[Vision2020] Opponents wave bloody shirt over Lochsa land exchange

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the Idaho Statesman at:

http://blogs.idahostatesman.com/opponents-wave-bloody-shirt-over-lochsa-land-exchange/

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Opponents wave bloody shirt over Lochsa land exchange

Read more here: http://blogs.idahostatesman.com/opponents-wave-bloody-shirt-over-lochsa-land-exchange/#storylink=cpy
A proposal by Idaho’s two Republican senators and Rep. Raul Labrador to start talks on writing a bill to exchange of 39,000 acres of private timber in the Lochsa River watershed for national forest has opponents out in force.

Two letters in Monday’s Idaho Statesmansuggested the proposal was nefarious because the private land is owned by billionaire timberman and developer Tim Blixseth. And one suggested that conservation groups like the Idaho Conservation League and Trout Unlimited were part of a secret conspiracy to jam the exchange down Idahoans’ throats because they hired timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey.

This tactic, know as waving the bloody shirt, is often popular. But it is not always enlightening.

First, Blixseth no longer owns Western Pacific Timber, the company that owns the private Lochsa timberland. He was forced to give up ownership in 2012 due to defaulting on loans.

But Mark Rey — the former undersecretary of agriculture in the Bush administration, former chief of staff of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee when chaired by Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, and long a voice of the timber industry — has been hired as a lobbyist by the Idaho Conservation League and Trout Unlimited.

Gary MacFarland, executive director of Friends of the Clearwater, whose communications director wrote one of the letters, guided me to the website Open Secrets, where it showed that Rey had indeed been paid $15,000 by the ICL, $30,000 by TU and $42,000 by Western Pacific.

“Its just one of those things that looks a little fishy,” MacFarland said.

Rey worked efforts to protect the Boulder-White Clouds and other issues for ICL, said Rick Johnson, executive director of the statewide group. He did not work on the land exchange, which ICL has not supported.

Working with Rey helps ICL see itself and its issues from other sets of eyes, he said.

“Some people will tell Mark Rey something different than they would tell me,” Johnson said.

As for the attempt to demonize them for hiring Rey, Johnson gets it. He worked for the Sierra Club on the Northwest timber campaign where he waved Rey’s timber credentials in the same way.

“I helped demonize him,” Johnson said.

The land itself is intermixed with national forest land in a checkerboard that goes back historically to the Northern Pacific Railroad land grant. Most agree it and the federal land intermixed would be better managed as a single block.

The land was largely clearcut in the 1980s and 1990s and opponents often refer to it as “hacked over” lands. But today most of it has young trees covering most it.

Andy Hawes, an attorney for Western Pacific in Boise, said they went to the senators when the Forest Service told them that it could not do a complicated easement requested by Idaho County to protect access and prevent development on the lands it gets in the trade. Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and Rep. Labrador said in a letter to Forest Chief Tom Tidwell, obtained by the Idaho Statesman, he should pause its current administrative land exchange process so they can try to put together a bill that would satisfy the many groups involved in the process.

“We believe that these interest can be better reconciled by the additional authorities and protections that could be embodied in an exchange directed by authorizing legislation,” Risch and Crapo said in the letter.

MacFarland sees little value in a land exchange. Instead, he would like the Forest Service to consider buying the private land. Idaho County would hate that because it would lose the property tax that is now paid on that land.

Johnson said both senators brought the issue up with him when he was in Washington earlier this month.

“We have not entered into any conversation with anybody,” Johnson said. “It’s fraught with problems.”

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This sign on the Clearwater National Forest shows how the federal and private land is a “checkerboard.” (Western Pacific Timber Photo)

Read more here: http://blogs.idahostatesman.com/opponents-wave-bloody-shirt-over-lochsa-land-exchange/lochsa/#storylink=cpy



Read more here: http://blogs.idahostatesman.com/opponents-wave-bloody-shirt-over-lochsa-land-exchange/#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://blogs.idahostatesman.com/opponents-wave-bloody-shirt-over-lochsa-land-exchange/#storyli=
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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still 
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill 
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon
 

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