The Source printed a rare editorial in this week's paper (07/27/07) suggesting that the community should think twice before accepting the deal that Skyline Forest's owner - Fidelity National Financial - has offered to build on 5,000 acres and donate 28,000 acres.

Among its reasons for questioning the offer are a lack of an immediate threat, the impacts that the planned community would have on infrastructure and the environment, tremendous fire danger (think Black Butte), and most worrisome, concern over what a special state law - which the owners need to develop this land - might mean for many thousands of acres of forest elsewhere throughout the state.

Perhaps the most astute observation the editors have made is as follows:

[M]aybe it makes sense to let developers develop part of their holdings in return for putting the rest in preservation trusts. But if that's what Oregonians want, the state needs to enact comprehensive legislation spelling out a process for evaluating such deals and setting criteria for approving them. Cutting deals with developers to carve up the forest land on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis is a formula for chaos - and maybe for future disasters.

We're still far from convinced the Skyline Forest is imperiled and as we told the Source - we don't need a handshake deal with a developer to save this forest. All we need to do is uphold existing law. With the support that so many members of the community have shown for Skyline Forest and with the law on our side, we shouldn't be led to feel that this is as daunting a task as some have said.

However, if a legislative solution is ultimately what Oregonians want, the paper is right to be concerned about cutting a quick deal. Whatever law comes out of the legislature had better ensure that every time a deal like this is done, the result is a clear victory for conservation. The problem is that it's very easy to craft legislation that looks tough but is carefully designed so as to to provide relatively few actual hurdles for developers. It's going to be especially tough to draft sensitive legislation during the month-long 2008 session.

If this issues does head to the legislature, we would also like to point out that the community has the ability to demand a far better deal than what is currently being offered. 1,000 homes, a golf-course, miles of roads, and 5,000 acres of forced management (to protect private residences against fire rather than for wildlife or healthy forests) on critical wildlife habitat is a steep price to pay and would set a very poor precedent for other deals around the state. If the Skyline Forest could be subdivided into 240 acre lots - which is the smallest division of land state law would allow in the Skyline Forest - with a house built on every lot, that would still only give the owners at most 137 homes, a number which is more than an order of magnitude greater than what is politically likely to result from attempts to develop the forest if it proves to be developable at all. If a deal is what the community is ultimately interested in, those will be important figures to keep in mind.