Speech
to Grants Pass City Council, January 5, 2010
The presentation last month of the City's and citizens' plans for
the River Road Reserve was interesting; the most eye-opening part was the map
of Grants Pass and the River Road Reserve with City properties highlighted;
next to the city properties, the Reserve is immense. Staff and citizens
recognized that in reserving large blocks of it for farming, and even pear
orchard. But farming takes farmers, and you have the same problem Naumes did;
no takers for large parcels of farm land covered with diseased pear trees,
treated poles and steel wires.
We bought that land, it was said, for parkland sometime in the
future, because it was so cheap compared to land inside the Urban Growth
Boundary, at $11,000 per acre. I submit that we won't know the true cost of
that land until we clean it up. It isn't going to be easy or cheap to do that
with those wires in the way, but we have to do it now, to save the rest of the
pear and apple trees in our part of the Rogue Valley, at least, and to avoid
being sued by owners of large orchards downwind in Jackson County. I suggest
that we don't ask for any plan to be approved for that land until we have
cleaned it up.
For one thing, that will give us time. Our state is in a profound
fiscal crisis, where our land use laws could change very quickly. Oregon is
starting to realize that our high unemployment situation is structural, and
just might be tied to both our tax structure and our restrictions on the use of
our land. We should wait and see what happens to these laws, and actively work
to change them to allow more industry and small farming, at least.
For another thing, it will give many of us work. We have a lot of
unemployed people who could be hired to clear that land, and we need to get it
done before the trees leaf out in the spring. According to the video about
Abandoned Orchards put out by Jackson County, which I hope you have watched on
roguetv.org, we should have done it when we first bought the land with no
intention of maintaining those trees. Now the trees appear heavily diseased and
it has become an emergency.
Thirdly, the City has trouble maintaining its land inside the city
limits. The property around the sewage treatment plant is covered with star
thistle where it isn't watered lawn, and they are spreading into the All-Sports
Park and the surrounding neighborhood. We should control our properties in town
before we plan another park.
The City of Grants Pass contracted in 2012 with a nearby farmer to clear and farm the abandoned orchard and most of the rest of the 250 acres, giving them a $100 per acre lease and giving them credit for clearing the acreage that could pay their lease for a decade. About half the land has been cleared and farmed the first year; the rest should be cleared and burned this year. They had two years to get the clearing done.
ReplyDelete