Audrey Caro
The Linn County Board of Commissioners last week signed a letter of support for President Donald Trump’s executive order regarding the review of national monument designations under the Antiquities Act.
The president’s executive order, issued April 26, instructs Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review the approximately 30 national monuments designated from Jan. 1, 1996 through the end of 2016 that are over 100,000 acres in size, and asks for an interim report within 45 days and a final report within 120 days of the order.
Specifically, the order directs Zinke to determine “whether designated lands are appropriately classified under the Antiquities Act as “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest,” the effects of the designation, “concerns of state, tribal and local governments affected by a designation,” and availability of federal resources to manage the monuments.
The Antiquities Act gives the U.S. president authority to create national monuments from federal lands.
Locally, county commissioners and other public officials have expressed concerns about a proposal last year by environmental activist Andy Kerr and others to establish a nearly half-million-acre Douglas Fir National Monument in the forests east of Sweet Home.
They want to create a nearly 762-square-mile reserve that would extend from just north of Detroit Lake, east to the Cascade crest, west to roughly the boundary of the Willamette National Forest and south to the hydrologic divide between the Middle and South Santiam rivers.
Logging would be limited to thinning necessary to get local forests back on track to what the writers envision toward becoming the old-growth stands they once were. Road maintenance would largely be discontinued, as would nearly all fire prevention.
The basic motivation behind the proposal is to re-establish old-growth forests over the 487,491-acre expanse of the monument, according to the proposal’s authors.
Last January, former President Barack Obama expanded the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument by about 48,000 acres. The monument was established in 2000 by former President Bill Clinton.
In an April 25 press briefing, Zinke said the executive order directs him to “review prior monument designations and to suggest legislative changes or modifications to the monuments.”
Commissioner John Lindsey presented the letter at the May 23 Board of Commissioners meeting.
He used a letter from a neighboring county as a template, he said.
“This county that we copy here, are, shall we say, they’re not on the same political spectrum that we are,” Lindsey said. “That shows you the seriousness of this issue. This is a bipartisan issue.”
The two-paragraph letter addresses the monument revue in relation to the Oregon and California Lands Act of 1937.
“As one of the O&C Counties that receives revenue from timber harvests that occur anywhere in O&C Lands, our county is adversely impacted by the designation of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument,” the commissioners stated in their letter which is addressed to U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
The Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands (commonly known as O&C Lands), are approximately 2.6 million acres of land located in 18 counties of western Oregon.
The land, which includes the forests east of Sweet Home, was originally granted for construction of a railroad from Portland to San Francisco, but was returned to the U.S. government in 1916. Since then, the 18 counties where the O&C lands are located, including Linn County, have received payments from the United States government as compensation for the loss of timber and tax revenue.
Over the years, as timber production decreased, so have the payments. Linn County is a member of the 17-county Association of O&C Counties, which has filed a civil suit against Neil Kornze, director of the Bureau of Land Management and Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
“As a member of the Association of O&C Counties, we are committed to working with you and others to craft a broadly supported plan for the O&C lands in Oregon,” the commissioners said in the letter. “A good first step in that process would be your careful review of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument designation.”