Senator stalls Mount Hood wilderness bill

PORTLAND – An Oklahoma senator who often targets what he calls Oregon “pork” spending has again stalled new Mount Hood wilderness legislation despite wide support in the rest of the Senate.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., pledged to filibuster a massive lands bill that included about 125,000 acres of new wilderness on Mount Hood and along the Columbia River Gorge, in Idaho’s Owyhee canyons and elsewhere in California, Colorado and New Mexico.

That would have forced the Senate to use three days considering the bill, and Senate leaders decided they had more pressing business.

However, a top aide to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., predicted eventual passage.

“Sen. Coburn is delaying the inevitable,” said Josh Kardon, Wyden’s chief of staff. “The new Congress with the new president will pass the wilderness bill. It’s just a matter of time.”

Coburn has repeatedly over the past year blocked attempts by Wyden and Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., to push their wilderness legislation through. He contends that the roughly $10 million cost for mapping and surveying is wasteful.

On Friday, two of the eight examples in Coburn’s pork report came from Oregon.

One quoted an Oregonian headline describing “arty upgrades,” including new lamps, sidewalks, bike lanes and trees, on Northeast 102nd Avenue in Portland funded with $5.4 million in federal earmarks.

Another described a “junket to Mexico” by Umatilla School District officials to brush up on Spanish skills and absorb Latino culture to help teachers better support the region’s fast-growing Hispanic population.

Coburn said the lands bill includes excessive spending of nearly $4 billion over five years and puts millions of acres off limits to oil and gas development that could earn royalties for the federal government.

Aside from Coburn, the bill had wide bipartisan support, Kardon said.

He said Wyden sent a letter Friday morning signed by Wyden and 19 other senators, including five Republicans, urging Senate leaders to move the lands bill forward.

The bill packaged several wilderness bills that easily passed the Senate Energy panel, Kardon said.

The wilderness bill would have been the most land protected since 1984, when President Ronald Reagan signed into law almost two dozen bills that added more than 10 million acres to the country’s wilderness system.