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it will be on the ballot in its present form, but you are correct that there is some risk if the legislature starts "tinkering" with it during the enabling legislation process. You might also be relieved to note that there is a sunset provision in the ballot measure.

In tough economic times, there likely will be some legislators who will try to gut the measure as a manner of posturing to appease some of the interest groups to whom they owe allegiance. In reality, they will have difficulty doing anything substantive.

M76 is one that honestly reflects the sentiment of Oregonians, that their natural resources are a high priority. The state's general fund allocates less than 2% to natural resources.

posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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Dr. Lubchenko is now in charge of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service. NMFS has ESA Section 7 consultation responsibility, yet seems to foster a culture that makes habitat restoration projects absurdly difficult to implement. Restoration is not development, yet those of us that work on restoration projects are treated as if we intend to decrease the chances of salmon recovery instead of doing the exact opposite.

I have a great deal of experience with Sec 7 consultations that routinely delay projects by more than a year, and in fact will be in a meeting this morning attempting to negotiate design/engineering agreement on a project that NMFS says is one of their highest priority fish passage restoration projects in our area. After more than a year of these negotiations between NMFS fish passage engineers and our own engineers, we are still at an impasse on a project we expected to implement this field season. We will be fortunate to implement the $1.5 million project in 2010 the way things are going. We are about to hand this issue over to our congressional delegation if today's meeting does not result in significant progress with defined timelines for NMFS to return a Biological Opinion that will enable project implementation.

Would she consider delegating signature authority to branch chiefs to help expidite the process of consultation, similar to what US Fish & Wildlife does?

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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It should not come as a surprise that the wolf issue divides along a line between livestock producers and those who will never wake up one morning to find that wolves have killed their animals.

I heard the comment from Curt Jacobs, who has already faced this reality, when he said that he thinks livestock producers can live with wolves, but not in their backyards. Literally, this is where two young wolves killed 24 lambs that belonged to Jacobs and his wife.

If wolves kill privately owned livestock when they are on public land, it is quite a different issue than when they come on private land.

I really always thought the wolf management plan for Oregon could have been really simple: when wolves are marauding on private land, they're fair game and when they're on public land, they should be protected.

posted 4 years ago
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