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The INDEPENDENT, July 17,1996
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The
INDEPENDENT
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Serving the upper Nehalem River valley. Published
twice monthly on the first and third Wednesdays of each
month, by Public Opinion Laboratory Ltd., 725 Bridge
Street, Vernonia, OR 97064, as a free newspaper.
Editors and Publishers, Dirk & Noni Andersen, (503)
429-9410.
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Closed government
equals open distrust
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The best part of Oregon state government, since its
inception, has been the traditional openness which
has allowed citizens to talk directly with the people
who make decisions.
At this time, a disturbing trend is underway, one
which will eliminate that openness and substitute “staff
reports” in lieu of real, live people talking to decision
makers.
A case in point is recent action by the Environmen
tal Quality Commission to approve expansion of vehi
cle emissions testing in the Portland Metropolitan
area. The commission made that decision without
hearing from anybody in the expanded area, which
now includes Scappoose, because only a hearings of
ficer listened to all of the testimony, which was then
By Dale Webb, member
put into a staff report. Additionally, testimony was cut Izaak Walton League, Nehalem Valley Chapter
off about three weeks before the commission decided
Summer has finally arrived and, by the time
the question.
you read this article, we probably will have
This is a neat and tidy way to bring questions of had the hottest days of the year. With this hot
public policy before a board or commission because weather will almost certainly come lethal water
the members who make the decisions don’t have to temperatures in our local rivers for salmonid
listen to emotional or boring or inappropriate testimo populations. We are monitoring the situation
again this year to see if the “Great Flood” had
ny. Instead, they merely need to read the testimony -
any effect on stream temperatures.
as translated by staff members after having been giv
Talking about temperatures rising, I recently
en to a third party - off of an unemotional piece of pa spoke with a representative of the North Coast
per. This procedure is a really great step forward for Game Association (Astoria-based sportsmen
group) and it sounds as if the doe hunting is
dictatorship.
In another case, with a different way of keeping cit sue is going to blow up again. ODF&W is
izens uninformed and at arm’s length, the State De again talking about opening up a doe harvest
in the Saddle Mountain Unit, beginning in
partment of Forestry effectively lied to citizens at Fish-
1997. The hunt would be only in the Western
hawk Lake by saying they had no plans to clear-cut half of the unit, for about 400 tags. This was in
the area (see article on page 1) even while they were the agreement between ODF&W and NCGA
seeking approval for someone else to clear-cut the when the moratorium on doe hunting was im
posed in 1994. But also in the agreement was
same property.
Perhaps this penchant for keeping the unwashed that ODF&W and sportsmen groups would
collaborate on an agreeable plan to gauge the
masses (citizens) away from the nobility (bureaucrats)
results of the moratorium at the end of the
is one result of the trickle-down theory the federal gov three years. From what I have heard and seen
ernment was touting a few years ago, goodness the agreement part of the deal has been a lit
tle lopsided.
knows there are enough examples there.
The agreement specified several criteria to
However it got here, the West Oregon Electric Co
operative Board of Directors certainly has succumbed be used for judging the success or failure of
the antlerless hunt moratorium. Buck harvest,
to the same petty condition. Their ridiculous policy on
hu nte r success, s p o tlig h t tren ds and
providing information first forces members to jump ODF&W’s new FLIR (Forward Looking In
through hoops (entertainment for the royal family of di frared Radar) study were to be the baselines
rectors?), then obstructs the declared intent of the pol for judging. Here’s where the twist comes in:
ODF&W has concluded the FLIR study needs
icy— protecting the rights of members.
at least five years of data collection for valid
While personnel files should remain confidential,
results (something that I argued for from the
there is no good reason for West Oregon to withhold
beginning). So ODF&W devised a plan to split
information about operating procedures and/or the
the Saddle Mountain Unit, so the FLIR study
costs of operations. There may be a valid reason from
area in the Eastern half will not be affected by
the viewpoint of those who equate secrecy with secu
the antlerless harvest in the Western half.
Questioning our district biologist about why
rity, but there are no good reasons.
Whether the people who are footing the bill are be they needed five years (I knew why, but I
wanted him to say it) for the FLIR study, he
ing abused or misused by government or by their own
replied, ‘They need five years of study so they
“co-op” matters very little. What does matter is that
have adequate data to base their findings on.”
WOEC has forgotten the meaning of the words “mem
I agree, and so do the sportsmen groups.
ber-owned cooperative” and our state government has
Where we disagree is that, by allowing this
forgotten the proud tradition it established long ago.
antlerless harvest, the trends for buck harvest
and spotlight surveys will be negatively affect
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ed and we will not see the true effect of an
antlerless moratorium. ODF&W could have
bought a lot of credibility by offering to hold off
on the antlerless harvest until the end of the
five year study. ODF&W wants to conduct the
antlerless hunt to collect tooth samples to do
an age structure of the population. This is an
other point of contention. Upon questioning
the district biologist about what, exactly, they
are looking for, I have yet to get a straight an
swer. I feel that in three years there will be lit
tle difference in age structure except for a
higher percentage of younger animals in the
population.
To illustrate the thinking of the district biolo
gist, during NCGA’s spring banquet, he was
asked, “If the moratorium is shown to produce
higher buck harvest, better hunter success
and is generally better for the population, will
ODF&W still promote antlerless harvest in the
Saddle Mountain Unit?” The answer was,
“Probably, yes” ! It was a good thing there
wasn’t a long rope in the crowd or somebody
might have been swinging from the Astoria
column.
The situation with our elk herds isn’t much
better. We continue plugging along with about
400 bull elk harvested each year in the Saddle
Mountain Unit. Gone are the hey-days of 900
bulls-plus harvested each year, along with the
top rating for bull harvest in any unit in the
state.
I questioned our district biologist about this
and his answer, like his two predecessors,
was that ‘This unit is fat with elk.” I continued,
saying, “My research into elk tells me that a
cow elk has a calf every-other year, that half
the calves are bulls and that they experience
a 50% mortality loss before a year in age,
right?’ His reply was, “Yeah, that’s fairly cor
rect.” Of course he couldn’t argue, this data
comes from ODF&W.
Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to fig
ure out that it would have taken at least 7200
productive cow elk to produce an annual har
vest of 900 bulls a year. This means that elk
herds in the Saddle Mountain Unit would have
numbered at least 10,000 animals. ODF&W’s
figure for the current elk population is over
8,000 elk. But, with 8,000 elk we should be
Please see page 3