Susan Roberts

A longtime opponent of U.S. Forest Service practices in Wallowa County is livid about the approximately 1,400-page document the Forest Service is pushing as the new forest plan for the Wallowa-Whitman, Malheur, and Umatilla National Forests.

And Bruce Dunn, the only chairman the Wallowa County Natural Resources Advisory Committee (NRAC) has had since its inception nearly 25 years ago, has made a New Year’s resolution to abandon what he terms “political correctness” and now is speaking from the gut in defense of assets located within the county.

His words sound harsh, and he doesn’t care.

While apprising the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners about a significant “invitation only” meeting to be held Thursday, Jan. 8, in Pendleton regarding the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision that’s been 14 years in the making, Dunn said, “I’m concerned about the agenda.” In the body of that two-page, one-day agenda described as a “Blue Mountains Forest Supervisors and Partners Meeting,” the words “engagement” and “engage” are repeated a total of 19 times.

The first note under “Meeting purposes and desired outcomes” on that agenda reads, “To convene a cross-section of partners from various stakeholder groups to discuss process options for additional engagement for the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision.”

Says Dunn, “I don’t engage people in a plan that sucks.”

The meeting will be held at the Supervisor’s Office of the Umatilla National Forest, at 72510 Coyote Road in Pendleton, and Dunn, although not invited, plans to be present at a meeting starting at 9 a.m. County commissioners from Wallowa County have been invited, and Dunn has offered to chauffeur Commissioner Susan Roberts to the meeting, she still being unable to drive because of a broken ankle.

Dunn’s anxious for one particular question to be posed at the meeting: Who present actually has read the entire 1,400-page document? He said he doesn’t care if the question comes from his mouth or from Roberts’. The point Dunn said he wishes to stress here is how illogical it is to engage people on how best to promote a document so few have read.

Opposition to the plan that bears on future forest management in Northeast Oregon has emerged from varying quarters, including the Eastern Oregon Counties Association (EOCA), an 11-county organization of which 10 member counties touch at least one of the three national forests in question.

John Williams, local OSU Extension agent who is another longtime NRAC member, stated earlier that the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision “is basically almost exclusive restrictions” and could become a “permit nightmare.”

Dunn and Williams, primary authors of a 108-page official rebuttal submitted by Wallowa County in August 2014 in opposition to the Forest Service’s proposed document, concur that the science used by the Forest Service is outdated. Said Dunn to the Board of Commissioners Monday, “Their science is from the 1990s.”

Roberts said Monday that she has read the 1,400-page management plan in question, yet admitted there were large sections of technical writing where reading and understanding what she had read parted ways.

When submitting the county’s official rebuttal in August, the board of commissioners attached a county resolution accusing the Forest Service of departing from Land and Management Plan Practices because of changing political theories, not changes in forest conditions.