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Show A6 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor EDITOR’S VIEW Let Court Decide Commissioner’s Fate Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. EDITORIALS Farming: Paying for Nothing The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Copley News Service With grocery prices up nearly 6 percent over the past year, it might seem odd that the federal government is paying farmers a fortune to not grow food. Odd but true. The government last year paid $1.8 billion to farmers for agreeing to not plant crops or graze herds on 36 million acres of land - an area bigger than Arkansas. Stranger still: As food prices rise, the government still insists that farmers not grow crops, even though some farmers are pleading to be allowed to plant. The guiding policy is called the Conservation Reserve Program. It was born in the 1980s, when crop surpluses were driving down prices and hurting farmers. The situation now is reversed, but the program remains unchanged. These days, it’s grocery shoppers and food processors who are feeling the pain. The reserve program is under attack from the food and livestock industries, which would love to pay less for the grain that goes into food for both human beings and animals. How much difference would it make to put some of those 36 million reserved acres back into production? Perhaps not much. The program is aimed at marginal farmland, along with sensitive acres near streams - wetlands and the like. Once idled, the land is planted in prairie grass or trees to hold the soil. Since it isn’t plowed or fertilized, there’s less erosion and chemical run-off. The program serves a useful purpose in safeguarding wildlife and water quality and limiting soil erosion. Farmers volunteer for the program and rarely put their most productive acreage in it. On the other hand, those reserve acres make dandy habitat for deer, so the Department of Agriculture sometimes finds itself paying wealthy “farmers” to keep up their hunting preserves. The department also pays absentee owners who wouldn’t farm the land anyway. Once land goes into the program, it has to stay there for 10 to 15 years. There is, as they say, a substantial penalty for early withdrawal. But with some crop prices up 40 percent to 80 percent in the last year, a lot of money could be made planting that marginal land. Bill Roenigk, vice president of the National Chicken Council, says 7 million or 8 million acres would go back into production if the government waived the penalties. Chicken feed prices are triple what they were two years ago, he says. By this fall, that could translate into a 25 percent jump in the supermarket price for chicken, he says. Environmental groups make a different calculation: More farming equals more pollution and less wildlife. Any effect on food prices would be tiny, says Julie Sibbing, program manager at the National Wildlife Foundation. “It’s not feeding the hungry. It’s feeding animals and ethanol plants,” she says. “So much of the Midwest is agricultural. There has to be some place where wildlife can survive.” This calls for some Solomonic decision making at the Agriculture Department. The best way to lower prices is to increase supply. So the department should allow some good farmland out of the program without penalty. But the department should protect the land near streams and other ecologically sensitive areas, whether it’s good farmland or not. The more difficult question involves the government mandate for use of ethanol in gasoline and its effect on food and fuel prices. The New York Times reported this week that Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has several key staffers and top campaign supporters with strong ties to the ethanol industry. On the other hand, Obama’s Republican adversary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona is a longtime critic of the special subsidies granted to the corn ethanol industry. Expect ethanol, gas prices and food prices to play a big part in the fall campaign. Reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. James L. Davis If we were a nation of cannibals, then politicians would probably be our meal of choice. We eat them alive. Vilifying our politicians is quickly replacing baseball as America’s favorite pastime. No matter your political leaning, there’s a political enemy out there that must be destroyed before he or she destroys you or your cause. The sad truth is that our political leaders have given us plenty of reasons to doubt their sincerity, honesty and sanity. From the city hall to the state and nation’s capital, one politician after another has been caught with his or her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, leading a great many to lose faith in the entire political process. The only thing more unfortunate than the loss of faith in our politicians is our knee-jerk reaction to try, sentence and convict a politician accused of wrong-doing before they are ever given their day in court. While the court of public opinion has entered the digital age and thrives on the internet, the court of law continues to grind slowly and methodically forward. As it should. The process of proving the guilt or innocence of a defendant takes place in the real world, which can be aggravatingly slow to navigate at times. A week after Emery County Commissioner Drew Sitterud was charged with three felony counts of misuse of public monies by the Utah Attorney General’s Office, public opinion has largely decided the commissioner’s fate, depending on your political viewpoint. Either he is guilty of crimes against the people or he is the victim of a political smear campaign a little more than four months before a reelection bid. A third opinion is the simple shrug of the shoulders by those tired of hearing about politicians charged with wrongdoing. One opinion a little harder to hear is anyone saying “let the court decide the commissioner’s guilt or innocence.” The court and its grinding pace is a little too slow for the lightning fast pace of the 21st century world. The commissioner is not due to appear in court for his initial appearance until July 15 and by then his political future may already be decided by a great many, which is unfortunate. With the commissioner facing reelection in November, we should hope that in this incidence the slow, methodical march of our legal system can move fast enough to decide the commissioner’s guilt or innocence before Election Day, giving the voters of Emery County a clear, accurate and honest decision based on the findings and facts of law, not the emotional outpouring of public opinion. PUBLIC FORUM Plan Events Together It was once again my privilege and blessing to be able to take part in Relay for Life this year. I always enjoy doing a few laps, seeing lots of friends, meeting new ones, supporting survivors, remembering those we have lost, or walking with and praying for those who are now battling cancer. Sadly, there seem to be more all the time. My concern is this: Carbon County had their “walk” the very same night as Emery County. Seems that this happens a lot! When it does, the people of these two counties cannot support each other at these and many other events though we would like to! I am sure I am not alone in my thinking! My suggestion is that the people who are in charge of events in both counties make a simple phone call to see when the other county’s event is scheduled. Simple communication can solve the problem, and it will be better for both counties. I realize that there is “always something going on” but, I love to go to events in Carbon County and I have many relatives and friends there who would come to support Emery County events as well. Please Carbon and Emery counties, get it together! Talk together. More importantly, get together and talk at the first of every year and put together a calendar that all of us can know about and be able to plan according to all year long. Compromise! Help each other! Help us, the people of both counties to not only support our own events but each other’s better. - Sylvia Nelson Huntington Forest Service Decision Ruined Spoon Creek Valley “Wild lands, nature can touch the soul” -- a quote in the Deseret Morning News in the “religion” section. For a long time now, I have given a lot of thought to the Forest Service’s decision to close the Spoon Creek valley just above the “sanitized” camping area of Indian Creek campground. This came as a big shock and caused extreme sadness. All of my life, my family had camped in the Spoon Creek valley. It’s beautiful when the flowers are blooming in the spring. I have many pictures that I have taken just of the flowers and green habitat along Spoon Creek. Flowers of every type and color spread magnificently throughout the valley. We have pictures of purple flowers covering the valley and hillsides that are just a wonder. Not any more. They are now trampled by cows, cows that trample the vegetation, the wet lands and the stream banks. The reason for closing access to Spoon Creek was just a guise for adding the cows to graze and destroy all that is beautiful about the valley. Cows don’t enhance the beauty, they destroy it. Becoming one with nature, as the Forest Supervisor suggests, is hard to do under these circumstances. In my day, in Upper Spoon Creek there were many 4-H campouts. The Forest Service, with their insight (?) on managing that area, felled all the larger quakies in that beautiful place. Large, ugly stumps were all that was left to beautify (?) this once beautiful area. And there has been no significant re-growth in what was once a serene, soul-food type area. Many, many families from the local area used this place to replenish and refresh themselves. This valley was a haven to us when we needed to refresh our souls from the demands of life. It’s breathtaking to look downward through the Upper Joe’s Valley pastures. It was beautiful to see a “moon bow” across the valley one night just as a full moon rose over the east side of the mountains and shone through a slight drizzle of rain. There were many witnesses to this phenomenon. As impossible as it sounds, this did happen. During our experiences in Spoon Creek, we had the excitement and pleasure of seeing elk grazing and romping as they came down to the stream to drink towards the evening. We have had deer wander next to and through our camp, which is always exciting to us and our children and grandchildren. This experience will now be denied to our future generations, thanks to the “management” of our forests by the Manti-LaSal National Forest Service. We can’t even drive up Spoon Creek valley now because of a blockade. I have to ask, how much time have the administrators of this land actually connected with it? These administrators come in from areas outside our local area and hove not formed the love and care for the land they are “managing” for the future. I have found that the management of it all seems to cause managers to protect the forest from the very people that need the forests for times away from the demands and pressures of everyday life. Yes, the forests need protection from abuse. But I will tell you, there has never been as much abuse done to that beautiful valley by anyone as much as the Forest Service has done. It was a shock to go up to our little valley one spring and find that quakies by the hundreds had again been felled. Large slag piles were everywhere. What a blight. What a heartache. Many camping areas were now ruined by the lack of trees to camp near to, so as to connect with nature. It really struck an ironic cord when a message was left posted on the road block in front of the road that leads up Spoon Creek. The reason was “some campers were threatening the wet meadows.” In all the years that we had camped in Spoon Creek, no one ever damaged the wet meadows. Campers had always camped on the east side of the road. Who would camp in “wet lands?” But so many camping areas had been destroyed by the felling of the trees on the east side that it left campers searching for places to substitute for the areas they had been camping in. And now campers are camping in new places that had never been disturbed before. I would say this problem was brought about by the Forest Service. And even more ironic was what they then did after they closed the road into the valley. They upped the number of cows by many, many more that were allowed to graze, damage and destroy the wetlands. Cows do more damage to the wetlands in Spoon Creek than any camper could even conceive of doing. The road into Spoon Creek has now been reduced to dust and has been destroyed by the constant trampling of cows moving across it to get to the stream for water. Access was even left open to 4-wheelers. The dust was so great, it was choking and the smell from all those cows made the air putrid. I would challenge any water purification tests to show that cows haven’t now seriously increased the impurities with their feces and urine. This little stream has been seriously compromised. The air is ripe from the stench of cows. This is not what I would call “management” of this beautiful valley. I would say it was a way the Forest supervisor used to justify the added numbers of cows put in the valley. Cows will always destroy more than campers would even think of. The only two areas left to camp in were overrun by cows. The camping areas have been overwhelmed with cow feces and urine and, adding insult to injury, they tramped through our camp all night long, leaving even more of their impurities. It was rather funny to read the Forest Services article in the newspaper stating that people should look for places to camp with vegetation. The Forest Service Ferron District Ranger stated “we encourage people to be responsible, because when people are responsible we don’t have to regulate as much.” Just joking on their part of course. Who regulates the so-called prescribed burns that it seems more often than not get out of control, again destroying more forest than any camper can. It seems to me that it is time for the public to start to speak out. Let the Forest Service know how we feel about what they do in the name of preserving our forests. The way they preserve it means shutting down every place to camp, except what they deem as OK to them. No thought or credit is given to the way locals had managed to respect and preserve the areas for ages before they came on to the scene and upped their control of everything. The locals love this land too. Trust them a little. They want their forests to be passed down to their children and grandchildren so they can experience the same wonder that we have been able to, up until now. My kids and grandkids will never be able to experience the beauty of Spoon Creek. They will now experience the stench of cows, trampled wetlands and unsanitary waters that flow in the stream. They won’t be able to see elk come into the valley to romp and graze. They won’t be able to camp under the trees that help you connect with nature, or see deer roaming through their camp area. Thanks Forest Service, your care and management of the land is doing much more harm than good. Your judgment should be challenged by all of us. - Kathy Stilson Orangeville |
