FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2015
4 — THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS
Opinion
— Editorial —
Underground
fine was
over the top
The Oregon DEQ spent several years
and thousands of dollars in man hours
sending paperwork demanding Larry
Dean Stratton make a plan for the old
underground storage tanks at the former
store in Unity.
The tanks weren’t leaking. The $8,194
penalty was for failing to submit a plan on
time.
The same day, the DEQ fined the City of
Portland roughly the same amount after it
dumped raw sewage into the Willamette
River.
Both were considered moderate of-
fenses. We’re probably not the only ones
to see the disparity there.
Such is the endless loop of big govern-
ment at its finest: generating paperwork to
fine a former business owner for not su -
mitting his paperwork, all in order to fund
a department so it can continue generating
… paperwork.
—The Baker County Press Editorial Board
— Letters to the Editor —
Recipe for locking up lands
To the Editor:
A recipe for locking up public lands to
motorized use.
Ingredients – 1 Regional Forester, 3
Forest Supervisors, Environmental Groups
and State Agencies (ODFW preferred),
Seasonings - flouting rules and ignoring
the public.
1) You take one forest supervisor that
is within retirement age and willing to
sellout entire communities to get his high
3 for retirement, add in 2 others that will
blend smoothly with a Regional Forester
picked ripe from the vine to force motor-
ized use restrictions on the public. Blend
in a yearly bonus of somewhere around
$5,000 dollars a year to turn a deaf ear
to local residents’ calls for keeping their
mountains open.
2) In a separate bowl collect a ratio of
“interested groups” 4 to 1, anti-motorized
use to pro-motorized use to cover the
supervisors and regional forester.
3) Spread the “interest group” top-
ping over the blended Forest Supervisor/
Regional Forester mix and cover heavily
as to disguise any sense of pre-conceived
agenda.
4) Apply a generous seasoning of
flouting rules on how public engagement
should occur, smothered with a heavy
application of ignoring the public on their
concerns.
Place in a “consensus” oven set at, till
hell freezes over, and wait to see when the
Forest Supervisors and Regional Foresters
actually act upon locals concerns.
Meal will be done when the supervisors
and regional forester are soft to the touch,
poking with an email or phone call to test
tenderness, and are ready act upon local
residents concerns.
Until they reach that point you should
place the meal back into the oven and
increase the heat till such time as the For-
est Supervisors and Regional Forester act
accordingly or are done, whichever comes
first
John George
Bates
High hopes for new leadership
To the Editor:
Good morning. It is a good morning for
Baker County. Now is the beginning of a
new day! After 12 years of the status-quo
we can now anticipate some economic
progress and freedom in Baker County.
That is our goal.
Our County is rich in resources, natural
and human, but poor in opportunity. One
of our greatest problems has been that the
federal agencies, which we have hired to
manage and protect the natural resources
on our public lands, now appear to be-
lieve they own those lands and resources.
Their management technique is largely
that of precluding our access and use.
As a result each year large areas of forest
burn for lack of constructive use and
on-the-ground management. Then salvage
lumber from the remaining dead trees
is precluded, all wasted resources and
money. Would intelligent forest manage-
ment permit this?
Mineral resources are also held hostage
by the federal agencies. The agencies have
delayed the mining of some claims for
very long periods asserting the time is
required to make sure that no environmen-
tal restraints are violated. Some mining
applications have been delayed for years
in stead of a few months as envisioned by
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the laws that govern the process. A vigor-
ous, and safe, mining industry would add
very greatly to the local economy. Then
why can’t it be?
Local controls are robbing our prosper-
ity also. The process required for permis-
sion to build a new house is tedious and
expensive. Each step of the way requires
study or inspection each of which has a
time delay and dollar fee attached. The
cost of approved access in some cases pre-
cludes building. Both the extra time and
money required by excessive local control
discourages construction of , particularly
rural, new homes.
The above is but a tiny tip of a gigantic
iceberg that has brought our economic and
social progress to a grinding halt. We now
have a leader, Bill Harvey, who under-
stands basic economics and our rights
under the Oregon and U.S. Constitutions.
Let us all give Commissioner Harvey our
enthusiastic support and enjoy the benefits
of the new day.
Jasper Coombes
Haines
BLM mustang program a waste
To the Editor:
Politicians by nature are a pretty gut-
less bunch of people. Maybe that isn’t a
fair assessment because of the nature of
our political system. On the local level a
person running for office can pretty much
take a stand on some issues and will have
a pretty good idea of what the local feel-
ings are. Move away from the local and
things get murkier. They have to appeal to
a wider range of voters. I can mention an
issue or two that will illustrate this fact.
Take the management of “wild Horses and
Burros” for example. This 1971 is out of
control and grows more ridiculous every
year. Grab your smart phone and check
out these facts.
The BLM manages 40,815 wild horses
and 8, 374 wild burros in 10 western
states in a free roaming condition. Off
the range, there are 15,862 horses and 961
burros in corrals and 31,624 in pastures
for a total of over 48,000 in BLM holding,
and they figure they have a 50,000 holding
capacity. Feeding and gathering costs run
into the millions. Wild horse populations
will double every four years.
Here is where political guts come into
play. It is simply time to end this ridicu-
lous program and greatly reduce the num-
ber of free ranging horse that are damag-
ing the environment for native species of
animals like big horn sheep, deer, antelope
and endangered sage grouse and prairie
chickens. The problem is that the vocal
urban left tends to think with their hearts
instead of their minds and they intimidate
the politician.
We are short on environmental history
in this country. I’m old enough to have
heard my grandfather talk about the dust
clouds that the wild horses made when
they ran on the range or the hydrophobia
outbreaks when coyotes and other preda-
tors built to high numbers.
One of the problems is that the biologist
seems to be in the shadows and isn’t often
called upon to give an opinion. I would
suggest that congressional hearings be
started and televised on the wild horse and
burro problem. This black hole is sucking
up millions of dollars that could be used to
fix some environmental problems
Steve Culley
Richland
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— Guest Opinion —
How to fix
Congress
(Final Installment)
By Sen. Mike Lee
5. Ryan-ize the Committees. Ironi-
cally (or not, if you know how Con-
gress works), the most important policy
development in the Republican Party in
the last decade was not undertaken by
party leaders in the House, Senate, or
White House. In fact, formal party leaders
largely discouraged it.
Paul Ryan and his staff dove deep into
America’s structural budget shortfalls and
the long-term challenges to our entitle-
ment programs and economy.
Instead, that work was conducted by
Congressman Paul Ryan when he became
the ranking Republican on the House Bud-
get Committee in 2007. Ryan instructed
his new committee staff to think big, to
transcend the short-termism that plagues
Congress and develop solutions to long-
term problems. Ryan and his staff dove
deep into America’s structural budget
shortfalls and the long-term challenges to
our entitlement programs and economy.
The end result was what Ryan called his
“Roadmap for America’s Future.” It called
for major reforms to our tax system, our
entitlement programs, our health care sys-
tem, and across the federal government. It
was controversial, of course. The immedi-
ate reception was predictable: Democrats
trashed it and most Republicans ran for
cover. But in time, people on both sides
of the aisle were forced to admit that
the Roadmap was a serious document.
It warranted a serious debate, and it has
gotten one ever since. When Republicans
took back the House of Representatives
in 2011, some of the broad outlines of the
Ryan Roadmap became de facto positions
of the Republican party—positions on
issues Democrats still try to pretend don’t
exist.
For all the well-deserved plaudits Ryan
gets for his brains, the Roadmap—what-
ever one thinks of it—was really an
achievement of his guts. He had the cour-
age to take his plan into the arena, and
withstand criticism, even from his allies.
That is, he did what all politicians say we
want to do—and succeeded.
So the fifth step to a healthy Repu -
lican majority in the one hundred and
fourteenth Congress is to use congres-
sional committees to begin developing the
agenda for the one hundred and fifteenth,
and one hundred and sixteenth, and one
hundred and seventeenth Congresses, too.
We should “Ryan-ize” the committees,
for lack of a better word, encouraging our
chairmen to think big. House and Senate
Republicans should make it part of the job
description of “chairman” that each com-
mittee—and ideally, each subcommittee—
propose at least one major, fundamental,
long-term policy overhaul each year.
House and Senate Republicans should
make it part of the job description of
‘chairman’ that each committee—and ide-
ally, each subcommittee—propose at least
one major, fundamental, long-term policy
overhaul each year.
These reforms could not be passed in
Submitted Photo
Elected in 2010 as Utah’s 16th
Senator, Mike Lee has spent his ca-
reer defending the basic liberties of
Americans and as an advocate for
founding constitutional principles.
this Congress, of course. And conserva-
tives are rightly suspicious of “big bill”
legislating at all anymore. But such pro-
posals would serve the valuable purpose
of identifying long-term goals that nearer-
term, incremental proposals can move
policy toward. They would be outlines,
not thousand-page bills, and they would
help shape the small bills and gradual
steps necessary to advance a conservative
vision of government.
America’s health care, energy, higher
education, telecommunications, security,
and criminal justice needs (to name just a
few) appear to be in the midst of transi-
tions, nearing tipping points that will help
define our nation in decades to come. In
such a moment, it’s not enough to ask
ourselves, “What can we pass this year?”
without first asking—and investing every
possible resource into answering, “How
can our needs be met in the twenty-first
century?”
Government itself is one of the prime
candidates for this kind of thinking. Most
systems we use to provide government
services were designed decades ago,
before the tech and telecom revolutions
that have changed the way Americans
do almost everything else. In 20 years,
will we need, say, a Government Printing
Office or Internal Revenue Service in an -
thing like their current forms? If disrup-
tive innovations continue to personalize
and localize the economy, will centralized,
monolithic bureaucracies be the right in-
struments to regulate it? Or is government
just as badly in need of some disruptive
innovations that would enable market
forces, public desires, and longstanding
constitutional principles to once again
show us the way and make our institutions
more accountable?
Of course politicians cannot predict the
future, nor can government direct future
industries any better than it directs current
ones. But we know that our society and
our economy have rocketed out in front of
our government, and that the bureaucracy
in its current form is unlikely ever to catch
up. Insisting that today’s leaders look
beyond the next news cycle and the next
election cycle will benefit the country and
the Republican Party in the long run.
The only way to move incrementally in
the right direction is to know which way
the right direction is. Long-term reform
projects will lay down markers for the
Party while identifying opportunities for
innovation in the nearer term.
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YOUR ELECTED
OFFICIALS
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202.456.2461 fax
Whitehouse.gov/contact
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503.326.2900 fax
Merkley.Senate.gov
US Sen. Ron Wyden
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Wyden.Senate.gov
US Rep. Greg Walden
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541.624.2402 fax
Walden.House.gov
Oregon Gov. John
Kitzhaber
503.378.3111
Governor.Oregon.gov
State Rep. Cliff Bentz
503.986.1460
State Sen. Ted Ferrioli
541.490.6528
Baker County
Commissioners Bill Harvey;
Mark Bennett; Tim Kerns
541.523.8200
541.523.8201