guest opinion: plum creek and mark rey
Backdoor Deals on Public Lands Deeply Disappointing
In Montana, we are proud of our sunshine laws that keep government actions open and responsive to the public. Unfortunately, the laws that apply to the federal government are not as enlightened, which can sometimes lead to nasty surprises from Washington—surprises that impact the clean water and open spaces we treasure on our public lands.
Montanans got just such a surprise two weeks ago, when the Missoula County Commissioners and Senator Jon Tester discovered that Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, the Bush Administration political appointee who oversees the Forest Service, has been quietly negotiating a backroom deal with real estate developer Plum Creek.
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In The New West magazine
Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
It's 2:30 a.m., and Bud Boyce, 75, fumbles in the dim light of the pickup cab for the controls of the mounted spotlight.
Outside, the beam cuts the blackness, illuminating clouds of warm breath and glassy eyes as it pans from left to right, then back again across a herd of more than 250 Angus-Hereford cows, all pregnant and ready to give birth.
The cattle huddle in dark masses. Bud plays the light across them, carefully watching for a cow in labor or a newborn calf. With no signs of a delivery-in-progress and no new calves since the last check three hours ago, he wheels his pickup back toward the house and lurches down the frozen drive. In three hours, he'll do it again. Then, ranch hand Mike Horst will take over.
It's a grueling schedule, part of what makes ranching a lifestyle, not a job.
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In The New West magazine
Montana’s Cash Cowboy
If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.
But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business.
Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it.
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6degrees Astroblog
What Should be Taught in Science Classes
For nearly a century a battle has raged in our country over the nature of science and how it should be taught to public school students. When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859 based on his observations of various animal species during his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, it immediately crystallized a growing disagreement between the proponents of a divinely inspired origin to life on Earth and those who looked for a natural explanation for the multitude of species.
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New West News Brief
Statewide Wyoming Real Estate Steady, Slight Chill in Teton ValleyThe Associated Press' Mead Gruver takes a look at the Wyoming real estate market today with two stories: One about a slight cool down in the pricey Jackson Hole area and another about the still slightly tight overall statewide situation.
New Census numbers show Wyoming is ninth in the nation for the lowest vacancy rate in the first quarter (1.7 percent, compared to 3.2 percent West-wide), tied with Hawaii and Oklahoma. New energy workers moving into the state have helped the market, as has the reluctance to go hog-wild with new construction.
In the Teton Valley, Gruver reports there is a little dip in home sales, although the median price continues to climb. (It's at $1.1 milllion.) And, with a proposed moratorium on new building while the county finishes a management plan, those prices might just continue their rise.
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From The New West magazine
Revenge of the Resource Economy
For years now, talk in the Mountain West has been about the "amenity" economy displacing natural resources as the key to prosperity. But as the housing downturn marches across the region and commodity prices soar, the old standbys have returned as key economic pillars.
Clearly, the industry powering much of the growth in the Mountain West over the past decade -- growth itself -- is limping. Residential real estate, while healthier than much of the country, continues to weaken, especially in larger cities like Boise and Salt Lake and in resort markets like Big Sky. The luxury second-home sector is also taking a hit, with high-profile projects like Tamarack Resort in Idaho and Promontory in Utah seeking refuge in bankruptcy.
Yet still-tight labor markets, continued job growth and commercial construction -- all of which are at least partly related to the natural resource boom -- have kept the overall economy in positive territory.
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from timberlands to subdivisions
Officials Challenge Mark Rey on Plum Creek Road Easements
The dust kicked up by closed-door negotiations between the U.S. Forest Service and Plum Creek Timber Company to amend forest road easements brought Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey to Missoula Monday, where he apologized for keeping western Montana counties in the dark but did little to ease concerns that local communities will increasingly bear the burden of Plum Creek's transition into residential real estate.
Rey, a Bush Administration appointee and overseer of the Forest Service, said he's "extremely sensitive" to the effects the development of Plum Creek's timber lands could have -- increased firefighting in the wildland-urban interface, road maintenance and other public service costs, plus environmental impacts -- "but that sensitivity does not empower me to write new laws," he said, and in the end Plum Creek can do whatever it wants with its land.
"You ought to think harder about executing these responsibilities yourselves," he said, whether through zoning or other means.
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From The New West magazine
Traffic Perplexes New Western Communities
A century ago, Ustick, west of Boise, was a farming hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and served by a trolley car system. After World War II, Boise's sprawl gradually subsumed the bucolic little burg. Running east-west between Interstate 84 and Chinden Boulevard, Ustick Road – once a graceful tree-lined two-lane thoroughfare – became clogged with cars and lined with strip malls featuring gun shops and nail salons, small office buildings, and, eventually, big-box retail stores (a 97,000 square foot Kohl's department store stands at the corner of Ustick and Eagle Road).
Commute times into Boise lengthened from 15 minutes (the time it once took to ride the streetcar from Ustick to downtown) to 30 minutes and more, as traffic crawled along the narrow arterial.
So it goes across the West on one of the most contentious issues facing the region: traffic. Several decades ago, few even had the word "commute" in their vocabulary; you simply left home shortly before you wanted to arrive at your destination.
But today, an aging and inadequate road system needs immediate repairs while the number of cars and trucks skyrockets, and construction costs soar. Annual vehicle miles traveled in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho doubled between 1995 and 2005. In Utah, the figure nearly tripled, according to the Federal Highway Administration. And local governments simply don't have the money to do much about it -- and when they do, they often can't agree on how to proceed.
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NewWest.Net Conferences
Designing the New West
The Designing the New West: Architecture and Landscape in the Mountain West Conference is wrapping up here in Bozeman at the historic Gallatin Gateway Inn. Put on by NewWest.Net and sponsored by the Sonoran Institute, the conference brought together designers from all over the country to explore innovative design ideas, identify best practices, and better understand how to bridge the gap between good architectural theory and sometimes-messy building practices in the fastest growing region in the nation.
A mix of presentations and engaging panel discussions tackled pressing Western issues like sustainable development, land design and the special challenges of urban, rural and resort design, historic preservation and affordable housing.
Click on the photo or here for a slideshow of the days' events. Click "more" for a recap of the conference.
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