As a longtime Columbia River watchdog in the Pacific Northwest, I have had mixed emotions over a Columbia River Gorge bill passed by Congress several years ago. On one hand, it was designed to bring some protection to one of the most beautiful natural treasures in America.
But on the other, that protection has meant a virtual confiscation of a great deal of private land by the federal government, which has not exactly been the best and most reasonable of landlords. In fact, the evidence over the years has been that the intrusive hand of government has been an alarming case of Big Government at its worst.
The Gorge bill had the bothersome capacity for setting the stage for some unnecessary donnybrooks on land-management policy and use between the states of Washington and Oregon, as well as between the two states and the bureaucracies of the federal government.
For example, consider this mishmash of controlling factors that are now present in the management of the Gorge in particular and the Columbia River in general:
The secretary of agriculture now has the authority to call all the shots on general policy regarding the Gorge and the river.
A Gorge manager selected from the U.S. Forest Service was given the authority to run things at the site.
A Gorge Commission made up of six persons from Washington and six from Oregon was given the job of developing a long-range management plan for the scenic area — even though final authority for major decisions was left to the secretary of agriculture and his personally selected manager.
Regardless of the decisions made by the Gorge Commission, the federal government was given the last word on any policies made for the site and for the river. However, a glimmer of light was added to the measure by Congress in a brilliant display of hindsight. It gave the Washington-Oregon commission the right to overrule the feds on policy, provided it could do it by at least a two-thirds vote of commissioners! What a twisted mess of verbiage that bill provided.
It hasn’t happened yet, but I have had the hope that the Gorge measure will eventually be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, because of that strange provision giving a two-state-level commission veto power over congressional authority handed to the federal government.
The whole tangle reminds me of that marvelous comedy routine, “Who’s on first?”, staged so often by the team of Abbott and Costello for the stage, radio, and television. Want more? Jot this down: About half of the 277,000 acres of the site is under the management of the Forest Service and the other half by the Gorge Commission. Who’s on first, indeed!
It sounds as if the bill was written by a boxing promoter with a penchant for arranging fights that were bound to come to no decision. One must hope that the Gorge, one of the most beautiful sites in the U.S. and, in fact, in the world, will survive the machinations of a wretched piece of legislation.