FOREST PLANS
AND COUNTY
FUNDING UPDATE
The timber trust plan that Congressman Peter DeFazio
has been talking about has been causing consternation
among those in town more prone to hugging trees than
cutting them down.
DeFazio has said, “The bottom line is: How can we get
counties adequate funding for essential public services?”
But Chandra LeGue of Oregon Wild says, “There’s other
things that can be done rather than recoupling timber
harvests and county payments.”
O&C lands are BLM lands, which amount to about 2.4
million acres in Oregon, that came from a land grant given
to build the Oregon & California Railroad, and later taken
back. The 1937 O&C Lands Act tied logging on these
lands to county revenues, but as logging has decreased, so
has the money. The gap has been filled in with funding
from the Secure Rural Schools Act, but that money has
come to an end, leaving Lane and other counties with a
large amount of federal land hurting for money for
essential services.
LeGue says, “No one likes to talk about taxes in these
economic times.” But she points out rather than just
focusing on increasing logging, an export tax on raw logs
could generate over $200 million every year, a lot of which
would come to O&C counties.
DeFazio says his plan would be to split the lands
between conservation and logging and have each of the
two sections managed by a board of trustees creating a
conservation trust and a timber trust. The congressman’s
office has been waiting on a land inventory of the area in
question before coming up with legislation. The lands
inventory is reportedly being done by The Nature
Conservancy.
LeGue says she thinks about one million acres could be
given over to logging under the DeFazio plan. “What I
think those maps will show is when you look at all the
values for this land in context, there’s no way you can find
a million acres that can be sacrificed,” she says.
“Some of it will be political because we are talking
about funding counties, and county funding trumps
science,” she adds.
LeGue says there have been rumors that the DeFazio
trust plan will be added into a separate House proposal
called the National Forest County Revenue, Schools and
Jobs Act of 2011, which seeks to increase commercial
timber harvests on national forests as a way of replacing
the expired federal county payments.
That proposal didn’t address the O&C lands, though a
press release for the legislation says it “provides for future
inclusion of proposals to address other federal forest lands
affected by declining timber production,” and references
those lands.
According to Headwaters Economics, a nonpartisan
research group, among other issues, “the cost of
implementing the County Revenue Act would require
significant new federal spending — from $1.8 billion to as
much as $5.9 billion annually above current Secure Rural
Schools appropriations — based on the current cost of
preparing and administering timber sales.”
— Camilla Mortensen
Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands will host an event called “Will Rep. De-
Fazio Sell Out Public Lands in Western Oregon” at 6pm Nov. 29 at the down-
town library.
COUNCIL LIKES
BIKE/PED PLANS
A plan to increase the city’s wealth, health and livability
while saving the environment by doubling walking and
biking got a warm reception from the Eugene City Council
this week.
Eugene Councilor Pat Farr commended staff for the draft
Eugene Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan. “It really gives
me a lot of enthusiasm for the future of Eugene,” he said.
“Good work,” said Councilor Mike Clark, “It’s very
important.”
“This is a great plan,” said Councilor Alan Zelenka.
The plan proposes hundreds of miles of new sidewalk
and bike facilities to double walking and cycling rates over
the next two decades. “It’s something we think is very
achievable,” city bike/ped planner Reed Dunbar said of the
goal.
Eugene’s current bike commute rate of about 11 percent
is higher than any other city of its size or larger in the nation,
according to the U.S. Census. Eugene’s walk commute rate
is 7 percent. The city plans to respond to comments and
finalize the draft plan in February.
Cycletracks physically separated from menacing car
traffic will be a key part of the effort to increase biking in
Eugene, according to Dunbar.
Dunbar pointed to Portland survey research indicating
that about 1 percent of people will bike no matter how
dangerous it is. About 7 percent are confident enough to
bike next to traffic with bike lanes. But about 60 percent are
interested in biking but are concerned that they’ll be hit by
cars.
Safe cycletracks physically separated from menacing
cars are needed to boost biking above existing levels,
according to Dunbar. “This is going to be necessary if we’re
attracting families and the 60 percent interested,” he said.
Cycletracks are “important and something we need to
embrace.”
Mayor Kitty Piercy agreed. “It seems to be the next
place we really need to go to get everyone” from the
committed to the interested, she said. “That’s where we are
headed.”
Councilor Betty Taylor also backed the cycletrack focus.
“We do need more bike paths that are separated from the
road completely.”
But the new plan proposes only one major new cycletrack
connecting the Amazon bike path to downtown and the
riverfront trail system via High Street.
Dunbar said the city also may consider retrofitting a new
two-way buffered bike lane on Alder Street near the UO
with flexible bollards to convert it into a physically
separated cycletrack. Without the bollards currently, some
cars have been driving or parking in the lane and “ignoring
all of our paint,” he said.
But the biggest deficit with the new plan may be how to
pay for the roughly $50 million in new sidewalks and $40
million in new bike facilities proposed over the next two
decades. Zelenka pointed out that at existing funding levels
it could take the city roughly 75 years to build all the
projects in the city plan.
Other councilors also cautioned that the current
controversial system of charging neighboring houses for
new sidewalks wouldn’t work. If the city is depending on
such improvement district charges, “we’re dooming this to
failure,” Clark said.
EUGENE-BASED OTA IS
NOW BEYOND TOXICS
“Our vision is a world beyond toxics,” says Lisa
Arkin, executive director of the organization formerly
known as Oregon Toxics Alliance. She says OTA’s new
name, Beyond Toxics, reflects the environmental and
social justice nonprofit’s “aspirational goals” to move
the world to a new paradigm in which pesticides aren’t
sprayed on roadsides where children wait for buses or
in parks where they play, and toxic chemicals aren’t
found in the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies.
Beyond Toxics will celebrate its name change at a
“Holiday Cheer and Open House” from 4 to 6:30 pm
Thursday, Dec. 1, at 1192 Lawrence St.
Arkin says the name change and new tag line —
“Leadership for a clean and just Oregon” — more
accurately reflects the group’s grassroots work with
both urban and rural Oregonians and social justice
work, and moves away from a mistaken impression that
it represents the chemical industry. “Beyond Toxics
reflects our enthusiasm for a healthy planet,” she says
“not a goal of aligning toxics in the state of Oregon.”
Beyond Toxics will continue the campaigns that it
worked on as OTA, including pesticide reform, safe
public places, healthy air issues and social justice.
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
Arkin says the group’s work aligns with the Occupy
movement in some ways. “It’s not right that corporations
say what’s safe for us and what exposures we can get,”
she says. Arkin points out that many studies that claim
exposures to chemicals are “safe” are done by the
chemical industry itself.
The group has gotten grants for its work with Centro
LatinoAmericano in the polluted west Eugene industrial
corridor — affected by industries such as the Seneca
biomass burning plant — to both study how toxics
affect the populations there and to do outreach among
affected neighbors. The goal is to improve living and
health conditions in the area. Arkin says that while EPA,
Meyer Memorial Trust and other grants help Beyond
Toxics in its capacity building and environmental
studies, it’s the donations from individual donors that
allow it do “edgy pesticide work.”
Beyond Toxics will also be rolling out a new
website, as well as a new logo, which Arkin says shows
the nonprofit’s work in the Willamette Valley, as well as
its focus on air quality, a focus that along with its social
justice work has made Beyond Toxics unique in Oregon.
— Camilla Mortensen
EUGENE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 17, 2011 7