The Job of County Commissioner: Jeff Golden Reports

What does a county commissioner do?

Another in a series of reflections by former Jackson County Commissioners.

It isn't all accolades and victory parties. 

People who agree with a County Commissioner think he or she is simply doing the obvious, reasonable thing. There is no credit for that. However, people who disagree with the commissioner consider the person foolish or corrupt or politically extreme. How else could their decisions possibly be so unfair and wrong? 

Jeff Golden: November, 1986 clipping.

 As a commissioner I learned that people want county services, but they voted against taxing themselves to pay for them. I learned people wanted clean air, but they voted against a program to make people drive clean cars. I learned people have contradictory ideas on the value of their homes, thinking it worth a lot for the purposes of ownership or sale, but put a much lower value for the purposes of tax assessment. Same house, different mindset.

I was elected 6 years prior to Jeff Golden, and was out of office when he served. He got caught by two of the great hazards I had mentioned yesterday, hazards that could change everything for a commissioner.  One is a change in federal law--in his case in the form of regulations for protecting the spotted owl. The other is when a citizen group gets riled up. 

He had them both at the same time.

I remember reading the news at the time. Jeff Golden had used the forbidden words: "worker retraining."  Those were fighting words to some members of the political community, proof that he had given up on defending the status quo of federal timber policy. Jeff Golden was early to the new-normal of lower timber harvests. His words may have been thought reasonable and forward-thinking in the halls of Congress, where forest policy is created, but for a County Commissioner in a timber-dependent O&C county, he was thought a defeatist. 

It is dangerous to see the future before others see it.

Public TV show

Jeff Golden has stayed active in public life, having run for State Senate against Lenn Hannon, having been a radio talk show host on Jefferson Public Radio, and serving as the producer and host of the Public TV show Immense Possibilities. He is currently the Democratic nominee for State Senate on the ballot for this coming November.

Here is Jeff Golden's description of the crisis in timber policy, and his 4 years at the Courthouse:

Jeff Golden remembers: 

 Rules Changing Fast

I remember a photo that ran in newspapers across the country in the first week of May, 1989. I think I saw it in the front section of the New York Times.  It showed a plaid-shirted guy wearing a ball cap with a foot and a half of stuffed owl attached to the top. An arrow ran through the owl’s head.  

The picture had been taken the night before in the balcony of the auditorium in what’s now the Central High Auditorium in Medford, Oregon. The dead-owl guy was one of thousands of timber workers there for a special meeting of the Board of Commissioners.  Below and few hundred feet in front of him, I sat on the stage in between Commissioners Hank Henry and Sue Kupillas, trying to keep enough order for the 50-some people who had signed up to comment to be heard. 

At issue was which of two formal resolutions the Board should approve and send to Congress. Both said that the recent listing of the Spotted Owl as an endangered species, which reduced the massive flow of logs harvested from federal forestlands to a trickle, was plunging Jackson County into a world of hurt: massive job losses, mill cutbacks and closures, bankruptcies of small timber-related businesses, the slashing of federal timber receipts that the county relied on to support basic services.  

From there the two versions diverged. Version 1 called on Congress to end this nonsense fomented by environmental crazies, so we could go back to what we did best: cutting and milling trees to supply the world with lumber and plywood. Version 2 recognized that the harvest rate of recent years would strip our landscape and impoverish our people before long, that as much as we might want otherwise, the 1990s and 2000s would not be like the 1970s. This version called on Congress to help re-tool mills for smaller-diameter logs and help train workers to find other ways to support their families.

Newspaper clipping. Sometimes the headlines are good.

It was a tough meeting to run. Those speaking up for Version 1 set off loud cheers and foot-stomping. Those who liked #2 were booed almost to silence.  A small group of well-respected locals—I remember Mike Burrill of Burrill Lumber among them—paced the aisles to keep violence from breaking out.

We got out that night in one piece, but the community was broken. People were angry and scared, and it wasn’t a great time for seeing, or even being curious about, the other side’s point of view.  Almost overnight, the rules on logging had completely changed, and most of us who believed they needed to change didn’t think very much about the violent way people living by those old rules had had the rug pulled out from under them.

Rules Changing Fast would have been a good title for my term in the Courthouse (1987-1991).  The County’s population doubled between 1960 (74,000 people) and 1990 (147,000) as the state’s grew from 1,770,000 to 2,860,000. The flood of newcomers triggered regulations that were new and not real appealing to longtime Oregonians.  

Beyond the timber restrictions: 

   ***New rules limited  what rural landowners could do, County commissioners, sitting as a kind of land-use court, had the opportunity to enrage either a property owner or his complaining neighbors almost every week,

   ***How people could use their woodstoves on days of stagnant air. We enacted the country’s first woodstove curtailment ordinance, roughly as popular with some people as a gun confiscation law would have been.

   ***The gasses our cars and trucks could put in the air. The state of Oregon state began requiring Rogue Valley and Portland vehicles to pass tailpipe tests just before I took office,

What did all that feel like to people who had been here a while?  I started wondering that as a river guide, before my commissioner days. When Californians discovered the lower Rogue River in the 1970s, the rules changed. Local folks who’d grown up floating the river every summer were suddenly told they couldn’t, unless they won a permit in a competitive lottery.  

All to accommodate a massive inflow of new Oregonians they didn’t especially want in the first place. 

That was the flavor of mid-‘80s Jackson County. Is it very different today? I’m not sure.  

What I know is that commissioners have a tough job, and that doing it well takes enough patience to hear and care about concerns of vastly different people, and enough courage to stray now and then from your home base.