Oregon County Set For Timber Showdown

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Voters in an eastern Oregon county overwhelmingly approved a measure to allow residents to cut trees on federal land without permission, setting up a potential showdown with forest officials.

The measure in Grant County passed 1,512 to 745 Tuesday despite cautions that local laws cannot override federal regulations.

Herb Brusman, who helped write the measure, said Wednesday it would reduce the threat of wildfire by letting residents thin trees, remove trees in danger of falling onto roads and provide income to loggers and mills.

``If they go along with us, all well and good, and the same goes for the Forest Service,'' he said. ``Whatever happens, we are still going to do it.''

The measure recalls the ``Sagebrush Rebellions'' of the 1980s in which counties in some Western states claimed control of federal land within their borders.

Grant County has about 7,500 residents and 60 percent of its land is publicly owned. It is economically depressed by reductions in logging.

Sawmills still operating do so on reduced shifts because of log shortages. The eastern Oregon county's unemployment rate - 13.5 percent - is the second-highest in the state, and people are moving away.

``We understand the frustration the folks in the community have,'' said Rex Holloway, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in Portland. ``We have restoration work that we have been working with the community on and will continue to work with them on.''

Projects such as thinning work will produce jobs and could involve logging, he said.

The county also passed, 1,326 to 959, a measure banning United Nations action in the county.

``We don't want the U.N to come in here and step on us as a county and a state,'' Brusman said. ``It's a communist organization as far as we're concerned.''

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http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/editorial/102232783877310.xml Grant County's fury

05/26/02

R eally, there was but one question on the ballot in Oregon's Grant County last Tuesday: Why the hell not?

The answer, of course, was obvious.

Grant County's citizens voted to give themselves the authority to cut trees on the public land that surrounds their towns and scattered ranches. They also approved a second measure demanding the United Nations stay out of their county.

Why not?

Maybe it will draw attention to a desperately poor and deeply frustrated county noticed by the outside world usually once a year. Each summer when the wildfires burn close to town, somebody elbows the governor and he declares Grant County a disaster area.

Sure, it's crazy. The federal goverment can't just stand by while these good folks oil up their chain saws, fan out and decide among themselves which of the stands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine are ripe for the cutting.

The U.N. ballot measure claimed the U.N. Charter promotes seizure of small arms and private land, worldwide taxation and "one-world controlled education of our children." All that's both untrue and just plain weird, but 58 percent of voters went ahead and demanded that the U.N. stay out of Grant County anyway.

Why not?

Grant County doesn't have much left to lose. It has the second-highest unemployment rate in the state, approaching 16 percent, twice the rate that has prompted all the cries of pain in the Portland metropolitan area. And when you're unemployed in Grant County, you stay that way. New employers come around about as often as the United Nations General Assembly.

These people are furious. They've been locked out of the public forests and rangelands that surround them, that fed their mills and their families for generations. The feds keep promising a better, saner, predictable forest policy, one allowing some logging, some fire prevention, some salvage of timber after the inevitable fires that sweep through the county. It never comes.

Meanwhile, the families keep streaming away. Grant County's population has dropped from 8,100 to about 7,500 in the past decade. Its schools have 200 fewer children. Before last week's election, "For Sale" signs hammered into front yards outnumbered campaign signs. The one growing local population is cougars, freed from hound hunting thanks to protections approved by city folk. Now the big cats sometimes wander into the city limits of John Day, Prairie City and Granite, which recently was the last community in Oregon to get phone service.

Why not? By a 67 percent to 33 percent margin, voters approved the measure giving themselves stewardship rights of federal forests. The ballot backers already have scheduled a meeting this week to discuss how to begin removing dead and dying trees from the national forest. They say they plan to begin cutting roadside trees that pose danger to passing cars, and move onto others that could feed wildfires.

They can't do that. Both measures are clearly unconstitutional. The public forests of Grant County don't belong to the people who live around them. At the same time, they don't solely belong to the rest of us. Lands so rich in resources can and should be managed to sustain the communities of Grant County.

This election was a show of anger. It demands a serious response from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Meanwhile, as tempers and temperatures rise further this spring, the people of Grant County must remember that they do have something left to lose: Their dignity. When they're invited to exploit this measure by breaking the law, and they again ask themselves, "Why not?," they need to have an answer.

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