 What I experienced in Mexico was community and almost every town or village that we went to and what I found here in most cases in the States was that folks were really hiding or separating around, not actively involved in community and so that was something that I really wanted and then we actually started building community here in the Applegate around a lot of these issues and the more that that happened then the less I was attracted to going to someplace else. So how did you do that? How did you build community? Well I don't know if I knew how to do it. I think we backed into it more than anything else. I think that a lot of the, I was on the board of headwaters at the time in Grants Pass and part of what bothered me with being with headwaters is that we were very effective in stopping egregious timber sales and things like that mostly through litigation but it was like, you know, we were winning the battle and losing the war because it was constantly, it was just continuous so it was, if it was one timber sale it was another and another and another and at some point in time the light came on and said we've got to figure out a different way to do business, we've got to do it some other way and I ended up writing an op-ed piece that I think it was in the Medford Mail Tribune or the Grants Pass Courier, I don't remember which and it went out on the AP and it would end up in the Bend Bulletin and a guy by the name of Jim Neal who was a logger for Chrome Incorporation read the article and called me up and said it's the first time he ever read an article by an environmentalist that he agreed with and he called me and said let's get together, he says I come to, he works for Chrome which is located here in White City so he comes down quite often and he says next time I come we'll have breakfast together and talk and we did and we started a conversation and found that we had a lot of issues in common and so we continued talking about this and we said you know we need to pick a place where we can demonstrate how to do this stuff and we looked at a map of the Rogue Basin and we said that's way too too big and way too politically fragmented you know with multiple counties and multiple cities and the more we looked around we ended up seeing that here's the Applegate that have no, it's all unincorporated rural community so there's no cities out here the only governmental overlay that's here is the county government which is little or nothing is done out here by the county other than road maintenance and you know sheriff's department issues and a couple of irrigation districts and a couple of fire districts and so so politically it was much less fragmented than a lot of the other communities and so that's where we decided to see if we could develop this and we didn't know what it was but we just wanted to develop a different way of doing business and you know this this whole business of appeal and the litigation was not very fulfilling nor did it really stop the problem it just it was a temporary thumb in the dyke sort of situation and I think in nineteen I don't remember what year we 97 92 that's right 1992 Jim and I started that was when I'm Jim and I had started talking and in the latter part of 92 we I had taken him I was taking him to environment to the environmental group meetings and he was taking me to the timber industry folks and we were in and there was a total lack of trust from either group toward the other and at some point in time we said let's we kind of brought this idea of what it is that we wanted to do and we said we need to go test it out someplace that's far enough away from home so people here can't hear about it and so we ended up we got it we made a presentation to the Audubon Society and at Olympia Washington we thought that was far enough away from home that whatever we talked about wouldn't filter back down and when Jim and I went to the Audubon we drew straws to see who was going to talk first and and Jim ended up going first and he started in on what we were talking about we were we had agreed upon on what we were going to talk about and he started in and in a little bit this this elderly gentleman interrupted him and he says Mr. Neil thank you very much he says but we really want to hear from what the environmentalist has to say and so I got up and said exactly the same thing that was he was saying but what and what we realized at that point in time is they could not hear that message from him it was just it was the wrong messenger and and what we realized and that was a real wake-up call for I think for us is that if we in fact are going to make a change we need to send the right messenger and in many cases folks who have been involved in litigation are doing something else is probably not the right messenger to send to somebody who who doesn't agree with you and it was some months it was interesting is that as we move forward we started talking to more and more people and and we ended up having a meeting out here on the on the deck and the latter part of 92 when a group of us got together and we actually created a board for the Applegate Partnership at that time and I think it was a nine-member board as I remember were you on that nope okay and we we we tried to have representation from the environmental interest and the farming the farming community Connie Young was on from the Farm Bureau and Dwayne Cross was on from the Croman Corporation and we had Sue Raleigh who was the district ranger at the Applegate and what's his name who was the BLM guy no no even before that anyway we had a representative from the BLM on the board and we started conversations and we didn't really know what it was we were going to do other than what we really wanted to do was business differently than what we've been doing before and we we agreed to do full consensus we didn't know that that was really hard and we met weekly for the first first year sometimes it was out here sometime it was in BLM in Medford and at some point in time an attorney from the from the Attorney General's office in Portland came down and informed us that we were in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act that we were unduly influencing the federal government in our wildest dreams I wish we could or had and and and what they indicated is both the Forest Service representative and the BLM representative who were on our board could not be on our board because they were in decision-making positions with the agencies that were doing the decisions and so they were asked to leave our board and then we asked them to come back on our board on to come to our meetings as advisory committee members and and they their job was to come and listen to the conversations and if there was anything that they could do to embellish the conversations then they were asked to do so but then they were not in that in this kind of relationship where we may be perceived as in you know unduly influencing them and and and you have to understand that that Chris Bratt who was on also on headwaters and on the board at the time and Dwayne Cross who was from Croman Corporation just the month before had been in district court in Eugene and being sued by at Croman was being sued by by headwaters so the very guy who was literally in the process of suing Dwayne they were on the board together and that was really an interesting process and so as we continued on we actually ended up getting we had a number of folks that that stepped up and volunteered to facilitate our meetings because we it was we were talking about very contentious issues we had people who have basically been suing one another we had folks who didn't trust one another one of the things that that our group concluded was is that we didn't trust the politicians nor did we trust the media and so we made basically vowed not to speak to the media or the politicians about the process so we initially we avoided the county commissioners like the plague well and the and the state representatives and congressional representatives as well we just we figured let's just move forward on this and interestingly enough at the same time that this was going on the Quincy library group had started down in northern California down in Quincy, California and they they were had embarked on a similar path but they had decided to change the regulations in Washington DC which was a formidable task and so because they had chosen to do that they were very very high profile with the timber industry and and the environmental community which was really good for the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council well we hadn't become a Watershed Council yet because it focused all of the all of the focus was on the Quincy library group and nobody ever looked at the Applegate Partnership because we weren't out beating the drums doing something scary like making legislation back in Washington DC at least you didn't have any members of the agencies on their board either they weren't no they weren't inclusive in the same way that you know no the agency and okay no but one other thing I want to interject there is that people did here and they did visit the governor came down didn't he we had the governor we had a couple of congressmen we've had a yeah we've had flew in in the helicopter we've had secretary of interior secretary of ag we've had a couple of presidents come here so so there's been there's been a that was a little after the fact I mean this is much much later than early on and then the forest supervisor come early on and say who gave you the permission to do yeah yeah and and and our response was we didn't need anybody's permission to do this it was basically we were doing this and if they chose to listen that's fine and if they chose not to listen then that then they would suffer the consequences and whatever that might be so the story about the Applegate Partnership can go on forever I know so it's so I guess what is most important to know how it's affected your life or how or the Watershed Council or how it's affected other families what should we talk about well how did it create community well what was interesting is as we can we met regularly we had to use full consensus so so so really sticky wicked issues just weren't addressed early on I mean we really were working in the really soft stuff for a long time and what was interesting is after we had continued continued to meet regularly like this with somebody helping facilitate our meetings it got to the point where for example if Dwayne Cross didn't show up at a meeting for some reason Chris Bratt would say well you know we can't do anything or until somebody or you know somebody needs to represent the industry's position on this and so what we found is that folks who were on opposite sides of the fence or supporting the folks who were on the other side of that fence just because we have developed a relationship with all of those meetings you were speaking each other's lines I think is how you used to put pretty much pretty much and so so the tenors of the conversation started to change a lot and I think in 1994 1994 we had started a we had been working with the BLM with the first project was the bluefoot timber sale and it was that they had proposed a number of clear cuts and hum up in the home upper reaches of humbug Creek and we started negotiating with them and we we brought a couple of forestry professors down from OSU and we actually submitted a proposal back to the agency that instead of doing a clear cut how about they do a thinning and they do it across a broader landscape and they can get the same volume of timber but just doing it in a different sort of way and the agency agreed to do it and it was interesting that when we finally went public with this thing and we I think the BLM had contacted the media and said that you know they had been working with a group out in the Applegate and they had we had come to agreement and so they had we had a press conference up at up on humbug Creek and the TV stations showed up and I don't remember who all the media were and we we talked about how we had come to agreement on this thing and we were moving forward and the media said well what did you not agree upon and we said we're not going to talk about it and that was what the media wanted and then one of our members I think it was me ended up going and talking to the County commissioners in Jackson County or at least one of them and the first thing that he did is he went on on on the media and started tooting his horn about what this was all going on and how much the commissioners had to do with it and it was really it was it just confirmed for us you can't trust the assholes that's a that's a broad statement so you may want to cut it so we continued on they actually did the bluefoot timber sale we didn't know a lot about what it was we were doing then in terms of the technical pieces around you know force management but we had a general idea of where we wanted to go it was interesting also that during that time I was I was shuttling back and forth going to lots of different meetings and and I was actually asked by the headwaters board to leave their board and some of their funders had was putting pressure on them that that and at that time I was vice president of headwaters and that I was getting too close to the enemy and that I couldn't wear the environmentalist hat any longer and so I left I left headwaters and I lost a lot of respect for the environmental community when that occurred and tell about selling your Cessna you used that Cessna to fly around and do what I called shuttle diplomacy yeah I we had a plane that we kept in Ashland I think we'd headed out on ten years or so and so we we we used the plane a lot to go to to to other places and is a fairly quick transport system and not not to go back to Washington DC of course but but more more regionally and locally and so we were doing a lot of outreach to other other groups that were doing similar kinds of things or what we thought they were similar kinds of things and and I don't know specifically what it was well people made well first of all I think that the fact that there were so many groups shows that this was really quite a movement and we had a meeting in Oak Ridge in the in the school and that was partly organized and Riley's house caught on fire and burned down while we were at that meeting that's right and I remember somebody coming up to us and saying this is just like the 60s this is a movement that's a movement yeah and but some of the naysayers were criticizing you because they saw you as an a feat in and you got criticized by both sides the environment we did because you had you could afford a plane and that you weren't a real rancher and by the ranchers because and so you you kind of changed your public idea in my view you've changed your public identity and you sold your beloved Cessna that you and Susan would go camping in and and but not for that reason but and and you but you bought a herd of cattle and I know that it wasn't an exchange that you had this but you're probably sold the airplane and bought cows so there was a way of gaining legitimacy in your effort to create community so so what what we were experiencing is is that it was really difficult ground the timber industry was distrustful the environmental community was distrustful the agencies were distrustful you know the Attorney General's office didn't trust it I mean it was like there was there was a lack of trust across the board and it was interesting as Dwayne and I ended up going back to Washington DC well let me back up a little bit we at some point in time we decided that we were working with with five land management agencies three ranger districts and two resource area management units from BLM and what we were finding it was really difficult to you know we could go talk to the resource area manager of the Grants Pass resource area and then we can go talk to the Ashland resource area manager and then we had to go talk to the Applegate Ranger District and it was really difficult keeping continuity of communication going you know talking with them on one day if I was in one mood the conversation might have a different tone than when I talked to somebody the next day and I could have a totally different tone and a totally different meaning and what we realized is that if we were going to have continuity in this process we couldn't keep you know running to all these different places and we said we need that what we need is an adaptive management area coordinator a person who a single representative who represents BLM and the Forest Service and Sue Raleigh was the district ranger at that time we went and talked to Sue and we realized that whomever took that job was probably going to be a dead-end job for them in terms of career advancement so if it was somebody who was climbing higher up the ladder then it was not in their best interest to take this task on and so we talked to Sue Raleigh Sue's husband also worked for the Forest Service and we asked her if she would be willing to be the adaptive management area coordinator and she and her husband talked it over and she said yeah she would because they weren't they weren't desirous of moving away from here they live in Ashland and so I went to we met and Mark Hatfield's office who was the senator from Oregon and we had the regional forest supervisor and then the state director BLM and we we requested that those two agencies set up an adaptive management coordinator position and that it be funded 50% by BLM and 50% by the Forest Service and they did it and Sue Raleigh was appointed that and all of a sudden our job got much much easier and we we continued down that path for quite some time the adaptive management area has just been taken off the books of BLM it's no longer an entity in the latest resource management plan that BLM just completed here some months ago which gave us a gives us a high degree of angst there were 10 adaptive management areas ultimately set up in the in the Northwest Forest plan and it was interesting that the whole concept of the adaptive management area came from the Applegate we Jim Neal who worked for the helicopter loggers association his partner Steve his Steve's daughter was Jerry Franklin's secretary who and Jerry Franklin was a professor of forestry at University of Washington and he was the he was the the chair of the of the Northwest the committee that was working in the bank buildings in Portland on the Northwest the new Northwest Forest plan Jack Ward Thomas was but yeah Jack Ward Thomas and he was one of the group of seven or however many there were of those folks that were doing this this work and so we gave the concept idea to to Steve Steve gave it to his daughter his daughter gave it to Jerry Jerry take it to the bank building in in Portland and lo and behold in the process 10 management areas were adapted and adopted into the Northwest Forest plan of which the Applegate was one it was interesting to note that the Applegate was the only watershed that was an intact watershed it was the entire you know watershed where as every one of the other adaptive management areas where it was a mishmash of part of one watershed part of another but not an intact watershed I don't know if that's necessarily significant but I think I think it I think it is significant you were the only one with the history of collaboration also that's correct that's correct and collaboration was key to those ten areas and so Dwayne and I and Sue Raleigh made a number of trips back to Washington DC over over the timeframe that this was all occurring and it was interesting we it would take us anywhere from four to six weeks to get an appointment with our congressman or our senator back there and we hooked up with American Forest and we hooked up with the timber industry Association and once we hooked up with the timber industry Association they said well we'll set up your meetings for you you just let us know when you're coming and they could get a disappointment the next day and then I realized that the center of power and control had nothing to do with the voter in out here in the hinterland it had to do with the power and control back inside the beltway was really real interesting that was really a quite a revelation I think and the and the Sierra Club was liked it that way and they felt threatened by the movement that was going on out here I had a number of meetings I met with Mike McCloskey who was the president of the Sierra Club I met with the chair of the wilderness society and a number of other folks and the chair of the wilderness society was very supportive he was a rancher from Montana and he took it back to his he took we were we were seeking support from the National Environmental Interest and we he he he agreed I met with him in their building in there in Washington DC Greg Applet was the one that introduced us and kind of got me in the door and I had never been to one of these places I mean this thing was like a 12-story office building that was all wilderness society it was a big corporation and I just never had thought of him that way you know and so he was very supportive of this he took it back to his board it happened to be the time that Clinton and Gore were the president and vice president and Gore was the environmental vice president and he was going to fix all this stuff and the membership in the wilderness society had dropped by about 25% they were having an economic crisis and they ended up firing their director who came back with this idea from us and they they basically took a tack to continue the war because they needed to have the conflict made them money that was another revelation for me that I had you know I thought these environmental groups are all kind of touchy-feely and doing it for for the right reasons when in reality that was not the case what was interesting is that is it we we we actually had before the conversation before I even met Mike McCloskey we had the lead partnership group with Jonathan Cusill and there were a group of us that were meeting regularly down in northern California I first our first meeting I think was in Mount Shasta and then ultimately we met probably every six weeks and ultimately at the at Wheeler Breeder and Anderson California near Redding so there were a group of like 26 to 28 organizations that were meeting fairly regularly Vicki went down myself yeah Beverly Brown quite a number of us and so most of it yeah the Quincy Library group folks were coming up the Shasta Hema Bioregional group there were just a broad range of organizations and and we all basically were just sharing war stories with one another it was more of a support system and kind of seen what was going on and at some point in time we were approached by a foundation from San Francisco saying we've heard what you people are doing and we would like to come talk to you and they came I remember that they their representative came up from San Francisco to one of our meetings and at the end of their meeting they said if you guys can pull together the timber interest and the environmental interest will give you a grant for $100,000 that was unsolicited and we ultimately ended up doing a three two or three-day workshop I think you went to that in Blairsden California at the I don't remember the name of the school now anyway it's not important anyway we had it in Blairsden we invited the top 10 national environmental interest and the top 10 timber interest to come to this and most of the money that we got was used for paying their airfare from wherever it was they came the Audubon Society the Sierra Club the World Society the Timber Industry Association the American Pulp and Paper Association and all of these guys and it was interesting that Jim I can't remember the guy's last name it was with this the Timber Industry Association in Oregon said this was the scariest thing huh guy singer yeah he said this is the scariest thing he had ever participated in and they ended up saying that they would not participate in this gathering unless we guaranteed their safety by having state police there during the conference and we ended up calling the California Highway Patrol they ended up assigning a couple of officers to the meeting which was totally unfounded but it was they they had he had the image in his head that this was really scary and ultimately I think we ended up rooming environmentalists with timber people we didn't we didn't actually we had where they had the bunk up together and instead of putting two timber guys in one room we put a timber guy in an environmentalist just so they could start their conversation and and what it was was a coming together of community communities of interest versus communities of place and most of these smaller groups were basically communities of place whereas the timber industry association and the environmental interest were communities of interest that they had their own interest in mind we ended up developing a number of white papers that we in preparation for this conference we had the conference I don't remember the details of the conference it's probably videotaped someplace and somewhere Jonathan Cusill may have it I don't know and and we spent a number of days in the field all all of us talking together about what it is we wanted and Mike McCloskey went back to a board meeting of the Sierra Club in San Francisco and presented a paper talking about the new and rising dogma with these these grassroots groups out in the hinterland and Mike and I were good friends or became good friends but we were ideologically so we were never lobbied by any of the special interests to do one thing or another other than we were kind of we were condemned from perception though that we were going to co-opt and Mike and I had our last debate at the at the environmental law conference of the University of Oregon the year that he retired from the Sierra Club and we were still at opposite into the spectrum and all of our grants was it was the chair of the Sierra Club for the Rogue Valley and they the the Sierra Club put out a national red alert to all of their organizations all their members to avoid participating or being with the Quincy Library Group or the Applegate Partnership so whatever it was we were talking about scared scared them it was perceived that by the environmentalists that we would that we would cave and we would that we would be dupes of the timber industry who were their smart wily folks and which was really arrogant what was really I guess what really bothered me a lot is they they treated us if we just had fallen off the back of the turnip truck and that we were going to be turned you know it would be easily swayed which was absolutely it would have been impossible from the group that we had there the group that we had was so so focused that that was not going to happen Terry actually was quite involved indirectly with the partnership but it was it was interesting at some point in time Jackson County had had was running short on money and they decided to close Cantrell Buckley Park and I contacted the county and I said so what do we need to do and they said we don't have any money we're gonna close the gates and so Terry Black and myself and a couple of others said well what we'd like to do is we'll continue to water this was in this was in July this was first of July of whatever year that was I don't remember the year and we said we don't want the trees to die in the park and so I said will if you'll give us the key to the pump system will go down and turn it on so you don't have to pay anybody to do it all you gotta do is pay for the electricity to run the pumps and so we continue we did that through into the fall of that year and then in the meantime we drafted a a a letter of agreement or a paper that we submitted to Jackson County to take over the Cantrell Buckley Park to have the community take over the Cantrell Buckley Park it was not in the purview of the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council to have it and because our bylaws didn't include that kind of thing but we we were the vehicle to start that ball rolling and then we ultimately created a new 501c3 non-profit corporation that actually became the the holder of that agreement with the county and and and it was interesting the county was operating the park during the months of June July and August on the weekends only and they were still losing money and the community took over the park we got a number of grants we basically operate the park 365 days a year so it's open every day of the year and and we're putting money in the bank and so I doubt seriously that Jackson County they still own the park but the community runs the park we've got it we've got a board of directors that actually runs it makes the decisions on the park we actually hired the park staff there we got new new housing facility for the park we got newer new irrigation systems new new restrooms new road paving I mean just a lots of stuff so I think that's one example of how the ripple effect of what it was we were doing you know affected Jackson County now we went to Josephine County there's a little park down down in Josephine County on the Applegate River and we went to the Josephine County and said that we'd be interested in and taking over the operation of that park and it in fact at that time we had we had donors with $75,000 ready to buy and pay for a new restroom in that park and the county turned us down because they were a fear of loss of control so it's just a little interesting how all all of us have our own little Bailey wicks that we protect voraciously even if it's self-destructive the greater Applegate Community Development Corporation was the 501c3 nonprofit that we created to become the keeper of the keys for Cantrell Buckley Park and then subsequently had they have expanded out and have done a lot of other outreach in other areas and at some point in time during all that process Governor Kitzhaber at that time it was G-web governor's watershed enhancement board and Kitzhaber was the governor and they decided to do away with G-web or the governor's watershed enhancement board and and recreated as the new Oregon watershed enhancement board which it is today and the Applegate they asked the Applegate Partnership if we would be a watershed council we didn't know what watershed council was and so they had a representative come from Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to one of our meetings and they explained what it was that we did and and at that point in time we made a decision to become the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council so we were one of the one of the first five a lot of the work that we're doing is on on private lands in terms of restoration work we we have a number of projects that are going on most of it is aquatic and riparian enhancement work and the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council at some point in time Jan Pertue who was one of our original founded board members became our first director for the watershed council and and she was a geologist by education and by trade and has subsequently died of Alzheimer's very smart lady and and we have had a watershed count we've had a paid staff now ever since we started so we our operating budget can run anywhere from about five hundred thousand dollars a year up to about I think our largest operating year was about three and a half or four million dollars and most of that is it was done in in restoration work so we still meet with the federal agencies we we it's interesting that the adaptive management area has been dropped by BLM and the Forest Service still still has adaptive management area and there in the Northwest Forest Plan and so they're still working around that BLM says they will continue to work around the adaptive management area but it's just not on the books anymore and it's interesting that of the 10 adaptive management areas the Applegate is the only one that persisted over time the others died a natural I guess it was an unnatural death in that basically what it was it was a it was a mandate that was fasted on from on high on to the agencies BLM in the Forest Service so as an unfunded or underfunded mandate from on high that there was phenomenal resistance within the agency because it was just another damn job without any extra pay we can either sit back and expect somebody else to do it and rail about what they're doing if we don't like it or we can fix it and do it ourselves and we can empower ourselves to do that and I think any community can do that but they have that you have to have people who are willing to step up and put their their shoulder to the wheel and make it happen