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March 9 - With the dissemination of Shaun Robertson's letter from John Day on Tuesday, we were interested to see how Idaho Power planned to handle this explosive issue at the final community advisory process South Team meeting at Ontario's Four Rivers Cultural Center. It was toward the beginning of the meeting, and they took it very seriously, a wise move.
While a number of senior Idaho Power officials and contracted employees have been genuine and honest with us, and actually listen to us, which we appreciate, there is also a contingent of employees and contractors within the company who do consider small town folks to be ignorant and easily pushed around.
Unfortunately, comments of the type heard in John Day have been heard in rural areas elsewhere but until now have not been reported. For IPC to investigate thoroughly, with repercussions, gives us the confidence that we are being taken seriously as community members.
This dichotomy of attitudes towards ruralites has been apparent from the beginning and has resulted in inexplicable, self-sabotaging moves by Idaho Power over the last 17 months, putting a strain on community relations and causing unnecessary and costly setbacks for the company. We hope these well-educated urbanites now realize that bullying and condescending behavior does not engender high opinion from those of us scratching a living from the hinterlands and supplying you with steamed vegetables and sliced beef for your dinner.
If B2H is a much-watched test case for future transmission line sitings, it would behoove any contemplation of those dealing with the public to assume that there is still rock-ribbed American independence alive and well out there, and deserving of respect, if understandably suspicious of stated motive and mandate.
As far as the three routes ultimately refined and accepted as alternates worthy of going forward with the NEPA and Oregon EFSC processes, it was pointed out at Tuesday's meeting by Stop Idaho Power's Roger Findley that had Idaho Power been listening to us from the beginning, they could have taken retired BLM botanist Jean Findley's public lands routes seriously and saved themselves a lot of time and money. Because that is what eventually has been accepted as viable.
We still intend to support Baker's Oregon Trail Interpretive Center against any and all encroachments by unwanted transmission line sitings.
Another bit of advice: If the contractor Tetra Tech had done its homework, they wouldn't have fed flawed constraint information into their route computation software and come up with an outrageous utility corridor marching through 50 miles of the most productive farmland east of Oregon's Cascades, a stone's throw from uninhabited public desert lands. The sheer audacity of the original route compounded and hardened the opposition of hundreds of Malheur County citizens in a way that a much more careful route would have certainly avoided.
If that homework included informed input by local citizens across the entire study area, then it would have paid to start out with that sort of input process from the beginning.
