It isn’t even a rounding error in the $1.3 trillion spending bill approved by Congress earlier this month, but the $436 million included in the package to revive funding for the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act will make a difference in rural Oregon.

The funding stream is temporary. The money will be raised by selling 8 billion barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. It includes a retroactive payment for 2017 and a payment for 2018.

The original act, which went into effect in 2001, aimed to make up for lost timber receipts in counties across the United States in the wake of a dramatic decline in timber harvests. In Oregon, that’s meant more than $3 billion in payments to some of the state’s poorest counties, according to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s office.

The latest contribution came as a result of the combined efforts of Wyden, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Rep. Greg Walden, R-Hood River, among others.

Yet the new money will not bring a sustained level of government services to places like Curry County, on the Oregon Coast. That county has one of the state’s lowest tax rates, to be sure, and voters have been unwilling to raise it.

Their reluctance isn’t really all that surprising. The county’s population is aging — its median age in 2015 was 54.6 years, compared to Deschutes County’s 41.9 years. Its property values are low, and its median wage is declining. It relied for years on money generated from the sale of timber from federal lands, an income source that has pretty much dried up.

Still, unless Secure Rural Schools funding becomes permanent, and there’s nothing to suggest that’s even likely, the residents of Curry County and others that have come to rely on the SRS payments, have nothing but tough choices.

They can continue as they have, hoping the federal government might pitch in. Or, the county’s leadership can, as it has in the past, try to persuade voters to pay more for such things as law enforcement and schools.