Illinois Valley News

Illinois Valley News welcomes Letters to the Editor. Please e-mail them to dan@illinois-valley-news.com.

POLICY ON LETTERS: ‘Illinois Valley News’ encourages letters to the editor provided they are legible and not libelous or scurrilous. All letters must be signed, including name, address and telephone number. The latter need not be published, but will be used to verify authenticity. The “News’ reserves the right to edit letters. Letters are used at the discretion of the publisher.

(Editor’s Note: Views and commentary, including statements made as fact, are strictly those of the letter-writers.)

Kudos to I.V. News
Gary McAlister
Cave Junction

Thank you for the recent article covering the fire hazards around the city of Cave Junction. I would also like to thank folks for the overwhelming public support I have received from the article and the positive changes that have already taken place. With your continued support and input we can help make the community of CJ a better place to live. Again many thanks and let’s keep up the positive efforts.

Road Hazards
Maureen Klimesh
Selma

I am writing to complain about people who routinely cause road hazards and then try and blame the motorist “for going too fast”. It seems as if they are trying to cause an “accident”. Lately, in this area I have encountered numerous problems that seem as if they are staged.

For instance today, for about the third time in the last few months there has been a dog or a person in the publicly owned, privately maintained access road I live on about 7 miles from Lake Selmac. At night it is very dark and there are no street lights. Yet some new neighbors seem to think it is permissible to hang out and drink in or near the road with their black dogs laying in the road.

Last year one new neighbor actually put his lounge chair right in the road, he said so he could be under a shady tree. Even going 10 or 15 miles an hour, you have to swerve to avoid them and their dogs and then they will run out in front of you and yell “You are going too fast” instead of calling their dogs out of the way which causes even more stress for the driver.

Why is it that these people, who have 5 acres or more to recreate, have to do their drinking, hanging out or sitting under shade trees or playing with their dogs on a public road“ Then they yell at the motorist for going too fast when the motorist is actually going very slow.

Not only are the grown-ups doing such things but the children seem to be taking the cue from these folks’ example. That could be really dangerous. Halfway down Thompson Creek Road, where there are quite a few houses and kids are often riding their bikes and playing near the road, I usually try to go very slow because of the congestion and also deer traffic. I was coming home from work, going slow and staying alert because there was a lot of activity in the area. Two teenage boys were walking on one side of the road, another vehicle was coming toward us going pretty fast in the opposite direction, a teenage girl was riding her bike ahead of me in my lane along the road, some more kids were standing near the road ahead. I was going real slow because of the situation when abruptly, with no signal or indication, the girl turns right in front of me, crosses both lanes of traffic, causing me to downshift into second, almost coming to a complete stop while she happily smiles to herself looking down. It seemed to me she did it just to impress her friends and the teenage boys.

This morning when I went by the same area on my way to work one of the other girls who had witnessed this incident, was all alone on her bike riding as fast as she could down her driveway like she was going to pull out in front of me to see“

I am a person that goes out of my way to try and be safe. I was a lifeguard in my younger years and have taken First Aid about 8 times over the years for my various jobs.

I know sometimes things don’t work out the way we wish but it seems to me if people want to be safe they would not do the things I’ve described. If I was to go on to the things some adults do in their cars, I could go on another few pages. Suffice it to say it is quite unwise for pedestrians to play the type of games some people around here think they are playing in their cars.

There is a heavy gang element in this area that seems to think the road and their cars are playing pieces in some mass aggression contest and whoever can make someone wreck in the other gang scores.

I think there are enough true accidents happening without any of these antics. I am a person who doesn’t believe in gangs but in the power of the individual in conjunction with God, the Son and the holy one of love, truth and justice.

The type of purposeful actions such as I’ve described fill me with dismay, horror and scorn. I am aghast at what some people’s examples are doing to their children. Of course if something happens it’ll be someone else’s fault.

Sick of it.

Demand not the issue
Jennifer Krauss Phillippi
Cave Junction

Sometimes when an occasional letter is written about our company that is uninformed, and even kind of mean, I generally ignore it rather than give the writer added exposure. But, after reading Donald Smith’s disturbingly inaccurate letter, I felt compelled to respond.

Smith wrote a letter in February 2008 and another last week, both of which show an alarming naiveté, and a presumption to understand the complex and private internal workings of our business.

Lack of access to the federal forests around us simply is our company’s biggest obstacle, no matter how Smith tries to argue that poor housing markets and our “ill conceived” cogeneration investment are causing us problems.

Not being privy to the inner workings of our business, Smith is wrong about three important points.

With 80% of the Illinois Valley forests being federally owned, the inability to purchase logs locally puts us at a huge disadvantage. It doesn’t take much analysis to understand that the cost of hauling logs 250-300 miles to Cave Junction would diminish our competitiveness, not to mention the regrettable increase in fossil fuel consumption.

Like everyone else, Rough & Ready is wading through the worst economic decline since the depression, but our markets have been more stable than for those who sell commodity lumber. With almost no federal timber available beginning in the 1990s, Rough & Ready downsized and purposely changed our focus away from commodity lumber and toward high-quality niche products. When housing declines, the remodel market tends to see an up-tick which supports the door and window manufacturers to whom we sell.

Our talented mill crew continues to produce and sell beautiful lumber. The appreciation of and demand for that quality is steady. Access to local federal timber would allow us to capture much needed economies-of-scale by operating a second-shift (adding 40 jobs), and let us further supply that demand for our lumber.

Investing in a cogeneration plant during a recession may seem foolish to Mr. Smith, but Rough & Ready has made most major capital improvements in down markets when construction costs are cheaper, business disruptions are less problematic, and at completion we are left poised to take advantage of a market recovery.

In 2006, after a two-year comprehensive analysis, we determined that the project was feasible. We tapped into incentives and grants, entered into a favorable financing arrangement, and after a year of construction, in February 2008 Rough & Ready put online a cogeneration plant and new dry kilns that dry more lumber — which adds value to our product and reduces shipping costs (we can get more lumber on a truck when we’re not transporting water down the freeway).

It also creates renewable electricity that powers 1,500 homes and uses forest biomass to support forest health restoration projects.

Our employees and my family had been excited that the project would enhance our ability to survive and help with projects in the forest, but were particularly pleased to imagine our electricity running down the lines into the homes of our community and beyond.

Perhaps most distressing of all in Mr. Smith predictions of Rough & Ready’s demise is a tone that conveys a clear preference for that end. I suspect the 75-80 families that are supported by Rough & Ready, not to mention those 400 indirectly employed, would be far less likely than Mr. Smith to write off those jobs as being of negligible importance.

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