I get a terrible bellyache when I think about the county taking over government lands. How on God’s green earth could the county commissioners handle this when they can’t take care of county business? They have been doing an ultra shabby job and just think what would happen if the timber industry would be given free rein and they would go crazy God only knows. The ATVs would be allowed to go anywhere they wanted.
It’s bad enough now with the FS giving away and begging the loggers to take timber that is not wanted or needed. Even with this shabby handling of the public lands it would be a disaster of the worst kind to let the counties take over.
Many people think that the land and trees they look at are public lands (wrong). I explain that first off Abe Lincoln and the boys gave the railroads every other section of land within 25 miles of the railroads. Then there was a bunch of land given to the states to supply money to support the schools. Then ranchers and farmers homesteaded more land. Then the big timber outfits bought up a lot of the timber land and Anaconda Copper Company bought up a lot of railroad land in western Montana. They also sent out their workers to stake timber claims on federal lands. Now this land that was the best low timberland in the country has been reduced to much less than half so most of the remaining land is the high country with poor timber on steep ground. The FS has already over cut to the point where there is very little old growth timber left anywhere and they are down to logging the second growth timber to death.
It’s plain that a lot of the people that are pushing for county takeover and for the FS to cut timber are loggers or sympathizers and the same goes for the off-roaders that just like to rip and tear over the mountains. The others aren’t using their heads much.
Floyd Wood
Corvallis