Raffenburg hits ‘Environmentalist Industry’
County commission chairman decries timber-cutting block; resultant economic effect
A bleak financial picture, and blunt remarks about environmentalists and higher taxes follow a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. by Chairman Jim Raffenburg, of the Josephine County Board of Commissioners.
He said that Bureau of Land Management leadership informed him that “they have already been notified by elements” of what Raffenburg calls the “Environmentalist Industry” that they “intend to seek injunctions in Federal Court to prevent BLM from implementing any alternative that modifies the existing status quo: no harvesting at all.
“Meaning,” he said, that “there is apparently no plan or alternative that would actually be supported by the Environmentalist Industry if it provides for any harvesting of timber to provide desperately needed revenue to western Oregon counties for critical government services.
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“For Josephine County neither the short-term nor the long-term prospects look good,” Raffenburg said. “We may get four years of declining federal revenue, but that will be it. The options for the future are down to two. Either:
“Pay higher taxes or cut timber.
“It’s that simple. My bias is obvious.”
The county board chairman added that for the short term, “the people of Josephine County and western Oregon will be faced either next year or in four years with deciding if they want to pay new, extremely high replacement property or other taxes or face a drastic cut in local government services.
“The long-term alternative is more problematic. That will require the people of Josephine County and western Oregon to stand up and become personally involved in an effort to counter the visions and policies of the Environmentalist Industry which are killing the economies and local governments of western Oregon.”
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Raffenburg said that his third trip to the nation’s capital “has been a watershed event for me. I no longer have any illusions about just what it is we are all facing as Oregonians and as Westerners. I now understand quite clearly that Congress is not interested in honoring any long-term obligation to the O&C Counties.
“Equally I now understand that the Environmentalist Industry is not interested in any future timber harvests on these lands They don’t care about the financial impacts to local governments, schools, libraries or local economies.
“Their vision of the future is for you to just buck up and pay higher taxes.
“And I now realize that the potential of returning the O&C Lands to private ownership through discussion or negotiation is a nonstarter The Dept. of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management and the Environmental Industry will never support any return of the O&C Lands to the county tax rolls. Period.
“At the same time,” Raffenburg continued, “if the people of the O&C Counties allow the federal government to walk away from a 100-year-old obligation they will never be able to reclaim their rights to the revenues from those lands
“Along with standing up to the Environmentalist Industry the people of the O&C Counties must be prepared to sue the federal government in Federal Court to force Congress to either exempt the O&C Lands from federal environmental laws and allow the lands to be managed once again as resource lands providing revenues to counties or to return these lands to the counties so they can be sold for full value by those counties and put back on the tax rolls as was the original intent of Congress in 1866.
It is time to resolve these issues once and for all. It may as well start here -- and it may as well start now,” Raffenburg stated.
Current pending legislation could lessen the financial crunch, but whether approval will occur is doubtful, he added.
