Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 08-04-25_MONDAY_7AM

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center, investigative think tank - What happened to summer jobs?? ALso talk of his bok now in paperback ARABELLA - amazing dark money network used by Dems. Comm. Colleen Roberts - calls to reopen off road trails.

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at ClouserDrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. We'll get to your calls here a little bit later this hour, but go ahead. Hold back on that, because right now I have Scott Walter with me. Scott Walter is president of Capital Research Center, and he served in the Bush administration as special assistant

to the president for domestic policy, vice president of the philanthropy round table, editing philanthropy magazine, and capital research center. Before we move along here, Scott, tell us a bit more about that for people who may not know about capital research center. Go ahead, please. Sure. The simplest way to put it is that we track the left's money. How's that? We investigate the left deeply. We expose it widely. Pretty simple. And you wrote a book a little while back here, and I still think that the more we find out about what's been happening with NGOs and all the so-called deep state stuff going on here. The more that your book, Arabella, the dark money network of leftist billionaires secretly transforming

America, the more prescient this is starting to look. And I was wondering if you could break down a little bit about why Arabella continues to be such an important book to be in everyone's library these days. It's a big deal, really is. Well, thanks for the kind words. And the paperback just came out a week or so ago, and it has a whole bunch of additional new information about Arabella. We updated all the numbers, but also we discovered more things that Arabella was up to. And I apologize to your listeners because probably not one in ten has heard the word Arabella before, but it is a for-profit DC company that operates half a dozen non-profits.

And that's where the money goes in from Gates and Soros and Zuckerberg and Ford Foundation on and on. And it comes in every electoral cycle cycle billions of dollars are coming in so that's the you may not have heard of it but they are they care about you and they are a hulking monster that you should be worried about. Can you give me an example of how Arabella is able to do its leftist Marxism work and actually you know corrode the country in many ways with some agenda, these agenda based policies.

Sure. I said that they operate a half dozen nonprofits, but the part that your listeners would encounter is not those nonprofits, which are sitting in DC obscurely, but the hundreds of fake groups that those nonprofits create. And they have names like, you know, Floridians for a Fair Shake, Keep Iowa Healthy, Secure Michigan Elections, on and on. And they want you to think those are a bunch of your neighbors who've gotten together and upset about something, when in fact it's some doofus in a DC office who's created a website

and bought some Facebook ads. This happens more than we think. And I guess it's not... Well, I guess, is a lot of greenwashing done this way too, in which we have a lot of climate change groups and such that end up being funded by these centralized DC lobbyists via the Arabella type? Absolutely. The founder of Arabella, Eric Kessler, is an enviro radical who has always had Arabella doing, you know, maybe a third of

its work at least in the environmentalist space. He was radicalized by a true crazy person when he was an undergrad at college. The guru, who was a very prominent environmentalist at the time, had run the Sierra Club and whatnot, this guru literally published a manifesto saying, you know, maybe this is back when population control was the apocalypse, not global warming. But maybe the government will have to make it illegal to have a child unless the government gives you a license to have one. That is the nut that radicalized the person who founded Arabella.

Delightful. Good to know. We would hear some similar complaints from the left to maybe right-wing organizations or right-wing people like, of course, the Koch brothers always ends up being brought up. Is there any equivalent to Arabella from the right wing, I mean, that has that kind of funding and reach, or is Arabella kind of a one-off in your view? Well, the book deals with that at some length, and the answer is it's barely analogous. The Trump network is not cycling through as many billions in the election cycle. Plus, the Koch network has, for a decade now, has

moved away from more partisan politics, whereas Arabella is one of the most important players in the Democratic Party universe. So for that and more reasons that I explain in the book, it's a pretty thin analogy. Okay. All right. So there are some equivalents, but the equivalent is a shadow of Arabella's influence and funding. Would that be fair? Is that a better way of looking at it? Yeah, that is definitely fair. Yeah. Two million pound gorilla on United States politics. Now, I know that we're kind of being told a lot, Scott, these days that, oh, Democrats are dying, the party is dying, they're looking for, you know, they have no path forward, etc., etc. And I'm not quite so relaxed about it

because of knowing about this book and the network, the web of influence, which is brought in there. Is that the right way to look at what we're even looking at here for the midterms when everybody's talking about how bad the Democrats are? I'm not relaxed about that. What about you? Well, I'm not an expert political prognosticator, but I will say the left, that's the only thing

I admire about them. The left absolutely never gives up. They're the Freddy Krueger of American politics. And they also are the party of the rich. Let me say it again, they're the party of the rich. You have to say that, it makes their heads explode. And it's true. And they have far more money, of every different type of flavor of money. The idea that they're not going to keep fighting is silly. Now the problem is they don't have many good products to sell as far as the public is concerned. So you know, it's not like they're doing wonderfully. But the idea that they're vanquished, they've gone away, you'll never see them again, that's really

silly. Okay, yeah, and also even when I hear Republicans in the Trump administration go, ah, it's going to be Republicans for the next 40 years or something, I don't think it's a great idea to count Democrats down, you know, when it comes to actual politics for the reasons that you just ended up talking about. Once again, Arabella is out now in paperback and you've added some additional information. Could you give us an example of what changed since you first published the book here, Scott? Sure. Well, first of all, there's updated numbers and those numbers generally just go up for

Arabella, you know, money in, money out and the rest. And then the...but the other thing is that they paid to have a business school do a case study on the for-profit company. And it's incredibly revealing. They admit that when they started out, the lines between politics and charitable institutions, because that's theoretically what they are, were pretty stark. But you know, those are really fuzzy now. Of course, it's yeah, it's fuzzy because of them. And supremely, I've been saying that they are that you know they stand for government of the billionaires,

by the billionaires, for the billionaires. And what we discovered and documented in there is that Arabella was literally bought out by a billionaire family. Nobody really, you know, that was exceedingly little known. But they now are literally owned by a billionaire family. Nobody really, you know, that was exceedingly little known, but they now are literally owned by a billionaire family. Oh, okay. So, and we have billionaires that are helping push leftist politics through. Lots of groups that sound really grassrootsy, right? Isn't that the whole idea? It's that grassrootsy feel from the the NGO in your local neighborhood, in your local neighborhood and your state legislature.

Keep Iowa healthy, says a person in DC who probably has never met an Iowan. I'm just kind of curious, does Arabella do a lot of funding of NGOs for homelessness response kind of deals because that's what has been taking over and decimating, or really causing problems in a lot of West Coast cities and in Oregon cities. And I can't help but figure there'd have to be a lot of homelessness money coming out of these kind of groups.

Arabella's groups play in virtually every issue area and there are definitely some with homeless. And by the way, go to capitalresearch.org in a week or two because we're going to have a nice big report about the homeless industrial complex as Chris Rufo rightly puts it. I'm looking forward to that. Now see that's the other thing I wanted to mention about this because with Capital Research Center it is a think tank but it is a research think tank and that's a big distinction out there. Isn't that the case? Yeah, we like to call ourselves the investigative think tank because we do investigations on exactly like where is the homeless money coming from? Where is it going?

I wanted to talk about one of the articles that one of your people at CRC ended up doing and it was Michael Watson's piece and I thought it was a fascinating take here, on the summer job. Now I know you didn't write that, but I imagine you could comment, you know, incredibly on this one. Whatever happened to the summer job, and what do you over at Capital Research think ended up killing it, according to this research report? Well, of course, it's one of the worst cabals there is and that is big government and big labor.

It is the labor unions that do things like cause out on your coast there. California's $20 minimum wage. Well the average 16 year old can't produce $20 an hour worth of value. They're not going to be hired at McDonald's if McDonald's is going to have to pay them $20. That's just a brute fact. And there's a big problem of the unions fighting for both higher wages and also fighting for immigration because they think they're going to get the immigrants to start being full-time workers and paying union dues. Is there

any evidence that illegal or legal immigrants end up joining the unions in greater numbers than perhaps non-immigrant people? I don't know if there's something comparing the two, but it is absolutely the case, as Watson quotes in the article, you mentioned, it is crystal clear that you have unions fighting, and they have been for years, fighting for more illegal immigration. And again, that too is going to rob the average ordinary American teenager of his summer job. All right.

Now Scott, I can understand why unions would like very, very high minimum wages, because if minimum wage, if the minimum wage is $20 an hour, then your union negotiated wage would naturally have to be considerably higher. Is this kind of the whole idea of wage creep? Is that the way the union tends to look at this? They do that, but there's also an even more perverse thing, which is unions will go, like this happened in Seattle, for instance, unions will go to a city council and say, you need to jack up the minimum wage. Oh, but of course you should have exceptions if a company gets unionized. So what they're really doing is they're going to the company and saying, you can pay less than the super high wage if you

force your workers into our union. Okay. All right. So they do both. They do both things. I mean, it's total perversity. The thing to understand is unions are run not for the benefit of the union members and workers. They're run for the benefit of the union bosses. Whatever it takes to get more cash into a union boss's hand, that's what they're in favor of. What do you think happens with a culture in which kids are no longer working or no longer able to work? Because you know, you're right, if you end up having a super high minimum wage, it is very difficult for someone who has minimal skills and minimal experience

to be able to make it worth hiring you. and that was the whole purpose of the minimum wage but minimum wage now seems like they're trying to get it closer to what would be termed a adult living wage I guess maybe that's what they're trying to do well that's well they love to use the term living wage even though traditionally the vast majority of people at minimum wage are not remotely some father with a wife and two kids, but rather they are kids or single folk in the rest. So that's the kind of language they use, but it's going to be terrible for the country because of course you need to start learning work habits.

You need to start learning how the world actually works as opposed to the way you work in your bedroom with mommy and daddy taking care of you in all ways and you spending all your time on the phone. Summer jobs are very valuable for kids growing up and I'm sure tons of your listeners could talk for hours about the difference it made to them. Yeah, absolutely. It just, well, it's how I ended up developing such a good work ethic early on, and it was no big deal. It's just considered just kind of my basic nature these days, and I kind of sadden for a younger generation doesn't get a chance to see that. Scott Walter, once again, is the president of the Capitol

Research Center. It is the investigative think tank, and he's also author of Arabella. It's out in paperback now. Arabella, the dark money network of leftist billionaires secretly transforming America. It has been updated and we'll have to get a copy of that and see what the update is. And you were mentioning over a Capital Research Center there within what a couple of weeks you're going to have a big homelessness expose, right? And do you know exactly when that's coming up or we just kind of kind of a moving target? We don't have a certain publication date but here's the thing if you go to capitalresearch.org you can sign up for our every other week e-newsletter which does which is not a money-begging letter it's a here's

the greatest hits of our research the last two weeks. So if you sign up for the newsletter, you will definitely get alerted as soon as the report comes out. Yeah, and I'm already on that list, so I'll get that. So I'll get notified when it does come out then. All right, very good. Scott, great talk. I mean, thanks for being flexible. We got to you a little bit late this morning. It's a typical Monday. I haven't had enough coffee. I'm late on everything, but I appreciate you being here. Okay. Thanks so much. Thank you. Scott Walter once again, president of Capital Research. Capital Research Center, capitalresearch.org.

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This is The Bill Meyers Show on 1063 KMED. Call Bill now, 541-770-5633. That's 770-KMED. Minor Dave was telling me off the air a few minutes ago that the Trump administration has responded to him for his request for a pardon and that it might be moving forward. I thought this was actually great news. Remember, Minor Dave ended up getting, what was it? 30 days, I think it was 30 days in solitary where he was confined because he was living on his mining claim back then. Got into a big trouble sideways with the, sideways with, you know, the feds.

And I guess he has to pay them. He's had to pay them every month and he's of modest means, if you know, he's called the show talking about that. And I haven't seen it yet, but I think that's interesting. He said he was going to forward it to me. So I'm looking forward, I'll share it with you as soon as I get the response from the White House, the people involved in pardons. That would be nice because they pardon him, then they stop dinging him the hundred bucks a month or whatever it is going into the federal maw. So we'll have that coming up. All right. Okay. Commissioner Roberts is standing by. I'll go get her, bring her in just a moment. We'll talk about some other issues of local

concern. Let me grab a phone call or two here first. Hello, I think this is Tom, isn't it? Very good, Bill. Just calling for some kind of a reality check or discussion. You know, a real shift here in perspective or what you've been talking about, but you know, Martin Armstrong is saying that World War III nuclear war is on the horizon. It's at our doorstep. And also last Thursday on the 31st, Jim Quinn published his fourth turning and said... Yeah, I know. He's been very big, didn't he? I think he put a big turning, what was it, out on the burning platform. He put that out the other day? Yes, he did.

So I'm just trying to... it looks like all the big shots, all the politicians, way high up in all these countries, Europe and certainly Trump and so forth, are all pushing for war, war, war. And Trump's sending two nuclear submarines to Russia. He's like, he's poking the bear. And I just try to, you know, we have a normalcy bias and think, well, you know, the average person, I mean, in none of these countries, even Iran, they don't want war. I don't want war with the Russians. They don't want war with us. But all the big shots at the top push, push, push for all this craziness. I think a lot of this is about wanting to the desire, and I know this sounds very conspiratorial

for early Monday morning, but it's about resetting the financial order. What do you think? Well, that's the possibility. You know, I've always kind of wondered, not as much with Trump, but maybe. It's that they want to have World War III and before the first missiles ever fired, it's already prearranged that the United States would lose and be pretty heavily traumatized and so forth. And then, as you say, the New World Order walks in with its salvation, with the computerized money and so forth. And essentially the Antichrist society, right?

Yeah, exactly. I'm trying not to go there right now. I'm gonna kind of go more with Joel Skousen who has been pretty cool head about such things. He says that kind of war is not on the table right now, not quite yet, but it could be. It's really about Russia. He still claims it's about Russia and China getting stronger and strong enough to

do this because they wouldn't have the ability to occupy at this point. Certainly take, you know, to actually occupy a huge Navy fleet, you know, to take thousands of people from China to the west coast here and so forth. So I'm sorry to tell you, you know, if you have a visa bill, keep playing the visa bill for right now. Don't think that nuclear war is going to get you out of the payment, okay? Okay, Bill. All right. Well, I'm glad for your hit.

Just having fun. Yeah. Hey, you got to have fun in the face of all the absurdity that we faced this morning, but I always appreciate the call. And I appreciate your sense of humor about it all. Yeah, you've got to. Yeah, don't sweat this one, all right? Not right now. Sweat it, but don't sweat it too much. All right, let me grab another call here before we break, and Commissioner Roberts will join

me. We're going to talk about opening up some of the roads out in the public lands. Hi, good morning. Who's this? Welcome. Yeah, Ron Grants-Pass. I've got a comment and a suggestion regarding AI where you treat AI as a hammer that we're just not used for anything other than what your hand puts on it. And that hammer then can be a dedication to a single computer and that the AI be stored

on a removable disk like an SD chip or a thumb driver, so that it never connects to any other computer and it's held in-house. Hmm. Well, they might be able to do that at some point. I don't know what the capability of that, if that's a realistic capability or not, because that is normally such a, there's such a huge database that it's an entity talking to all the time i don't know i'd have to talk to some other people about that ron it'd be nice if we could in other words just unplug it when we wish to all right appreciate the call 738 since 1979 dusty's transmissions has been your go-to transmission experts proudly serving our region for over 40 years this family-owned award-winning business has grown to become the largest specialized transmission and gear train shop from Portland to Sacramento. With 10 lifts at a custom remanufacturing facility, they're equipped to get you back on the

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Plus, I'll lower your internet and cell phone bills. And those offers in the mail from Dish, you can go through No Wires Now for those. Call me at 541-680-5875. Call Cherise like I did or visit their showroom off Biddle Road in Metford. NoWiresNow.com. Restrictions apply. Call for details. Internet and cell phone service not provided by Dish. News brought to you by Millette Construction, specializing in foundation repair and replacement. Get on solid ground. Visit MilletteConstruction.com. From the KMED News Center, here's what's going on.

Big cuts are coming for Southern Oregon University. President Rick Bailey announced cuts Friday responding to a structural deficit. The draft plan would cut $10.5 million over the next three and a half years, reduce staff by 64 positions, and also cut the university's 38 academic majors to 23, and axed the athletic department by more than a million dollars. Departments with the biggest cuts at over a million dollars each include the College of Arts and Humanities and the College of Natural and Social Science. Two men were killed in a late-night crash in Prospect. Jackson County investigators believe Arthur Roden and Gary Tate were outside of their disabled vehicle in the

eastbound lane of Mill Creek Road with its lights off when it was struck by an SUV driven by an 18 year old. Both men died. The teen driver cooperated with deputies. No charges have been filed. Lightning moved through Central Oregon over the weekend touching off 18 wildfires. 11 were contained at less than an acre in size. The Stevens Fire outside of Sisters was fully contained Sunday at 8 acres. Bill Lunden, KMED.

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and text for just 20 bucks a month, but what I really appreciate is PureTalk's commitment to our military and to our skilled workforce. That matters to me. Say 50% off your first month when you dial pound 250 and say keyword micro Pure Talk, a wireless company that actually stands for something. Hi, this is Lisa, the Hughes Lumber Girl, and I'm on 106.7 KMED. Jackson County Commissioner Colleen Roberts joins me in studio. Commissioner, it is great to have you here. We wanted to go over some things of county concern. How you doing?

Great, thank you. I'm well, thank you. All right. Thanks for asking me in. Yeah, wanted to talk about some things involving our outdoor trails and roads and such. And I know that the Motorcycle Association ended up approaching the board not too long ago with some concerns of what was going on in the public lands. I was wondering if you can kind of bring us up to speed, no pun intended, with what was going on there.

Well, they did bring some issues. People with the boots on the ground, I appreciate them so much because they bring us information we wouldn't know otherwise. The Motorcycle Riders Association has trails that are still closed from 2016, nine years ago when they did the big transportation management plan and that's when I first came on the board and I know the Forest Service supervisor came to our meeting and I said, why are you, you were closing 168 miles of something like that of roads in the monument. I go, you know, why?

And he goes, because I can. And that's kind of the approach. Literally what was said. That they took. And it's not that way. I don't feel anymore. But there's still some roads that and trails that this group brought to our attention from that, that hasn't been reopened. And so we reached out to the Forest Service, the local supervisor and the regional forester

to see if these would be addressed. And I have heard back from the regional supervisor and both foresters are very responsive to communicate, to get us information and answer address issues. All right. Now, I should know this, but who is the forester now? Because I know that I used to talk with Merv George. Merv George was promoted and is up higher in the hierarchy now. Well, it is Molly Jeulere. Molly. Yeah. And in fact, she was in here with me getting introduced. Yeah. By my last trip in, I was here.

And before fire season. I had to meet someone two, three times, I think, before I really start grasping it and getting it plugged in there. So I'm glad to know that Molly's being very responsive to this. So is Molly the one that's actually in charge of whether a road is open or not in the in the monument or anywhere else.

I'm not sure if it's a combination of her or a regional forest forester who is Jackie Buchanan at the state level. But both of them have well Jackie's one who got back with me. So she's on it. They're going to put to get together locally with our local forester and then they would meet with our board. So our board is very on board with, we're all together in knowing we want roads and trails open. I know, this has been a big- It's not controversial here on our board. Yeah, this has been a big pebble

in the motorcycle rider's boot, I think. No doubt from what I've heard. I don't have a motorcycle, so I guess I haven't paid as much attention to this. But I am intrigued because if they're going to shut it down for motorcyclists, I could see them shutting it down for people wanting to camp or people wanting to hike. Because I don't know, maybe they're less likely to do it for a non-motorized use. What do you think? Well, I think these have been shut down for a while,

you know, with plans maybe to rebuild them. I don't know all the issues on them, but for nine years, apparently, and this is now coming to our attention, that why are they still shut down? And that's what they'll get back with us and how we can get those back open. Were they shut down basically because of existing damage or fear of damage? Do you know at this point? I don't. The motorcycle association said, so there was five they brought to our attention.

They required some maintenance, simply requires a state easement on one of them and needs maintenance and was closed in error according to them. So it seems like a pretty easy fix if the Forest Service can address our concerns. Well, that's good. We hope they do and they'll get back with us right away. I'd say they were back in touch with, I got an email and that they would be getting investigated into this issue and would meet with our board, which I really appreciate.

All right. I know that there has been a real push within, I don't know, for lack of a better term, true believers within the public lands world that they really have not wanted a lot of motorized activity of any sort on these lands. There's a lot of restrictions in place right now because of fire season, that is for sure, and for good reason. And speaking of that, I applaud our firefighters. Hasn't our fire season been great in Jackson County? Not so much in other places. They do an amazing job for us. Of course, we have full suppression in Jackson County. Initial attack. You know, you have an initial lightning strike, which... We had tons of them. I know.

And according to the way that Jackson County has coordinated with these public land managers, the job is that you put it out. It's not one of these things where in many other counties in the United States or in Oregon, of course, too, it's, well, you know, we have a burn plan on this land and then we're just going to allow it to be a big collaborative thing and burn 50,000 acres within this box. Big box. And that's the way it is done. Well, look, Arizona, I believe I understand their big fire that has taken out the Grand

Canyon was a lightning strike. Yeah, the lodge, their big fire that has taken out the Grand Canyon was a lightning strike. Yeah, the lodge, right? Yes. The lodge ended up getting burnt down. And I was talking on the air about that when I saw this. You know that if you dig into this, you're going to find that it's the 1995 wildfire management plan that came out, which contains that part part of it which we've turned let it burn which is letting all of these fires any kind of fire burn for land

management purposes in other words it's like it's like you got your instead of having a Loma Kasi going out in and doing a prescribed burn something we're just gonna have a 50,000 acre prescribed burn and just try to put that out right yeah well and you can't. No. And unfortunately, you then have to breathe the results of it, you know, in your air. So that's something I think that the board did great by doing that resolution. Well, and this year, I've been focused on trying to get that coordinated effort locally with our fire districts and their fire districts have a board to get mirrored policy around

fire season as ours is. Has there been a good possibility that other counties in Oregon are going to go along with what Jackson County did? I know that the Association of Oregon Counties is something you've been struggling to get some traction with the other counties to do this because most of the fire smoke that we end up getting here is not from our local fires. I wish it was so. It is, I bring, we have our QR code now where everything is pretty easy for people to get. Josephine County

adopted at the same time we did, but adopting it and doing it are two different things. How so? Well, like anybody could adopt this plan, but we meet with our Forest Service and BLM, Oregon Department of Forestry, now Oregon State Fire Marshal, before fire season every year just to renew what they need for resources, support what they're doing, reiterate our policy and kind of get, yep, that's what we'll do. And then we get an after-action report after fire season. I don't know of any

other county that does that, but I feel it has aided in the success. Because our policy is a policy, it's not law. And because we've had great coordinated efforts with the whole fire fighting coordinated system, it has been successful, but we talk it every year. Why is there such resistance from the other counties in Oregon for going the way that Jackson and now Josephine County have done? I don't know if it's resistance.

I don't know if they just don't see the value or till they've had the horrible, we have a horrible problem. We're in a valley with the smoke and but even Klamath County, they've had some really big fires and, and sometimes they'll be close to our county line. I would call Merv George, I'd say, would you get your fire out? And he said, that's not my fire. So joke about that. Outside of the boundary, right?

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I I'm not sure why I'm so passionate about it for our county yet. And I just haven't gotten that contagious compassion out to the other counties in Oregon because definitely Siskiyou County is a horrible problem. And even one of the commissioners from, and I'm not sure what county he's in, but had the big fire in Lake Tahoe the

Caldor fire and he he loves the plan every when I first presented it to the National Association of Counties and He took a copy and I said we'll start by meeting with your Forest Service supervisor. He said I they're clear in San Francisco I said it doesn't matter they you need to bring him for your board But you know, it's kind of that attitude, well, that they don't really talk with us. Well, they should be talking with us. Well, you have to force the issue. You do. You have to force the issue. And I don't know if there's a passion for that.

And I tell them, we have a success story to tell here in our county. Yeah, it's working here. It is. And so I do tell the success, the story of success. But anyway, I just keep, keep on preaching it. Chugging away at it. Okay. Well, keep preaching it, Commissioner Roberts.

I guess the point being, it's not that we can't have a fire escape here because, you know, things could be bad enough that that it can get away from you but you're automatic the way the fire agencies in the public lands are now primed to operate here in Jackson County is that especially you know when you have all those lightning strikes coming out and you know there's going to be fires out of that the whole job is that first and foremost you put them out, you don't start drawing you know boxes around it which we know fire bosses have been doing for decades here. I understand why they'd like to do that, I really do, but the point is that you can't possibly burn enough of these areas around us without completely

choking us out and killing us with smoke, just to be able to manage your land. We're going to need to manage the landscape better, but it can't be by just letting it burn all summer. We just can't do that. Well, the cost is one thing, but the devastation to a rural living, people live out in the woods, the fire in New Mexico that took out a huge amount of homes, hundreds of homes that was hundreds of thousands of acres.

And it was even the Forest Service chief at that time Moore stopped prescribed fire. It was a prescribed fire plan and he put a stop to that program till he could get a handle on it. It was such a big deal. Yeah. Commissioner Colleen Roberts with me. I want to shift gears with you a little bit on this. I don't know if you can comment on this or not. The wildfire map program, of course, finally got, was held hostage in the state legislature and ended up getting repealed. Are you hearing anything from county constituents about, hey, this is a good thing that ended up happening or else

This is a good thing, but it hasn't really changed the challenges for rural residents. You have anything I'm just wondering what are you hearing? I'm asking for your opinion. What are you hearing? What's the board hearing on the ground? I don't know that we've heard anything since then. I think everybody was relieved. They got repealed That's what we wanted and I think everybody was relieved. They got repealed. That's what we wanted. And I think it shows how important all our voices together are and what difference it can make. Can we go to sleep on it? No. I felt there was other things in Senate Bill 762 that needed to be repealed with the mapping and involving LCDC that didn't get repealed.

And I put those, that was my push in my testimony that I would recommend repealing that, but they've still got some hands on some important things when it comes to rebuilding and living. In my opinion, there is attack on people living out in counties, out in the rural areas of counties and they want us in the city. Our own state wants it. This is the whole sustainable development plan. It is in every way. In fact, some new information has come to me that some non- NGO's you're talking about this

morning, collaboratives about water conservationists have been getting together with some good plans for our water. And there's a meeting in September of I'm gathering up people that for information and support and to get to that meeting to say, one, it's this typical consensus-based process with the predetermined outcome and it's against our...and when it comes to our water, that's important stuff. This is the same playbook every time. The predetermined outcome meeting, we gather everybody together and we're going to break up into little conversation groups and you're only invited to the meeting if you agree to

the predetermined outcome that we're going to plant down. Well, I let them know it wasn't a decent process. Oregon Water Resources Department person talked to me about this meeting and they said, you know, that just ticks me off when all these meetings are going on with people with an agenda and the actual stakeholder isn't even at the table. And we are left as, you know, elected representatives going, when did this, you know, there's no transparency and, and it's like the wildfire mapping. All of a sudden, we have this huge decided thing that is a monster against living in rural Jackson County,

or any rural county. What do you think about the insurance issue involved with owning homes in rural county? Do you think at some point the state and maybe your county, I don't even know if the county has any kind of ability to step in on these kind of things when it comes to the writing of insurance. Yeah, no we don't. We did invite all the state people involved in the while in Senate Bill 762 to our meeting years ago and the state insurance person was there and they were going to make sure that insurance

companies can use this. But everybody had their stories about what happened. Now, I know my mom still lives out and her insurance didn't go up. So I can use that as an example. And I don't know why people's insurance, I mean, I can't speak to that. Why anybody's went up or down. Yeah, of course. Nobody's is going down.

Well, one of my sponsors is Steve over at Skypark. I talk about him all the time. He was saying that it would look like this year that the business was starting to break open a little bit and kind of relax a bit. Not perfect, but loosen up a bit because, you know, for a while there, it was getting like difficult to write insurance here. I know. And between that and between LCDC and other land use policies and programs, what a great

way to end up going down the sustainable development and we'll all live and we'll all end up Commissioner Roberts in the downtown Medford climate friendly, equitable community, stack and pack habit trails, ideally, and then we'll save the planet. That's true. I'm being a little sarcastic. I'm sorry. I don't think they want me in a climate friendly equitable community. No, they wouldn't like that. They wouldn't like that at all. Hey, is there anything else that the board has come out that we should know about or pretty much routine? I know summertime. A lot of issues I think watching all the secretive little collaborative things going on is a big issue. Fighting our fires, they've done a great job. Still, we're still in heavy

fire season and of great concerns just August, but it's pretty dry out there. Yeah, a lot can happen between now and when the rains come. Knock on wood, right? All right. But yeah, and then I just think there just we as far as my work, of course, is always in natural resources. And I just look at there just needs to be such a push to support greater timber harvesting on our lands.

We are kind of in the ripe area of seeing all the mismanagement come to fruition, the bug infestations and dense forests that we need a new resource management plan and I'm not sure what the Bureau of Land Management, if that's the direction they're headed, we're kind of have no not really great communication on this. Has there been anything coming from the White House? I mean we can read presidential executive orders but what really matters I think ultimately is how on this. Has there been anything coming from the White House? I mean we can read presidential executive orders, but what really matters I think ultimately is how it ends up being implemented by the Public Land Manager's BLM and US Forest Service. Has there been any guidance whatsoever

about what this would look like? I can't tell. And I'm not sure how a presidential executive order, how it looks over writing a resource management plan. And I don't think the Bureau of Land Management has even, you know, we keep saying, so what's going to happen? And they just go like, we don't know. And I don't know. But I mean, I see the value of what President Trump's trying to do, because the problem

is our overstocked mismanaged forests and that needs to be corrected. Is it a bigger problem on BLM than Forest Service land? Do we know? I think all of our federal lands are not the best shape and Forest Service is taking a huge cut in, I've heard, in personnel and that getting the work done on the ground will be a little bit more difficult, but they hopefully are, you know, cutting the waste and sharpening their pencil and, and getting things to happen anyway.

Yeah, the reason I brought it up is that it seems like if there's any complaint that that listeners will write in and call about it always seems to be about BLM almost more than than the Forest Service. Well, most of our land is ONC, federal lands in Jackson County. I will tell you, if I could read the statistics, we have a consultant with our ONC group and he's a former BLM person. He knows his stuff and this is what he said, well, of course, we know ONC land grows 1.2 billion bt annually on the forest. Every year there's more timber.

And that's all ONC counties, not just our county. Now the Resource Management Plan, which BLM goes by, allows an annual sustainable, not sustained yield, but an annual sustainable harvest of 205 million bt. And that's only 17% of the capacity of capabilities. That's about one. Yeah, we'll just say one out of five. So we have five trees grow, growing each year, and then we're allowed to cut one. And five trees grow the next year, we're allowed to cut one.

So it's getting ahead of us. Yeah. Yeah. So this is how we end up getting our very thick, well, what we call the toothpick tree forest, right? That kind of thing. Yep. Now I know that George Sexton, who I handled a few weeks ago, you know, might disagree. Probably. And these aren't my statistics. So, but they are actual. The harvest land

based with the resource management plan allocated only 20% of ONC sustained yield management on that in that resource management plan. And that is why I know our ONC Association and I support we need to get a new resource management plan. It's not going to do the job. It says in actuality due to alivoidance, it's more like 10% of actual growth we are cut, have capability of offering for sale. So the fiber and the timber continues to just grow and grow and grow and we just let it

grow and grow and grow until it gets struck by lightning. Or bug infested. And then burns and burns and burns. Yeah, and bug infested and dead. And so he said over the last five years BLM has shortfall of over 140 million board feet in offerings as compared to the available sale quantity. And he said he said and you in Jackson County we live in the forest health and fire risk capital of this lousy management and it's in the plan and we're now meeting the current plan. And now our president is saying he wants this

and it kind of falls on, in my opinion, on confused ears or deaf ears, like what? What did he say? Okay, well maybe confused and deaf ears. Maybe so, because until our forests do, our 30 year old 1995 wildland fire policy, I mean, it may have been good intention and well used 30 years ago, but since then, we've had all of this overlay of protected species and lawsuits to prevent actual management on the ground.

And it's, and we're living in the fall of that. We've reached that real critical point. That all right. Keep us in the room or keep us in the forest where as you get some more information, if you end up getting, all right, if you can do that. I love that. All right, thank you very much.

Thanks a lot. Jackson County Commissioner, Colleen Roberts. It is four minutes after eight. This is KMED and KMED HD1, Eagle Point, Medford, KBXG, Grants Pass. Good to have you here on the Bill Meyers Show.