PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — When a group of armed protesters occupied a remote bird sanctuary in Oregon’s high desert early this year, their weekslong standoff drew national attention to the decades-old fight between the federal government and Western states over land policy.

For weeks, the federal government allowed the occupation to continue, causing speculation as to why authorities would not move in and re-take the site. The occupation that started Jan. 2, ended after 41 days. On Tuesday, opening statements are set to begin in the federal trial of seven of the protesters.

The defendants, including brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are charged with conspiring to impede Interior Department employees from doing their jobs at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge through intimidation or threats. Five of them are also charged with possession of a firearm in a federal facility. The Bundys are part of a Nevada ranching family embroiled in a long-running dispute over land use.

The takeover began as a protest against the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers convicted of setting fires and quickly grew into demands for the U.S. government to turn public lands over to locals. The issue traces back to the 1970s and the Sagebrush Rebellion, a move by Western states like Nevada to increase oversight of the vast federal holdings in the region.

At the Malheur refuge near Burns, Oregon, protesters mostly came and went as they pleased. They changed the signs to “Harney County Resource Center” as they attempted to gain control of the land, which they said they would turn over to local officials to administer. The group held frequent news conferences and said they were doing maintenance and other work at the site as they moved heavy equipment around the area.

The occupation roiled the surrounding area, with some locals supporting the movement and others denouncing the occupiers as unwanted outsiders.

Counter protesters, including environmentalists, also traveled to Eastern Oregon and urged the federal government to administer public lands like the refuge for the widest possible uses for everyone from ranchers to bird watchers.

The nearby Burns Paiute Tribe also criticized the occupiers, noting that prehistoric archaeological sites were located at the refuge and that tribal members considered Malheur part of their ancestral land.

Oregon officials, including Gov. Kate Brown, grew frustrated at the amount of time it took for federal authorities to move against the Bundy group. At one point Brown sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey that urged them “to end the unlawful occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as safely and as quickly as possible.”

The protest basically ended when the Bundys were arrested in a Jan. 26 traffic stop that included the fatal shooting by police of occupation spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum. Four holdouts stayed at the refuge for another 16 days.

Prosecutors say the conspiracy began a couple months before the takeover, when Ammon Bundy and Ryan Payne, who pleaded guilty in July, visited the Harney County sheriff and warned of extreme civil unrest if he did not shield the ranchers from prison.

The defendants say they used their First Amendment rights to engage in a peaceful protest and repeatedly mention the only shots fired during the 41-day occupation were the rounds fired by police at Finicum.

The government will remind jurors that the protesters established armed patrols shortly after the takeover, an action that deterred federal employees from going to work.

A total of 26 people were charged with conspiracy. Eleven have pleaded guilty, including Payne and several others from Bundy’s inner circle. Charges were dropped against another man. Seven defendants sought and received a delay in their trial, now scheduled for February.

Ryan Bundy and Shawna Cox, the only woman among the seven defendants, are acting as their own lawyers and are expected to deliver their own opening statements.

The jury includes eight women and four men from throughout Oregon, and eight alternatives are available, if necessary. The trial is expected to last until November.

Oregon legislators will likely be asked for $4.25 million next year to pay for conservation easements that would protect farmland from development.

Plans are beginning to solidify for the Oregon Agricultural Heritage Program, which would provide grants to farmers interested in easements and succession planning, said Meta Loftsgaarden, executive director of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board.

OWEB, which will oversee the program, plans to hold “listening sessions” this autumn based on concepts developed by agricultural and conservation groups before drafting proposed legislation for the 2017 legislative session, she said.

“We didn’t want to go out to farmers and ranchers with a blank slate. We really wanted to have something they could react to,” Loftsgaarden said during the Sept. 12 Oregon Board of Agriculture meeting in Pendleton, Ore.

Conservation easements are usually sold or donated by farmers who give up their development rights in exchange for tax benefits and lower property values, reducing inheritance taxes.

They haven’t been as commonly used in Oregon as in other states because of the statewide land-use planning system, but this system alone isn’t enough to prevent the fragmentation of working lands, Loftsgaarden said.

The $4.25 million wouldn’t be enough funding for everyone who wanted to sell an easement, but it would serve as a pilot program — particularly for lands inhabited by threatened or endangered species, or that are subject to “urban growth boundary” expansion, said Doug Krahmer, a blueberry farmer who sits on a work group advising the program.

The easements will have a conservation component and could be used to provide properties with regulatory protections, offering an additional incentive for farmers, Loftsgaarden said.

Currently, a similar approach is used for forestlands where owners want to grow trees older than 30 years but are afraid of creating habitat for the northern spotted owl, hindering future timber harvest, she said.

“They want bigger trees, we want bigger trees, so what we needed to provide was that protection,” Loftsgaarden said, noting that forestland owners submit management plans to the Oregon Board of Forestry and receive regulatory assurances from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

OWEB currently funds conservation easements, but these are focused on preserving native fish habitat and water quality, without emphasizing agriculture, she said.

For that reason, landowners in Oregon have had trouble getting matching state funds needed to obtain federal money available for buying conservation easements, Loftsgaarden said.

“We weren’t hitting for the same target,” she said.

OWEB is funded with lottery dollars especially slated for wildlife and water quality, but the agency may seek money from the general fund or from lottery-backed bonds that don’t have the same restrictions, Loftsgaarden said.

The fund would also be able to accept donations from organizations and individuals, said Krahmer.

Grant requests would be ranked based on the duration of the proposed easement — perpetual agreements will score higher than those which end after a certain number of years — as well as the management plan and the threat of development to the property, said Loftsgaarden.

The program would be overseen by a commission consisting of representatives from the agricultural industry, the conservation community, tribes and land use experts, with OWEB providing staff support, she said.

Agricultural groups have asked why the program wouldn’t be overseen by the Oregon Department of Agriculture while conservationists prefer the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Loftsgaarden said.

However, OWEB is already focused on grants and has representatives from both agricultural and conservation groups, she said. “OWEB sits sort of in the middle.”

Powers won its game in the annual 8-Man Classic on Saturday night at North Bend, beating Siletz Valley 52-6. Earlier, Camas Valley blanked Yoncalla 48-0 and North Douglas crushed Days Creek 52-8.

BANDON — The festivities surrounding the Cranberry Bowl make for a fun Saturday. The parade, car show and other Cranberry Festival activities in town lead up to the annual showcase game for Bandon's football team.

Bandon Cranberry Festival 2016

Stephanie Balin, an exercise specialist at Westinghouse’s Cranberry headquarters, takes a small break from fitness to get back on a healthy track.

Into the woods

Into the woods

SATURDAY, SEPT. 10

We can say a lot about John Decas…and This article says most of it.  What is doesn’t say is that John Decas is one heck of a story teller and jokester.  Come out to WI John! We missed you at the CMC. 

An Oregon nursery and its landlord have prevailed in a lawsuit that accused them of creating a hostile work environment.

Carlton Plants and Carlton Nursery of Dayton, Ore., were sued last year by former employee Criselda Romero-Manzano, who claimed the companies ineffectively responded to her sexual harassment complaint.

Romero-Manzano had complained to a supervisor in 2013 of unwanted advances by a crew leader, after which she was reassigned to another crew leader, according to court documents. She lost her job a year later after she exhausted her medical leave that was related to a work injury.

In her 2015 complaint, Romero-Manzano claimed she’d suffered economic loss due to lost wages and emotional distress because the companies “did not effectively respond to plaintiff’s report of sexual harassment” and subjected her to a hostile work environment.

Romero-Manzano accused the crew leader of “sexual comments, invitations of a sexual nature, and unwanted sexual touching.”

U.S. District Judge Anna Brown has agreed with Carlton Plants and Carlton Nursery that the lawsuit was time-barred and must be dismissed.

Romero-Manzano originally received permission from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries to file the lawsuit against only Carlton Nursery, not Carlton Plants.

However, Carlton Nursery did not employ Romero-Manzano as it’s a separate entity that leases acreage to Carlton Plants, Romero-Manzano’s actual employer, Brown said.

While she did eventually amend her lawsuit to include Carlton Plants as a defendant, the permission to sue from EEOC and BOLI had by then expired, the judge said.

Romero-Manzano also failed to establish that the two companies were so inter-related that they should legally be treated as one entity, Brown said.

Attorneys for the plaintiff weren’t allowed to comment or did not respond to Capital Press.

Jon Bartch, registered agent for Carlton Nursery and Carlton Plants, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Powers swept visiting Umpqua Valley Christian on Thursday to improve to 3-0 in Skyline League volleyball play.

A Growing Legacy

Friday’s Games

Bandon and Powers will both have the spotlight with Saturday football games this week, the Tigers in their traditional Cranberry Bowl and the Cruisers in the emerging 8-Man Classic at North Bend.

Today

MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — Western monarch butterflies migrating between the Southern Oregon coast and the south Cascades will soon get fresh patches of strategically placed milkweed and other nectar-bearing plants to create needed habitat on this leg of their storied journey through here.

A group of public and private entities, led by the Ashland-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project, have landed a $193,000 foundation grant to restore and enhance 300 acres of western monarch habitat stretched across six sites along key migration paths through Southern Oregon.

Monarchs that winter along the California coast migrate along this route and the projects are strategically placed like stepping stones along that pathway.

“This is the epicenter of the migratory route,” says botanist Clint Emerson from the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, which is one of the participants in this habitat collaborative. “That makes this compelling.”

The plants will be grown at the federal government’s J. Herbert Stone Nursery in Central Point that will be planted along with milkweed seeds on public and private lands, including several plots already cleared and prepped for other restoration projects, Lomaktsi Executive Director Marko Bey says.

The plants include three locally native species of milkweed and 26 other plants such as coyote mint, winecup clarkia and harvest brodiaea, Emerson says.

While all the plants help butterflies, bees and other pollinators, the milkweed is tied closely to western monarchs’ life cycles.

Adult females lay their eggs in milkweed, and the ensuing caterpillars dine solely on milkweed before forming a chrysalis, from which they emerge as the royal-looking orange- and black-winged butterfly.

Monarchs produce four generations annually, each one making a portion of the migration between Washington and Idaho through Oregon and down to California and Mexico.

In recent years, private groups like the Southern Oregon Monarch Advocates have cultivated small milkweed patches for butterflies called way stations, “but this is a large-scale restoration effort,” says Robert Coffan of SOMA, which joins Lomakatsi, the forest and four other public and private entities in this project.

Restoration sites include 60 acres of Rogue River-Siskiyou forest land along the coast, 60 more acres of Forest Service land on the western slopes of the Cascades near Mount McLoughlin, another 60 acres at Table Rocks and 120 acres of public and private lands in the Ashland-Colestin area.

Some of those lands already have been cleared and prepped as part of other Lomakatsi projects, including the Ashland Forest All-Lands Restoration Project in the Ashland watershed known as AFAR.

That was important because the foundation grant did not cover site-preparation work, Bey says.

“It was a real plus that we’re laying this over other habitat projects,” Bey says.

Most of the work will be done in early 2017, Bey says.

Emerson says the multi-species plantings are different than milkweed way stations because they will create ecosystem-based landscapes instead of gardened plots of a single species.

The grant was one of several totaling $3 million doled out by the foundation’s Monarch Conservation Fund and the only one targeting western monarch habitat. The lion’s share went to the eastern monarchs and their famously arduous migration journeys.

Coffan says western monarchs generally get stiffed in the funding world.

“But we raised the flag a little bit and somebody saw the flag,” Coffan says. “I’m happy with it.”

For the second year in a row, grower Charlie Ruddell of Bandon is claiming the earliest delivery of cranberries in North America.

BANDON -- On Monday, Sept. 12, following the Cranberry Festival, expect to welcome 2,000 or more Cycle Oregon riders for a one-night stay in Bandon.

For the past several years Wild Rivers Coast Alliance has been title sponsor for the Bandon Cranberry Festival.