There’s one thing people in this area never complained about when Jaime Herrera Beutler represented us in Congress, and that was her constituent service and her focus on the specific needs of our community.
She listened to local needs and she responded.
Now, she is running for Washington state public lands commissioner. Her support includes foresters, labor unions, tribal leaders, working families and recreationists. They support her because they know she'll take a balanced, science-based approach to managing forests and other public lands.
Herrera Beutler has a welcome plan for fire resilience and resistance. The record for largest fire in Washington state history stood for over 100 years. That record was broken three times in the last decade.
The public lands commissioner is pushed by organizations opposed to any logging. They want the trees left standing and, when the trees die, they want them left to create a more natural forest. The problem is that dead trees become tinder and unmanaged forests burn more quickly. With the state holding more than 3 million acres of forest land, the way they are managed has an enormous impact.
If you want to have fewer days in August and September where we see smoke instead of blue skies, then voting for Jaime Herrera Beutler is a good idea.
Herrera Beutler will support the Department of Natural Resources forest managers and scientists who want to keep Washington forests healthy, and the need to get political and bureaucratic obstacles out of their way.
She'll keep the political activism out of the office and let the scientists do their jobs.
And she proved to us in Congress that she knows how to get things done. For decades, the non-native California sea lions were coming to the Columbia River (and the Chehalis and Cowlitz) and feasting on more than a third of all salmon returning to spawn. But the sea lions were protected by federal law and nothing could be done to stop their destruction of the salmon runs.
That is until Jaime Herrera Beutler went to work on the problem.
She put together a bipartisan group of support and passed legislation directing the resource agencies to take the sea lions. People sometimes say “it would take an act of Congress” to do something, meaning it is next to impossible. But Herrera Beutler did the work toward addressing that significant natural resource problem.
She did pass an act of Congress, and our salmon resource is better for it. She’ll bring the same kind of focus as the public lands commissioner.
The Chronicle does not make across-the-board endorsements of political positions. But we are endorsing Jaime Herrera Beutler because we think that is a no-brainer for Southwest Washington and our state.
She favors protecting recreational access to public lands. She believes public land should be enjoyed by its owners — the people of Washington. She supports wise and balanced use of our natural resources, and she knows how to get things done.
