Program to include a ‘Gateway Community Dividend,’ which would add a 50 percent premium for every acre of permanently protected federal public lands to the current PILT formula. This dividend would be paid to counties with federally protected public lands within their jurisdiction, particularly lands that restrict extractive activity, such as wild & scenic rivers, wilderness areas, and national parks.”