Letters to the Editor for Feb. 12, 2010

Oregon makes it easier for Idaho Power

Idaho Power is going to route their proposed 500-kV transmission line wherever their finance analyst tells them. And that’s going to be on private property, with as little as possible running through Idaho and as much as possible running through Oregon.

If Idaho Power tried to route the transmission line through public lands, they’d face a series of environmental studies, court approvals, and endless appeals from various environmental protest groups.

Routing through private land is a much simpler and less expensive alternative. On private property they declare eminent domain, deal with the private landowners and it’s a done deal.

The route will most likely cover as little ground in Idaho as possible for several reasons. Idaho land-use laws allow ownership of much smaller parcels of land in farm-use areas than Oregon allows; if you’ve driven to Boise from the west you’ll see a gas station next to a beet farm next to a department store next to a medical clinic. It’s not like that in Oregon where land parcels in exclusive farm-use lands exceed over 100-acres per owner. For this reason, routing through Idaho would be complicated because it would involve many more private landowners than a route through Oregon.

Another reason for Idaho Power to route a short-line through Idaho, is because the counties in Eastern Idaho are protected by the use of a coordinated process with any land-use decisions in their counties. The use of a coordinated process by the counties of Eastern Idaho would present a huge complication in Idaho Power’s effort to route the transmission-line. This bit of information I learned from a congressional aide several months ago as I researched the Idaho Power 500-kV line.

Conversely, counties such as Baker, Union and Wallowa Counties are cooperator counties and inexplicably shun working in a coordinated process during land-use decisions in their counties. And rather, allow major local land-use decisions to be made with very little local input and control.

Brian Addison

Baker City

We’re not all equal in America

This is in response to the letter to the editor by Kyle Knight on Jan. 22.

I would like to know where you are getting your facts from. It would be nice for once that the wealthy not call all the shots and profit from the inequality that they bestow upon us, the working class. They (the upper-middle class) dictate what the working class will be paid for their labor. They will pay the working class the absolute minimum to ensure they gain the biggest profits. This is called the capitalist system. I guess in a better way of putting this, workers must submit to the rules established by the capitalists because, in the end, they have no other choice.

Without control of the means of production, they must sell their labor to the capitalist and must accept what the capitalist is willing to pay. Workers do not get the full value of what they produce through their labor; they get only what the capitalist is prepared to pay them, which is enough to keep them alive and to make certain they will return to work the next day. The remainder is taken by the capitalist themselves.

So how can people say that we need to continue to have the working class pay the majority of the taxes when they are not the ones making anything but enough to feed their families? The capitalist are the ones making the profits, so it should only be justifiable that they pay a bit more. We have the common misconception that we are all equal, when this is far from true. We live in an America full of inequality.

Garrette Smith

Baker City