Document text
Our View: County made right call on $60K consultant Sunday Nov 13, 2016 at 12:01 AM Jackson County taxpayers should be grateful that the Board of Commissioners refrained from spending $60,000 of public money to hire a consultant to fight a proposed expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. The consultant, Kansas-based James Carlson, met with the commissioners on Thursday at the invitation of Commissioner Doug Breidenthal, who paid Carlson's travel expenses out of his own pocket. We're not sure what prompted Breidenthal to make such a gesture, considering he was defeated in the May primary and will be leaving office at the end of the year. But he did say he hoped the county would agree to hire Carlson to prepare a study of the impacts of an expansion, including potential lost revenue from logging on former Oregon & California Railroad lands and the loss of grazing allotments. Breidenthal previously has espoused a belief that local governments could "take back" control of federal land, a suggestion that has been debunked by the courts. Carlson appears to share a similar approach to federal land management decisions. For instance, in a report he prepared for Utah county officials fighting a proposed monument, he and a ranching rights proponent argued President Obama could not establish a monument there because it would violate the private property rights of ranchers holding grazing allotments on public land. That tortured reasoning has been dismissed by the Utah attorney general, and it is perilously close to the extra-legal arguments of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is facing federal charges for a standoff with federal agents over his refusal to pay grazing fees on public land. Jackson County commissioners are already on record as opposing the proposed expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. The proposal, which monument supporters hope Obama will approve before he leaves office, would roughly double the size of the 61,000-acre monument. Supporters say the expansion is needed to better protect the monument's unique biological features, including plants and animals found nowhere else. Opponents argue the expansion would preclude forest management activities to reduce wildfire risk and restrict access to emergency vehicles if a fire did break out. The commissioners are entitled to express opposition to the proposal, and they have done so, sending Obama and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell 750 pages of written material from the public, including a 178-page transcript of a public hearing the commissioners held. The county is better off not getting entangled with a consultant who brings a dubious approach to fighting federal land management decisions, and the commissioners made the right call in declining to shell out $60,000.