Lars Larson: Crisis growing in Oregon’s timber counties

by Lars Larson

A crisis is growing in Oregon’s timber dependent counties along with the Douglas Firs. Law enforcement is falling apart in that half of the state where you don’t find a Starbucks on every corner. I talked with Sheriff John Bishop, who’s quitting after 6 years of trying to police 16-hundred square miles with only six deputies.

Thirty years ago the Willamette Valley contracted gang green ecological insanity and decided that the logging industry had to die…so they killed it. That cut off the life blood of jobs and taxes that supplied paychecks and public services.

And Oregon’s 85 percent Democrat party congressional delegation doesn’t have any intention of fixing it…nor does John Kitzhaber. A fix is actually easy. This state grows six billion board feet of trees every single year. If we cut, we create 66-thousand permanent, family wage jobs and we’d never run out of trees.

Instead, the plan seems to be…let it grow unchecked, till it burns, and let unemployment and crime grow in Oregon’s rural towns till it’s impossible to live there. The only jobs Kitzhaber and company care about are their own.

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