Lars Thoughts – Once again when Oregon needs solid leadership Kate Brown is just blowing smoke

 If you want to know who to blame for the dangerous air you and your kids are breathing this morning…look to Too Late Kate Brown, Governor of Oregon.

    Brown pleaded guilty this weekend, on CBS “Face the Nation” that, quote “It’s decades of mismanagement of our forests in this country”.

I couldn’t agree more. Kate Brown has been in office for those decades of mismanagement.  She’s been an influential state lawmaker, the Secretary of State and for the last five years she’s been Governor.

She has had plenty of authority over those decades and what did she do with it.

The same thing she did with Oregon’s failed unemployment system, she ignored the problem.

Forestry scientist Dr Bob Zybach, points out that from 1957 to 1987 there was exactly 1 fire bigger than 10-thousand acres.

Today, Kate Brown’s state EXPECTS an average of half a million acres of fires EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

The difference:  We don’t log the forests anymore…not state forests, and not federal forests.

When you log, you cut the trees, turn them into lumber, clean the forest floor of decades of wood debris that fuels the fires and plant a new forest.

When you don’t, you prime the forest for fire.

But Kate Brown did one more thing.  Her Forestry department knew about a fire in the Santiam Canyon that began one month ago.  They let it burn.  It was still small almost two weeks ago when we heard the forecast of East winds on the way.  They let it burn.  Now that fire has burned almost 200-thousand acres and it has killed at least four people.  Governor Brown has the ash of their burned bodies on her hands.