Letter: Tester talk no big surprise

Dear Editor:

The talk of wilderness designation by small groups with Sen. Jon Tester comes as no surprise to me. As one of the first things he did when elected was to hire the head of an environmental organization to operate his main office in Missoula. This group has been involved in one lawsuit after another against the Rock Creek Mine over by Noxon. These narrow-minded agenda-driven people have cost the schools, county and state millions of dollars in revenue over the years.

But now they are using their big ace in the hole, Jon Tester, and wilderness designation to stop the multiple-use of all this land. The people who represent logging are being blind-sided if they think they have a done deal to log the few acres left out of the mix.

Wilderness groups will have everything they have wanted for years and loggers, miners and ATV groups will face one lawsuit after another by environmentalist organizations from all over the country – just as before.

I would like to add the Scotchman Peaks area should not be considered for wilderness because of its strong mineral potential. The U.S. Bureau of Mines did grid mapping and have taken hundreds of soil samples from their grid zones, and they have shown strong silver and copper anomalies similar to the area of the Troy Mine.

Well are they going to do this again … put world-class mineral deposits in wilderness, like the stupid elected officials did before?

I would like to ask how much more land are we going to give to the Washington D.C. bureaucrats to play with … land which comes with wilderness designation? It would be forever lost and along with it jobs for children of the future.

Harvey H. Fredericksen

Libby