Soap Box

To the editor,

John McCain was shot down over Vietnam in October 1967 after completing over 20 missions. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. While McCain fought in Vietnam, our fearless president got four college draft deferments. After graduating in 1968, Trump visited a doctor who provided him with a letter stating he had bone spurs in a heel that enabled him to get a medical deferment from the draft. He later said the bone spurs were “minor.”

Capt. McCain’s passing brings back memories of my Naval service which culminated in June 1967, and I recall McCain was almost killed in July 1967.

On July 29, 1967, an electrical power surge occurred in a Phantom F-4B parked on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal operating off Vietnam. A Zuni rocket shot across the flight deck and struck an external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk piloted by Lt. Cdr. White or McCain. McCain and the other pilots were able to escape from their planes as jet fuel spilled across the flight deck, ignited and triggered a chain-reaction of bomb explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161.

It was one of the worst Naval accidents since WWII.

– Donald Moskowitz, Londonderry, N.H.

To the editor,

A deal is a deal, but the Trump administration isn’t seeing it that way when it comes to hard-won plans to protect the greater sage grouse and its habitat in Western states.

As the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s Third Congressional District, I support our existing Colorado plan for the greater sage grouse. I will also hold the federal government responsible for upholding, not overturning, the reasonable deal we struck together over many years of local, regional and state partnerships.

In the 1990s, many stakeholders in my home county were increasingly concerned about greater sage grouse habitat and the possibility of the bird being listed under the Endangered Species Act. Stakeholder groups came together and included ranchers, biologists and bird specialists, local governments, local ag and conservation nonprofits, the Colorado State Division of Wildlife, and interested citizens.

This joint effort to restore habitat was successful, and the State of Colorado has since continued to bring people together for habitat conservation. We even have a shuttle ambassador to D.C. – John Swartout, a Republican – who has made groundbreaking and consistent progress. Then, in 2011, Colorado leaders and other Westerners engaged in an even larger-scale, cooperative approach to public policy by crafting state-level plans for protecting the greater sage grouse and its habitat. Ranchers, biologists, hunters, energy industry representatives, local governments, conservation groups and Western governors met for years with federal officials. They developed state-by-state plans that would protect the bird and its habitat and avoid an endangered species listing. These plans are great examples of public-private partnerships.

Now, rather than giving these bottom-up plans a chance to work and waiting for the built-in review in 2020, the Trump administration appears to be intent on halting these plans with a top-down approach as quickly as possible. Claims that this will give “more local control” make no sense. This is ideology masquerading as policy.

The BLM, which controls vast swaths of greater sage grouse habitat, is now revising each state’s plan and is issuing one-size-fits-all directives that erode their effectiveness and ignore protections for bird habitat. This latest BLM directive, which severely limits an innovative landswap provision that helps BLM work with private landowners to compensate for damages to sage grouse habitat, is opposed by Gov. John Hickenlooper and the governors of Utah, Nevada and Oregon.

On top of that, the agency is ignoring a key provision of the 2015 plan that requires it to back off from issuing oil and gas leases on priority greater sage grouse habitat. The BLM has already offered more than 1 million acres of key habitat in the West for oil and gas leases in 2018 alone, and now its revised plan for Colorado would lease an additional 224,200 acres of greater sage grouse habitat for development.

Simply put, the Trump administration is putting politics over science. The BLM’s draft revised plan cuts out the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entirely and limits Colorado Parks and Wildlife to a consulting role only. If these latest changes are affirmed, the BLM will have no science-based constraints on allowing exceptions for drilling within greater sage grouse habitat. Truly, the fox is guarding the hen house.

This directive actually accelerates the risk to greater sage grouse and sagebrush habitat and will lead to what Westerners were initially trying to avoid: an endangered species listing. The Trump administration’s attacks are a betrayal of the honest, good faith compromise reached in 2015 by Western citizens, communities and industries and all the hard work at the local level from the 1990s - 2015.

As your congresswoman, I will stand firmly in support of the 2015 plans. I oppose the Trump administration’s policies that undermine the success of a local, bottom-up democratic process; substitute a bureaucratic, top-down, one-size-fits-all process; give unfair advantage to energy development on our public lands; and pose grave threats to both the greater sage grouse and to family ranches.

We need to stick with the existing plans, let them work, and remember that a deal is a deal.

– Diane Mitsch Busch, candidate, Colorado’s Third Congressional District

To the editor,

I have been following the continual coverage and letters to the editor about the homeless issue in Durango. Now the ACLC wants to become involved. The current sheriff’s solution to the homeless problem is to attempt to shift the responsibility to the city which, after attempting to address the demands of the homeless, has decided to do no more.

We need a strong, committed sheriff who will enforce the homeless laws that are already on our books. That person is sheriff’s candidate Charles Hamby. Please join me in voting for Charles Hamby for sheriff in November so our community can move on to dealing with more pressing issues.

– Pat Wainwright, Hesperus