SALEM — A class action lawsuit pursued by 14 Oregon counties against logging restrictions on state forestlands has reached the end of the road.

The counties have failed to convince the Oregon Supreme Court to review a decision that overturned their $1 billion judgment against the state government earlier this year.

An attorney for the counties said they’re “deeply disappointed” the state’s highest court won’t consider reinstating the award.

For affected rural communities, the judgment represented “funds their local governments should have been paid long ago and which they could have used for their schools, libraries, hospitals, public safety and other services,” said John DiLorenzo, attorney for the counties.

However, critics had expected the court’s decision, characterizing the plaintiff’s legal underpinnings as flimsy and far-fetched from the outset.

“There was nothing there to begin with and there was nothing to take to the Supreme Court,” said Ralph Bloemers, an attorney who’d represented fishing and conservation groups.

The lawsuit was filed by six years ago by Linn County, which claimed forestry officials were contractually bound to maximize logging revenues on nearly 700,000 acres donated by the counties.

The case was granted class action status, allowing local governments to argue they’d been deprived of more than $1 billion in timber harvest revenues after state forest managers began emphasizing environmental and recreational considerations about two decades ago.

In 2019, a jury agreed the state government had breached its contract with the counties, which gave up the forestlands in the 1930s and 1940s in return for a share of timber revenues.

The state’s Court of Appeals threw out that verdict in April, ruling that the lawsuit should have been dismissed before even reaching the jury

Linn County, the lead plaintiff, challenged that legal opinion on behalf of the counties and numerous tax districts within them, but the state’s highest court has now denied the petition without comment.

That leaves the Court of Appeals ruling as the last word word in the case.

While state forestlands must be managed for the “greatest permanent value,” that phrase gives Oregon’s government a lot of leeway, the appellate ruling said. It doesn’t amount to an “immutable promise” to maximize timber harvest, since there are other values than revenue production.

Forest management and other “matters of statewide concern” are policies over which counties cannot sue the state, since they’re its political subdivisions, the ruling said.

The Court of Appeals ruling allows the state government to make unilateral changes without the consent of the counties, which has far-reaching implications, said DiLorenzo, attorney for the plaintiffs.

“Issues of this magnitude that directly affect the people of Oregon and impact future cooperation between local governments and the state government should have been decided by the Supreme Court, not the Court of Appeals,” he said in an email.

Now that the Supreme Court has refused to entertain the lawsuit’s “red herring” legal theory, there’s no question that state forests must be managed for the benefit of all Oregonians, said Ralph Bloemers, an attorney who’d represented fishing and conservation groups.

“For the people of Oregon, it’s good that this came about,” he said.

Bloemers said the complaint was a “high stakes gamble based on a false narrative” that has now raised questions about tax breaks enjoyed by timber companies.

Only a small fraction of Oregon’s forests are owned by the state government, whose holdings are dwarfed by industrial timber operators, he said.

County commissioners went along with the lawsuit based on the “myth” and “political argument” that state forest policies have underfunded local governments, when tax cuts for timber companies have a much bigger impact, Bloemers said.

“It’s much harder for them to point their fingers at their political backers, who aren’t paying their fair share,” he said. “They’re the real culprits who aren’t supporting rural communities.”