Gordon Clay here. "What are they thinking?" That's a question I have for the last 75 years of County Commissioners, and especially this most recent bunch.

Valliant Corley's favorite cut-and-paste sentence reads "Curry County and 17 other O&C counties are suffering because they have not received the timber funding guaranteed by Congress in 1939." Ask any Native American about long-term agreements with the U.S. government.

He continues: "That came about because of the huge percentage of the county is owned by the federal government, which pays no property taxes."

That's a 75 year-old scam, like "the bridge to nowhere". While it's true that 59% of Curry County land is Forest Land, the remaining 41% has only 32 people per square mile with land owners paying the second lowest property tax in the state. Our Washington neighbors have three times as many, California seven times and the smallest state, Rhone Island has 32 times as many people per square mile.

Couple that with the fact that the US has grown by 9% from April 2000 to July 2009 and Oregon has grown 11.8% but Curry County has grown only point 1 percent, or 11 people in the last 9+ years.

Over the last 100 years, Oregon forests have diminished nearly 95%. A short-term solution might be to put those who have worked in the logging industry to work doing what the industry should have been doing all along, creating reforestation projects that produce trees for use in industries in the US instead of cutting down what little remains and sending them to Asian markets. That's actually what's happening in Eureka this month. Imagine, a self-sustaining lumber industry returning to Oregon without government handouts.