To the Editor:

For one county commissioner, cooperation, collaboration and coordination is the same thing. So for those who have a challenged vocabulary, here’s what the dictionary has to say.

Cooperate: to act jointly or concurrently to a common end.

Collaborate: to work with another person or group to achieve or do something; to give help to an enemy.

Coordinate: to put in the same order or rank.

Steve Beverlin, Malheur forest supervisor, told those at the Wednesday meeting that all three of the “C’s” were used in arriving at decisions involving forest issues.

Yes, one can cooperate with whatever may come out of collaboration, but the result is based on appeasing and placating the environmental community that has a strangle hold on our natural resources. Coordination is a law passed by Congress that the county has been loathe to invoke. If the court were to use coordination and had a natural resources plan to back them up, then all citizens of the county would become “stakeholders,” not just a few that collaborate to secure a piece of what we once had that made our county vibrant so many years ago.

The Grant County Public Forest Commission will be working on a natural resources plan for the county. With input from a public that desires to see genuine improvement on our forests, among many goals, achieve a healthy, fire-resistant landscape. Surely with the intelligence, education, hands-on life experiences, we citizens can create a reasonable natural resources plan suited to Grant County.

It is imperative we have a natural resources plan (not to be confused with a land-use plan already in effect). The county court must assert their authority in coordination so we can help ourselves now and provide a future generation a “future.”

Dave Traylor

John Day