The BulleTin • SaTurday, novemBer 13, 2021 A3
LOCAL, STATE & REGION
JACKSON COUNTY
Officials seek $7M to tackle illegal pot
BY VICKIE ALDOUS
mail Tribune (medford)
Jackson County plans to ask the
state for $7.2 million to tackle the bil-
lions of dollars worth of illegal pot
operations proliferating across the
Rogue Valley.
The money would fund 37 new
employees, ranging from new Jack-
son County Sheriff’s Office detectives
to code enforcement officers to more
staff for the Jackson County District
Attorney’s Office.
Jackson County Commissioner
Rick Dyer said the request is what
the county needs over a year to make
growing illegal marijuana uncom-
fortable and risky for those breaking
the law.
Without enough funding from the
state and blocked from enacting their
own local taxes on growing opera-
tions to fund marijuana enforcement,
Southern Oregon counties have fallen
far behind on busting illegal pot oper-
ations, Jackson County officials say.
State agencies charged with regu-
lating the hemp and marijuana indus-
tries and agricultural water use also
can’t keep up with the volume of ille-
gal operators.
Southern Oregon is at the tip of the
so-called Emerald Triangle, a famous
marijuana growing region that in-
cludes Northern California.
Jackson, Josephine, Klamath and
Douglas County sheriff’s offices reg-
ularly bust grows, processing and
storage sites with tens of millions of
dollars worth of illegal marijuana. The
largest sites this year have surpassed
the $100 million mark — including a
potato shed found stuffed with mari-
juana worth more than $100 million
in Klamath County and a massive
growing site with an estimated $200
million worth of marijuana plants in
Josephine County.
Jackson County Administra-
tor Danny Jordan said the Jackson
County Sheriff’s Office can currently
bust about 40 illegal grows per year.
Jackson County officials estimate
there are 2,000 legal and illegal hemp
and marijuana sites locally.
Law enforcement agencies in
Southern Oregon say foreign cartels
are behind many of the illegal grows
in the area. The cartels know some of
the grows will get busted, but the rest
will generate vast sums of money.
“There’s literally billions that this is
Submitted, file
More than 17,000 pounds of marijuana
buds were discovered Oct . 19 at a down-
town Klamath Falls warehouse
worth to cartels,” Dyer said.
As a general rule of thumb, police
estimate, a single marijuana plant can
generate $1,000 if sold on the black
market.
Growing marijuana is legal in Or-
egon and raising hemp is legal across
America. Many growers ignore reg-
ulations that govern those crops and
sell to states where marijuana is illegal
— and fetches a much higher price.
Locally, more than half of licensed
hemp grows are fronts for marijuana,
according to state regulators who
tested hemp grow sites this year.
Hemp doesn’t contain high levels of
THC, which gets users high. But with-
out testing, hemp plants are indistin-
guishable from marijuana plants.
Jackson County officials believe
they can get state regulatory agen-
cies to voice support for the county’s
nearly $7.3 million funding request.
The request will go to the Oregon
Legislative Fiscal Office Emergency
Board. Often called the e-board, the
board allocates emergency funds
when the Oregon Legislature isn’t in
session.
State regulatory agencies such as
the Oregon Department of Agricul-
ture, the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis
Commission and the Oregon Water
Resources Department are themselves
overwhelmed by the flood of illegal
hemp and marijuana grows and wa-
ter theft.
Jordan said Jackson County and
other Southern Oregon counties
needs millions of dollars every year to
tackle illegal operations. They need
stable, predictable funding so they can
hire, train and keep additional work-
ers such as detectives.
Jordan noted the nearly $7.3 mil-
lion request doesn’t include money to
address environmental damage from
plastic, dismantled greenhouses, hu-
man feces, pesticides and dangerous
electrical wiring left behind by illegal
growers.
The state Emergency Board is sit-
ting on a larger pile of money than
usual this year, in part because Ore-
gon’s budget was buttressed by federal
pandemic aid.
“From a budget standpoint, this
should be a no-brainer,” Jackson
County Commissioner Dave Dotter-
rer said about the county’s funding
request.
Dotterrer said illegal operations are
undercutting hemp and marijuana
businesses that follow laws.
Jackson County may also seek
tighter regulations on hemp and mar-
ijuana, taxes on grows, bigger fines,
restrictions on water hauling and
other changes to laws governing the
industries.
Jordan said state regulators and Or-
egon legislators from Northern Ore-
gon counties don’t always understand
the full impact of illegal grows in
Southern Oregon.
U.S. government tells judge gray wolves do not need protection
BY MATTHEW BROWN
associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. — A U.S.
government attorney urged a
federal judge Friday to uphold
a decision from the waning
days of the Trump adminis-
tration that lifted protections
for gray wolves across most of
the country, as Republican-led
states have sought to drive
down wolf numbers through
aggressive hunting and trap-
ping.
Wildlife advocates argued
that the state-sponsored hunts
could quickly reverse the gray
wolf’s recovery over the past
several decades in large areas
of the West and Midwest.
They want U.S. District
Judge Jeffrey White in Oak-
land, California, to put wolves
back under the legal shield of
the Endangered Species Act,
which is meant to protect ani-
mals from extinction.
Federal officials contend that
wolves are resilient enough to
bounce back even if their num-
bers drop sharply due to inten-
sive hunting. They say protec-
tions are no longer warranted.
At stake is the future of a
species whose recovery from
near-extinction has been her-
alded as a historic conservation
success. That recovery also has
brought bitter blowback from
hunters and farmers angered
over wolf attacks on big game
herds and livestock.
Friday’s hearing focused on a
much more arcane, legal issue:
Were wolves properly classified
under the endangered act prior
to losing their protected status
last year?
A U.S. Justice Department
attorney said they were not, be-
cause of changes to the act by
Congress in 1978. That means
the wolves at issue do not make
up a valid “species” that is dis-
tinct from a smaller number of
wolves not included in Novem-
ber’s decision to lift protections
by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.
odFW via aP
In this Dec. 4, 2014, file photo, released by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, a wolf from the Snake River Pack passes by a remote cam-
era in eastern Wallowa County. In court, government attorneys are defending a decision from the waning days of the Trump administration to lift
protections for gray wolves across most of the U.S.
“Congress was very clear in
the statute: If there is not that
species, the service does not
have the ability to regulate it,”
said Michael Eitel with the Jus-
tice Department’s natural re-
sources division.
Judge White questioned if
the government’s approach
amounted to a “back door”
way to remove protections.
Eitel said in response that
the wildlife service was “not
trying to skirt its obligations”
to wolf recovery, but attorneys
for the wildlife groups insisted
it was.
“They cannot take this
shortcut,” said Kristen Boyles
with Earthjustice, represent-
ing Defenders of Wildlife and
other groups. “One of the casu-
alties of the Fish and Wildlife
Service argument is that we are
not here today talking about
the key issues of what protec-
tions wolves need, where those
protections are needed.”
White did not issue an im-
mediate ruling.
The lawsuit does not cover
wolves in all or portions of
six states in the northern U.S.
Rocky Mountains, where the
animals lost protections a de-
cade ago.
Federal officials in Septem-
ber said they would consider
if those protections should be
restored in Western states in
response to loosened hunting
rules in Idaho and Montana.
That could take a year or lon-
ger.
In Wisconsin, where hunt-
ers surpassed a state harvest
quota last winter and killed
218 wolves in just four days,
this season’s hunt was recently
put on hold by a state judge,
two weeks before it was set to
begin.
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Conservatives on a state
wildlife board had set Wiscon-
sin’s kill limit at 300 wolves,
prompting a lawsuit from wild-
life advocacy groups and a fed-
eral lawsuit from a half-dozen
Chippewa tribes, which con-
sider the wolf sacred.
A state agency controlled by
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers
later took the unprecedented
step of unilaterally reducing
the kill limit to 130 wolves,
openly defying the board.
Wolves once ranged most
of the U.S. but were wiped out
in most places by the 1930s
under government-sponsored
poisoning and trapping cam-
paigns.
A remnant population in the
western Great Lakes region has
since expanded to some 4,400
wolves in Michigan, Minnesota
and Wisconsin.
More than 2,000 wolves oc-
cupy six states in the Northern
Rockies and Pacific Northwest
after some of the animals from
Canada were reintroduced in
Idaho and Yellowstone Na-
tional Park starting in 1995.
Protections for wolves in the
Rockies were lifted over the last
decade and hunting of them is
allowed.
However, wolves remain
absent across most of their
historical range. Wildlife ad-
vocates argue that continued
protections are needed so they
can continue to expand in Cal-
ifornia, Colorado, Oregon and
other states.
Wyoming also allows wolf
hunting, and officials are
considering wolf hunting sea-
sons in Michigan and Minne-
sota.
The Biden administration’s
defense of the removal of pro-
tections under Trump has an-
gered environmentalists who
hoped the election of the Dem-
ocrat would shift U.S. policy on
wolves.
Democratic and Republi-
can administrations alike, go-
ing back to former President
George W. Bush, have sought
to remove or scale back federal
wolf protections first enacted
in 1974.
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