Sen. Tester's Forest Jobs bill will not produce

Letter to the Editor,

I would like to comment on Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Bill. 

The naming of this bill is a farce. To start with, there is no guarantee this bill will create one job. But it does create more than 660,000 acres of permanent wilderness and roughly 300,000 acres of land split between snowmobile and ATV use.

The few thousand acres set aside for logging can be put in litigation just like it all is now, with more than 3.7 million acres of wilderness, which basically is no-use land. This state does not need any more, period. The almost 1 million acres of Glacier National Park is 95 percent managed as wilderness.

The roughly 30,000 acres of Roderick Park area proposed for wilderness should never happen. The area could have high mineral potential. The Yaak landscape is laden by the Precambrian belt super group of rock formations that is intruded by dikes and sills of intrusive rock which make the deposition of ore deposits highly possible.

The Roderick earth fault is also quite highly mineralized. The old Buckhorn mine and Independence are no doubt related to this fault.

In the present time, our county commissioners ride the fence and will not make a stand against 30,000 acres of Lincoln County being put in a little to no use capacity.

Past county commissioners worked to keep wilderness out of the county because of its future destruction of natural resource jobs. Pressure should be put on Rep. Steve Daines by our state representative and our state senator to stop this huge wilderness grab in the U.S. House of Representatives. So, anyhow, this Tester bill will do nothing to guarantee future jobs for Montana and should be stopped.

— Harvey Fredericksen

Libby