Friday, July 23, 2021
CapitalPress.com 3
Easterday sale gets green
light in bankruptcy court
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
YAKIMA, Wash. — Two major
creditors have dropped their opposition
to the sale of Easterday farms, clearing
the way for the Mormon church to buy an
Eastern Washington family farm brought
down by debt and fraud.
Prudential Insurance Co. and Equi-
table Life Insurance agreed to withdraw
their objections during a mid-hearing
break July 14 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court
in Yakima. In return, they are guaranteed
to receive most, if not all, of the millions
of dollars owed them by Cody Easterday,
his wife, mother and their companies.
The parties, returning from the closed
conference, outlined the agreement to
Judge Whitman Holt, settling a dispute
that had threatened to block the $209
million acquisition by Farmland Reserve
Inc., affiliated with the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.
How sale proceeds will be divided
among creditors and the Easterday fam-
ily will be decided later.
Farmland Reserve does business
in Washington as AgriNorthwest and
already owns 100,000 acres. It’s poised
to add 18,000 acres, including 12,000
irrigated acres, in Benton County.
Most of the Easterday properties bor-
der AgriNorthwest land, according to the
church-affiliated organization.
“Our successful bid reflects our long-
term commitment to Columbia Basin
agriculture. We will be growing crops on
these fertile fields for decades to come,”
Farmland CEO Doug Rose said in a
statement.
The Easterdays filed for bankruptcy
in February as Cody Easterday faced a
federal investigation that he schemed to
George Plaven/Capital Press File
Cody Easterday
defraud Tyson Foods and another com-
pany by billing them to buy and feed
nonexistent cattle.
Farmland Reserve outbid a company
associated with Bill Gates for proper-
ties commonly known as the Cox Farm,
Goose Gap Farm, Nine Canyon Farm,
River Farm, Farm Manager House and
Storage Complex.
The sale will involve dozens of par-
cels owned by Easterday Farms, Easter-
day Ranches or individual Easterdays.
Complex partnerships threatened to stall
the sale.
Prudential and Equitable had claimed
that the proposed bankruptcy sale
included privately held property not eli-
gible to be sold free of liens in a Chapter
11 bankruptcy, meant to reorganize busi-
ness holdings.
According to court records, the East-
erdays borrowed $50 million in 2020
from Prudential to operate their busi-
nesses, putting up various properties as
collateral.
Prudential, in court records, said that
with interest the Easterdays owed $57
million.
Equitable said in a court filing it was
owed about $29 million.
Late Wednesday, Prudential for-
mally objected to the sale, echoing an
objection filed in June by Equitable.
Both argued the judge should block
the sale unless Prudential and Equi-
table were guaranteed to be paid in
full, including at a higher interest rate
charged to loans in default.
The attorney spearheading the sale,
Richard Pachulski, said bundling the
properties would maximize their value
and that ownership and allocation
issues could be worked out later.
Under the agreement outlined in
court, Prudential and Equitable will
be repaid at the higher default inter-
est rate, though Easterday Farms and
Easterday Ranches reserved the right
to seek to regain some of the money
later.
Burned acres well above year-earlier levels
By BRAD CARLSON
Capital Press
Idaho’s Snake River Com-
plex Fire and Oregon’s Boot-
leg Fire — the nation’s largest
— have helped push the total
number of acres burned more
than one-third higher than the
2020 year-to-date total.
The National Interagency
Fire Center July 19 reported
80 large wildfires burning
more than 1.17 million acres
in 13 states. Current large
fires included 18 in Idaho,
20 in Montana, 8 in Oregon,
and 7 each in California and
Washington.
From 2020 to 2021, the
number of large fires from
Jan. 1 to July 19 increased
from 29,008 to 35,086, NIFC
said. Burned acres jumped
from 1,809,976 to 2,537,744.
Ten-year averages to
date were 31,774 fires and
3,347,133 acres.
The Bootleg Fire late July
19 stood at 364,113 acres and
the Snake River Complex at
107,433 acres on July 20.
In California, the Beck-
wourth Complex was at
105,348 acres late July 19.
In Washington, the 71,512-
acre Lick Creek Fire south-
west of Asotin was the larg-
Inciweb
A DC-10 jumbo jet drops fire retardant on the Bootleg Fire.
est. The Chuweah Creek Fire,
at 36,177 acres, was the sec-
ond largest as of July 19.
All were lightning-caused.
The Bootleg Fire, north-
east of Klamath Falls, Ore.,
was 30% contained as of July
19.
“We have a recurring pat-
tern of extreme fire behavior
in this incident where the fire
travels up to five miles in a
single burn period,” said Mar-
cus Kauffman, public infor-
mation officer with the Ore-
gon Department of Forestry
Incident Management Team
1. The fire in the past day
added about 40,000 acres.
Multiple tree stands burn-
ing at once in their crowns,
and various winds from
clouds and weather the fire
creates exemplify extreme
behavior. Such weather con-
ditions can prompt the main
fire to advance, throwing
embers and spotting.
“And since it’s critically
dry, the spots start a new fire,”
Kauffman said. “Then it will
spot across a control line and
we have to go chase.”
Crews have had some
tough days, but have done a
great job “putting in line and
holding it in some amazingly
difficult conditions,” he said.
The three-fire Snake River
Complex was 70% contained
on July 20. Public Informa-
tion Officer Deana Harms
said crews aimed to build on
recent progress.
“They have already kind
of connected the dots where
they put in dozer line or where
they have planned the easi-
est way of connecting that to
hopefully achieve contain-
ment,” she said.
Dozers and other heavy
equipment dig fire lines or
remove nearby fuels. Ground
crews increase a line’s effec-
tiveness by burning additional
fuel.
“They are going in and try-
ing to work in more fire so it
doesn’t push too hard against
the line,” Harms said. Fire-
fighters have burned mainly
at night, but slightly cooler
weather July 17-18 created
“some windows where day
operations could put some fire
on the ground,” she said.
Fish and Wildlife Service
withdraws critical habitat
rollbacks for spotted owl
By GEORGE PLAVEN
Capital Press
WASHINGTON, D.C.
— The U.S. Fish and Wild-
life Service is proposing
to withdraw a Trump-era
rule that would have sig-
nificantly rolled back crit-
ical habitat protections for
the northern spotted owl in
Oregon, Washington and
California.
Instead, the Biden
administration has put for-
ward a new rule that would
maintain much of the habi-
tat protections, which offi-
cials say are needed to pre-
vent the species from going
extinct.
Martha Williams, prin-
cipal deputy director for the
USFWS, said the revised
rule “will allow fuels man-
agement and sustain-
able timber harvesting to
continue while support-
ing northern spotted owl
recovery.”
Advocates for the timber
industry argue the decision
illegally restricts logging on
more than 1 million acres
of federal land that is not
actually spotted owl habi-
tat, and hinders the type of
forest management needed
to repel increasingly large
wildfires.
A 60-day public com-
ment period begins July 20.
The northern spotted
owl was listed as threat-
ened under the Endangered
Species Act in 1990. At the
time, the USFWS desig-
nated 6.9 million acres of
“critical habitat” to be man-
aged for species recovery.
That was later expanded to
9.5 million acres in 2012.
Timber companies, the
American Forest Resources
Council and several local
counties pushed back in
2013 with a lawsuit challeng-
ing the habitat expansion.
The sides reached a set-
tlement agreement on April
13, 2020, with the agency
agreeing to propose addi-
tional areas for exclusion
from the critical habitat
designation.
On Aug. 11, 2020, the
USFWS proposed a habi-
tat reduction of just 204,653
acres. But the final rule —
released days before Trump
administration left office in
January — called for 3.4
million acres to be removed,
more than 16 times the orig-
inal amount.
The rule was supposed
to take effect March 16,
but Biden’s Interior Depart-
ment delayed and ultimately
nixed the order, saying the
reductions were arbitrary
and excluded public input.
The latest proposal calls
for just 204,797 acres of crit-
ical habitat rollbacks for the
northern spotted owl across
15 Western Oregon coun-
ties. That includes 184,476
acres of lands managed by
the Bureau of Land Man-
agement, of which 172,430
acres are located within the
Oregon and California Rail-
road Revested Lands.
Another 20,000 acres is
located within tribal land
recently transferred under
the Western Oregon Tribal
Fairness Act to the Confed-
erated Tribes of the Coos,
Lower Umpqua and Siu-
slaw Indians, and the Cow
Creek Band of Umpqua
Tribe of Indians.
In a statement, Williams,
with the USFWS, said the
Service continues to work
closely with federal, state
and tribal partners to use the
best available science and
evaluate conservation needs
to protect the northern spot-
ted owl.
The announcement was
welcome news for envi-
ronmental groups that have
pushed for increased protec-
tions for the species.
“To use the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service’s
own words, Trump’s rule,
which slashed critical hab-
itat for northern spotted
owls, was insufficiently jus-
tified, insufficiently ratio-
nal, defective, filled with
shortcomings and factually
inaccurate,” said Kathleen
Gobush, Northwest director
for Defenders of Wildlife.
Court upholds Trump water rule
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
The U.S. District Court
of South Carolina last week
dismissed a challenge to
the Trump administration’s
Navigable Waters Protec-
tion Rule, which in 2020
replaced the Obama admin-
istration’s
controversial
2015 Waters of the United
States rule known by the
acronym WOTUS.
The Biden administra-
tion announced its intentions
to revise the definition of
waters of the U.S. under the
Clean Water Act on June 9,
with the Department of Jus-
tice filing a motion request-
ing remand of the Trump
rule.
Led by the South Caro-
lina Coastal Conservation
League, the environmen-
tal groups asked the court to
vacate the Navigable Waters
Protection Rule based on
what they said were the
indisputable facts, including
lost protection for waters.
That would have elim-
inated the Trump rule and
allowed the WOTUS rule to
remain in effect. The court’s
decision allows the Trump
rule to remain in effect until
the Biden administration
finalizes a new rule.
The Coastal Conserva-
tion League’s challenge is
one of 15 cases nationwide
opposing the Trump rule.
National
Cattlemen’s
Beef Association, along with
other agricultural groups, is
engaged in litigation across
the country to defend the
Trump rule and considers
last week’s decision a key
legal victory.
The decision ensures
regulatory certainty while
the Biden administration
moves through the lengthy
rulemaking process, said
Scott Yager, NCBA chief
environmental counsel.
The gravy on top was the
judge’s outright dismissal of
the entire case, as it was the
leading case in opposition
to the Trump rule — farther
ahead procedurally than the
other cases, he said.
He thinks other judges
will see the decision as influ-
ential and put the other cases
to bed as well, he said.
“This is the latest example
of courts, by and large, see-
ing the Trump rule as legally
defensible,” he said.
That’s in contrast to the
Obama WOTUS rule, which
has been struck down by
multiple courts as being ille-
gal under the Administrative
Procedures Act and the Clean
Water Act, he said.
“This decision overall is a
great legal victory for land-
owners and land users across
the country,” he said.
NCBA knows the Biden
administration is going to
come up with its own rule,
but the court’s decision gives
the organization another
year or two to work with the
administration and Congress,
he said.
NCBA’s message to Biden
is that he create a new rule
that doesn’t hinder produc-
ers’ ability to make invest-
ments in their land and care
for their cattle.
EPA’s Office of Water
held a call with agricultural
stakeholders the day after the
announcement of its inten-
tion to revise the Trump rule,
and there was a short oppor-
tunity for stakeholders to
chime in on the call, he said.
“It was good that they
did the outreach, but what
we heard was concerning.
They’re posturing to repeal
the Trump rule and replace it
with a more expansive Biden
rule,” he said.
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