Front Street Weekly

Portions of this program were previously aired during French Street Weekly's regular season. When you look at the vast range lands of Eastern Oregon a few houses here or there don't seem to make much of a difference. But subdividing the land is also dividing the people and many are wondering who is minding the range. And some runaway kids are reunited with their families thanks to Big Red. He publishes the nation's only trade journal on marijuana. Tom Alexander's magazine is a big hit among both growers and the police.

[Swenson]: You'll see those stories tonight on Front Street Weekly, Oregon Public Television's news magazine. Good evening, I'm Jim Swenson. [Gamble Booth]: And good evening I'm Gwyneth Gamble Booth. The eastern Oregon counties of Grant and Baker are the only two counties in the state which don't have land use plans approved by the Land Conservation and Development Commission. Those plans are required by state law and LCDC has slapped both counties with enforcement orders, withholding state funds until the counties come up with plans that LCDC finds acceptable. Both sides say it's been a struggle. From Grant County, Marilyn Deutsch reports on what the trouble is all about there. [Deutsch]: Grant County is cattle country. In the hills and valleys along the John Day River ranching has been the way of life here for more than 100 years. But in the past dozen years a battle has been brewing over the land, and the age old practice of breaking up branches, selling a chunk here, a few acres there. More and more the land is being bought up by hobby farmers, or folks who just want a

home out in the country. But some argue that that takes good ranch land out of production and that they say could destroy the economy of Grant County. It is calving season, midnight. Ken Holiday is pulling number K48's calf. Holiday, his two brothers and father expect more than 1200 calves by the end of the spring. The Holidays' ranch roughly 30,000 acres in Grant County. That's large but not excessive. Soil's often rocky. The weather is poor too. To support a commercial ranching operation, it takes thousands of acres. Land use planning was a foreign notion to Ken Holiday until a decade ago when the property next door to his John Day ranch was sold. Out went the cows, in came

26 new homes. Families with kids and dogs. [Holiday] Here we are. You see we just left the subdivision and bingo there they are. Those cows are calving right next to the subdivision. [Deutsch] According to Holiday, proximity is a problem. Neighbors' dogs kill calves, that costs money. But there are other hazards too. [Holiday]: And then a real problem we have is in the fall when deer season gets close, all them people sight their guns in our cross. We've been here working and had bullets zinging around us. [makes bullet sound] The guy keeps sighting his gun and-- [Deutsch] As far as Holiday is concerned the only neighbor a rancher needs is another rancher, and now Holiday believes ranchers should not be allowed to sell land and parcels too small to ranch. It's an argument that Holiday's neighbors say would strangle ranching in Grant County. Prairie City cattle rancher Del Raymond.

[Raymond]: I think they ought to ruin some more ranch land and maybe a guy can make a living on what's left. [Deutsch]: What do you mean by that. [Raymond]: Well the whole country we're over supplying everything you know that's that's our problem. [Holmes]: It sounds really nice to say "gee, we want to commit this land to a certain use," and at the present time it isn't economically feasible. Who subsidizes the people during the mean time? [Deutsch]: Steve Holmes, like perhaps as many as 80 percent of the ranchers in Grant County, is in financial trouble. Traditionally ranchers bail themselves out of tough years by selling off some land, paying back the bank loan or the feed bill. [Holmes]: In economic times if people could sell a small parcel maybe they can afford to get through these hard times. [Male speaker]: The type of rancher that gets into that kind of bind that you're talking about where he has to sell 40 acres to make it another year, he's got a terminal problem. [Deutsch] At times the local squabble seems almost like a class struggle. Those

successful ranchers like Hungarian-born Tibor Stefanski versus those trying to hold on until cattle prices improve. They've dropped 33 percent over the last seven years. But the argument's not that simple, nor is it confined to Grant County. That's because the State of Oregon, through its land use planning agency, the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC), could force county officials to adopt land use controls they don't want. The rules would set minimum lot sizes all over the county. For example between John Day and Prairie City, ranchers could not sell land in parcels of fewer than 160 acres. That is, without first going through what could be an expensive review process. And if LCDC gets its way 160 acres would also be the minimum in the Kimberley Monument area, despite the fact that small 20, 40, 60, 80 acre orchards could, some believe, mean new economic growth for Grant County.

Jim Ross heads LCDC. [Ross] --that if one divides up agricultural land to a point where it is too small to commercially farm, then you can't do it. [Holland] What we really need is we need some local control. [Deutsch] No one in Grant County speaks out louder against LCDC than county commissioner Bob Holland. [Holland] Remember all the deer here across the river? [Deutsch] Holland and his wife Polly ranched most of their lives in the John Day valley. Holland worries that new and part-time ranchers and farmers won't be able to get started if they can't first start small. [Holland] And what's happened in practice is the only people they can afford to buy this land are very wealthy people. You have to be a multi-millionaire to own land. [Deutsch] Large working ranches like this one are already in the hands of well-to-do outside investors. That's the kind of change in the neighborhood that bothers fourth-generation Grant County rancher Bonnie

Nance. [Nance] People that are buying ranches are not ranchers. People are coming in that have already made their money and they're using it as a tax deductible item. [Deutsch] Despite that, Nance opposes selling off small plots of ranch land and others argue that breaking up ranches will not mean new opportunity for some, but lost ranch income for everyone. [Male speaker] And what happens is that the ability of the county, the productive capability of the county decreases. It's just going downhill. The people in the county are hurting themselves to let that kind of thing happen. [Deutsch] After tourism and timber, cattle ranching is the third largest industry in Grant County. A ranch is not just a business but a living entity. Cattle ranchers here in eastern Oregon will tell you that it takes more than just land and cattle. To ranch you need a specially balanced mix: irrigated meadow land, spring grazing areas, and summer pastures. To put all this together it can take a rancher a lifetime.

[Holiday] It's those guys that are ruining the opportunity, it's those guys that are breaking up the established ranches. When a young man comes in and buys a ranch he doesn't want to buy a piece of a ranch that somebody else couldn't make a living on. He wants to buy a ranch. [Deutsch] When you talk to Floyd Hobby, don't talk about land planning. Even without a state approved county plan, Hobby believes land use rules the counties already adopted cost him his ranch. [Hobby] If there had not been any control on my land, I could have taken that six acres and broke it in about-- broken it down in about six acre pieces. Put six houses on it, which wouldn't have hurt this country at all, and made myself about 100,000 dollars plus paying off my debts. [Deutsch] Instead Hobby went broke. The bank foreclosed. Whether Hobby could have carried out his plans isn't clear. What is clear is that 1,000 dollars worth of farmland can be worth 10,000 dollars as residential property. Real estate broker Terry Lyons. [Lyons] Everybody when they get ready to sell it wants top dollar. [Deutsch] Today there's the lure of quick money when you break up ranches. But there's also the promise of

more people, more tax payers. Hardworking folks like Sandy and Mark Murray who run the pharmacy in Prairie City. Three years ago the Murrays bought 18 acres six miles south of Prairie City, deep in the county's ranch land. Beneath the majesty of the Strawberry Mountain Range, the Murrays built a house on their property. The piece of real estate is a dream. [Murray] When the land issue came up and Mark and I got involved with this, it was like one of those nightmares that you don't know happens until you're living it. [Deutsch] The Murrays' neighbor, cattle rancher Stefanski, filed complains with the county in the state against the Murrays' residential use of the land. The Murrays claim the soil is too poor to ranch. Stefanski scoffs, says the ground was and could still be used for ranching. [Male speaker] The question is should you mix a house or put a house, a five-acre lot in the middle of a 5,000 acre ranch or put a subdivision in the middle of the ranch. And those are the things that you shouldn't have.

[Male speaker 2] One of the reasons that people want to live in eastern Oregon is that they can have a little room. When you deny them that, you're in essence saying "eastern Oregon can't grow any." And it's never going to boom period, it just isn't. [Deutsch] And that, assert folks like the Murrays, is what LCDC doesn't understand. That the urban sprawl you see in the Willamette Valley just won't happen in the John Day Valley. Indeed in Grant County there are only two people every square mile. There's no commercial air transportation, no rail lines, no bus lines. The county says it needs to attract more folks like the Murrays to support and pay for local services. LCDC says nice theory, but it doesn't wash. [Ross] Rural residential development, in fact residential development period, does not pay its own way in terms of cost to the taxpayer. [Deutsch] There's another reason some here don't want to see more people move out of the countryside. They say it would ruin the wide open spaces for the bald eagle and other wildlife.

The arguments within the county and between the county and Salem may not end even when the county comes up with a plan LCDC will approve. The divisions run deeper than that, with one memory of the county's past but two visions for its future. [Male speaker 3] I think myself it's too bad when this land planning has to come along and turn neighbors against neighbors so bad. [Gamble Booth] Grant County will make another attempt to obtain state approval of its land use plan and under an agreed-upon schedule the plan should be back before LCDC sometime in June. Jim? [Swenson] Well Jade, Holly, and Brenda are teenagers whose stories are not particularly glamorous and yet thousands of youngsters across the country will do what

they have done: run away. Tonight reporter Steve LaBelle brings you their stories. [music] [LaBelle] There is hardly a person who at some point while growing up did not want to run away and join the circus. Running away from home has always been a romantic idea. Kids still do it in the 80s and it's still a scary ordeal. [Holly] At home, you know, you might - you might be real tough at home and might have a lot of problems, might not get along with your mom and dad. But if you go on the streets it's not any better, it's worse. [Teen speaker] On the streets is pretty bad news, I mean

you got pimps that know you're alone, if you're a girl. And you've got people bugging you all the time and they push you around. It's basically what happens. [LaBelle] But each year a million and a half kids run away from home. Chances are one kid in 10 between the ages of 12 and 17 will run away at least for a couple of days and almost all kids at least think about it. Corinne McWilliams and the staff of Harry's Mother gets a chance to talk to these kids. That's a program to counsel runaways and give them a place to live. [McWilliams] They run because they're looking for help and oftentimes they've tried to get help in other ways and they haven't been able. They haven't felt heard, at least by the people that they really need to be heard by, and that's their family. [Singer] The reason that the youth runs away is the first symptom, sometimes a more longstanding problem within the family.

[LaBelle] Brenda and Holly are best friends. Both are recovering alcoholics and both are runaways. Last Christmas they were in Los Angeles broke, on the street, and trying to figure out a way back home to Portland. [Holly] When we were gone, I've never told Brenda this, but you know at times I think of you know that I'm killing myself, why don't I just do it, you know, instead of doing this, and that's insane. [Brenda] You know it's like here I am 15 years old, I should act 15. I'm trying- here I'm trying to act 18 and 19. [LaBelle] Brenda has been in a string of foster homes over the last four years. She is considered a habitual runaway. Holly has run away 30 times and now she lives with her family. [Holly] Well when I started running away it was to get my drugs and then I'd get really screwed up and I wouldn't want to come home drunk or stoned and so I'd stay out for a few weeks. [LaBelle] Surviving on the street means having to steal. Kids that live on the street all tell the same story.

[Teen speaker] They get addicted to drugs real easy. And they do lots of them when they have the money. That's probably that they spend their money on. Some of them turn to prostitution and some of them get scared and turn to places like here, Harry's Mother. [Holly] When I first ran away I thought "well I can run away," I won't have to deal with my problems, but the problems go with you. [LaBelle] The favorite way to break from home is to hitchhike. But the only good thing about hitching a ride is that it's free. [Brenda] I run into a couple problems where you know I thought I might get raped or killed. And I'm not religious or anything, I can't say that God was looking over me. But somebody was, because I got out of it. [LaBelle] The streets are so mean, kids eventually try to go home. Both Greyhound and Trailways bus companies offer free tickets to reunite parents and kids. The companies notify the police and the parents. [Lerch] A runaway kid will tend not to look at somebody that is of authority figure, either the security guard or the guy with the blue blazer that says

"Greyhound" or the guy in uniform, in the Greyhound uniform, so when you look at him in the eye he will look the other way. [LaBelle] In spite of the risk, kids think life on the street is easier than school or dealing with their parents. But after living on the street, kids have a new respect for home life. [Holly] Right now I'm learning how to cope with problems at home and things that are going on. And so far it's going OK, I get upset a lot, but I'm learning to talk to my mom a lot more. [Holly's mother] Oh boy, there's so much you need to know. For one thing the trust is just completely gone and you don't know how long you're going to need to walk on eggshells. [Brenda] The one-on-one counseling is for like emotional problems and to better myself and to find myself, who I am, and I really think that I'm progressing a lot in that. [LaBelle] Both Holly and Brenda claim they are now serious about their counseling programs. They want to help themselves. [Holly] Running doesn't help anything. And like I said before, it doesn't solve the problems, it makes more.

[Singer] Rather than focus on who's to blame and whose fault it is, we try to look at what people can do to change the situation. [LaBelle] In Oregon there are only four programs sheltering runaways. Last year in Multnomah County there were 8,000 runaways reported and 500 kids lived on the street. [McWilliams] There are thousands of kids who run away in Multnomah County every year, those are just official run reports that are filed with the police. And there are certainly more kids than that who run away whose families for one reason or another don't file run reports on them. [LaBelle] Increasingly more kids are on the doorsteps of shelters such as Harry's Mother. Those are the lucky kids. Last year there were 4,000 unlucky runaways who wound up lost forever. [Brenda] A lot of times I've had younger kids come up to me and say "I think it's cool that you ran away. I think that's neat, I really look up to you." And that does not bring me up at all, that makes me shrink down because it's like some kid could run away and get killed because he thought it was neat that I ran away. [harmonica music]

[Swenson] Harry's mother maintains a 24-hour telephone hotline and the staff says that running away is not the way to let parents know that things are not right at home and on the other side the parent should listen to their kids and talk things out before it becomes a long distance conversation. [Gamble Booth] You might call him the "Dear Abby" for marijuana farmers. Tom Alexander publishes the nation's only trade journal on the marijuana industry. And ever since Sinsemilla Tips started rolling off the presses six years ago, the Corvallis-based journal and its publisher have created quite a stir. Reporter Rod Minott has this profile now. [machinery sounds] [Alexander] Getting information about marijuana out to the people

is what Sinsemilla Tips is all about. We don't advocate or promote anyone breaking any laws, but we do promote and advocate freedom of speech. [Minott] He's a self-described prophet of pot. From his tiny computer terminal Tom Alexander crusades for the rights of marijuana growers. For six years he's published his quarterly magazine. Sinsemilla Tips is the nation's only trade journal on the marijuana industry. Its title refers to seedless pot, the most potent type. And this was Alexander before he started his magazine, a pot farmer. That is until he got busted. [Alexander] I sat in jail for 30 hours while rapists got out in a half hour. The reason being growing one marijuana plant is a Class A felony. Attempting to rape somebody is a Class B felony. After I got out of jail one of the evidence officers said it was some of the best buds he had ever seen. And that now he gets a Christmas bonus, nudging one of his partners, and I got a good laugh out of that. And just seeing this whole corrupt

system operating made me feel that I had to do something. [Minott] With charges dropped because of an error in the search warrant, Alexander cut his hair, printed out the first thousand copies of Sinsemilla Tips and took them to Humboldt County, California where they sold out. Today the magazine has a press run of 10,000, grosses about $100,000 a year and it's sold as far away as Australia. [Alexander] Even experienced growers have stated that they do find a few tidbits in Sinsemilla Tips that help them improve their crops. [Minott] Those tidbits include articles on high tech hydroponics gardening, tips on what police look for during aerial surveillance, and everything you'd ever want to know about fertilizers like bat droppings. [Alexander] We have two college professors that write under pen names, pseudonyms, and we have growers also that send in anonymous articles or articles they've written under pen names.

[Minott] There are ads too color spreads, and grow lights, kits to detect the sex of marijuana buds, gadgets to sniff out counterfeit money. Alexander's subscriber list is on computer disks. He guards it closely. Wherever he goes, so go the disks. The irony is some of his most ardent readers are police. [Botta] And he has a lot of information in it that helps me develop investigative techniques necessary to obtain search warrants for the particular illegal growers. [Sandrock] It's a legitimate operation because the law allows him to publish it. [Minott] Sinsemilla Tips may be the Bible of marijuana growing for pot farmers and narcotics agents. But it apparently hasn't scored big yet with the general public. We took a random survey here in Corvallis. [Speaker] What? [Minott] The magazine Sinsemilla Tips. [Speaker] No. [Minott] Have you ever read it? [Speaker] No. I haven't even heard of it. [Speaker 2] I've never read it. I think that people should be free to write what they want, freedom of press.

[Speaker 3] I think the quicker they get rid of the stuff the better the world's going to be, personally. [Minott] Then there are those who can't even pronounce the magazine's name. [Speaker 4] Sen-see-mola? I don't know how. [Minott] Ok. [Speaker 4] Maybe have to smoke marijuana to be able to say it. [Botta] I think the things that bother me the most is that what I've seen happen to the magazine was come from an informative magazine, targeted for the grower to giving some maybe tips on how to get a better crop or whatever, or a better plant, to a magazine that's becoming very political. [Minott] Alexander says the government forced him to become more political. His columns lash out at drug enforcement officials using words like "fascist" and "Gestapo tactics" to describe their busts of pot farmers. [Alexander] Because the fact of the matter is their actions are just that. If you look at what law enforcement is doing today, aerial surveillance of everybody in rural America, regardless of whether

you are growing marijuana or not. Situations of using the military National Guard, not in Oregon, but in other states, against its own citizens. [Botta] We are the enemy because we work within the restrictions of the law. The person that that's growing it is working outside the law, 'cause they're committing an illegal act. [Minott] Alexander tracks this marijuana war. He says the government is losing it and cites numbers. There are an estimated 20 to 30 thousand pot farmers in Oregon. The illegal weed is a billion dollar a year industry here. He says the crackdown has shifted marijuana growing indoors, mainly to big cities like Portland. [Alexander] There are now computer controls that you hook up to your computer for indoor operations that someone doesn't even have to be there. It monitors everything, nutrient levels, carbon dioxide, and then you can access that through a modem from another location to find out if you have to go there.

[Minott] And while Alexander backs Oregon's marijuana initiative, which would legalize the personal use of pot, he goes one step further. [Alexander] I feel marijuana should be taxed and regulated and sold in state-controlled liquor stores or marijuana stores. It's-- at the present time it's unregulated, untaxed, and out of control. [Minott] Alexander believes a financially-strapped government could use that cash. Is there a political future for this marijuana press baron? Right now he concedes the controversy over pot precludes a candidacy but he says his day may come. [Alexander] The fact of the matter is, alcohol brought forth and pushed forward many politicians, the Kennedy family the most notorious, and I feel marijuana in politics is going to do the same thing. We're not wild-eyed radicals. We are just everyday people. [Gamble Booth] Alexander says if he ever does decide to run for public office, it will probably be for a state House of Representative seat. But until then he says he'll concentrate on improving his magazine. Jim?

[Swenson] Well that's our program for this evening. We hope you'll be back next week. We'll be here with another edition of Front Street Weekly. [Gamble Booth] And we hope to see you then. Good night.