Political Quotes

“today I rise to introduce a bill to end the gridlock on the Oregon and California, O&C, lands and secure a new future. I recently unveiled my legislation in Oregon alongside Governor Kitzhaber, premier forest scientists, and a cross-section of supporters from timber, county, collaborative group and environmental interests. With the introduction of this bill, I look forward to working with supporters and interested parties, as well as the entire Oregon delegation, to end decades of uncertainty and broken forest policy with a science-driven solution. The 2.1 million acres of O&C grant lands have a history known too well by Oregonians. After the Oregon and California Railroad violated the terms of its land grant, Congress revested the lands to federal ownership in 1916. In 1937, Congress directed how the Department of the Interior was to manage these lands and laid out a formula for distributing timber receipts to the 18 Oregon counties with O&C lands. The high logging harvests of the 1980s made way for the spotted owl timber wars, and today the lands are ground zero for the battle between those seeking to halt logging in the Northwest and those seeking to return to the unsustainable logging levels of a bygone era. My bill ends the O&C gridlock by using science to guide management of the O&C lands while upholding bedrock federal environmental laws.…”