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Produced & Maintained by Idaho Mountain Express, Box 1013, Ketchum, ID 83340-1013 
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Copyright © 2003 Express Publishing Inc.
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Friday, June 25, 2004

Our View

Loggers, log in!


The town of Bellevue can be excused for feeling as though it’s being walked on like a doormat by the Bureau of Land Management and logging companies preparing to drive through town with 40-plus ton loads of freshly cut timber.

The city doesn’t know when these trucks with their long, stacked loads of logs will come thundering out of Martin Canyon onto Bellevue’s Main Street and roar southward to delivery points in Rigby and distant Montana.

The BLM and its logging contractors, in short, have made no arrangements with Bellevue officials for a coordinated, well-managed trip through the city.

Bellevue Marshal Randy Tremble understandably is troubled by safety implications—huge trucks mingling with pedestrians and auto traffic. Second on his list of concerns is what the trucks could do to the city’s pavement.

His preference, if BLM and its logging contractors would deign to contact him and other officials, would be to shepherd these giant loads through town at no more than 20 miles per hour in a convoy of rigs, not simply allowing one or two at a time to pass through the city whenever the mood suits loggers.

Likewise Blaine County Commission chairman Dennis Wright, who recalls that loggers in the late 1990s "devastated"—that’s Wright’s description—the Little Wood Road near Carey, turning the pavement into gravel. He’s uneasy about what could happen today.

Speed and braking of the big trucks did the damage, Wright remembers.

For his part, the occasionally wry Commissioner Wright has some thoughts made in partial jest, but surely with some merit in view of the indifference shown by BLM to Bellevue.

Wright suggests, for example, that the city of Bellevue might install a series of speed bumps along Main Street, aka State Highway 75, to force loggers’ speed to a snail’s pace.

And, he asks sardonically, what’s wrong with installing eight temporary stop signs on Main Street to control speed during the logging season?

A simpler solution is for BLM to pick up the phone, arrange for a meeting with Bellevue and work out a sensible plan for moving hundreds of tons of logs on mammoth trucks through a quiet community without destroying pavement and menacing the safety of other users of public streets.


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The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.





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