Andy Stahl for Lane County Commissioner

3/11/2012: Andy Stahl is running against Pete Sorensen for South Eugene Lane County commissioner. It’s district 3 – yes, even if you live in Eugene you vote for a county commissioner. The election is May15th, ballots are mailed out in about 6 weeks. It’s a nonpartisan position, so no primary.

Andy is a longtime advocate for environmental and child-welfare causes with many important accomplishments. (His father is UO professor emeritus Frank Stahl). Most recently he has helped developed a sensible plan to divide Oregon’s BLM forest lands, and manage the most environmentally important half for environmental quality, while auctioning off long term leases for the parts best suited to logging. Pete Defazio has endorsed this idea as a long term solution to help provide jobs, county revenue, and protect environmental quality. From the RG:

“Each is trying to accomplish a different but complimentary set of objectives,” he [Stahl] said. “The timber trust wants to make sure the land in the timber trust can actually be logged in real life without people sitting in the trees in protest, and the environmental trust wants to make sure the land it protects is worthy of protection.”

The timber trust lands could be leased to a private company — a long-term 99-year lease with the investor paying an upfront fee; $3 billion is the figure being batted around. That money would be invested, with the annual interest going to Oregon counties, DeFazio said. …

“We need long-term stable funding for essential county services, and if we can establish a trust that would provide for that, it would be most attractive in the current environment in Washington,” DeFazio said.

Stahl and his plan have picked up endorsements from many other local politicians, from all over the political spectrum. One other contender for the commissioner position, Kieran Walsh, just withdrew and is now supporting Stahl.

Stahl’s remaining opponent is the incumbent Pete Sorensen, who was most recently in the news for using secret meetings and email to make decisions that were then followed up with sham public meetings. Rather Pernsteineresque. The court found he had violated Oregon’s public meetings law, and by the end legal fees were over $300,000. Sorensen then managed to get the county to pay most of them for him! The Eugene Weekly is a big Sorensen supporter, and regularly posts bits accusing Stahl of being in bed with the timber industry. I don’t understand the backroom politics here, but anyone who knows Stahl’s history knows how ridiculous that charge is.