November 26, 2019 10:45 a.m.
It was a double victory for rural Oregon counties on Monday.
That’s the word from the Association of O&C Counties.
A release from the group said on Monday Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued decisions in two cases filed by the group in 2016 and 2017, granting AOCC a “complete victory” in both cases.
Douglas County Commissioner Tim Freeman, who serves as the President of AOCC’s Board of Directors, said “this decision has been a long time coming but it has been worth waiting for”. He said the Court agreed with all of AOCC’s arguments. The release said O&C lands have historically been managed to produce revenue that is shared with Counties to pay for a broad range of public services.
In one of the cases, the AOCC argued that the 1937 O&C Act requires all 2.1 million acres of O&C timberlands under jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management to be managed for sustained yield timber production. The Court agreed issuing a summary statement that said “Of this there can be no doubt: the 2016 BLM Resource Management Plans violate the O&C Act”. The statement continued saying “when a statue’s language is plain, courts must enforce it according to its terms”.
In the second case, AOCC argued that O&C lands cannot be included by presidential declaration in a national monument in which sustained yield management is forbidden. The release said the Court agreed with that as well. AOCC’s Executive Director Rocky McVay said “this is a clean sweep for the counties”. He said while the litigation is not over, the decision was “a huge step forward for counties in western Oregon that have historically relied on shared timber receipts from O&C lands to support essential public services”.
The release said Judge Leon ordered the parties to submit additional briefs regarding the path forward in implementing the Court’s decisions.