This is for all the ranching and grazing community in Southeast Oregon.

Our ranchers and grazing allotment owners in Southeastern Oregon are of the highest caliber of working people. They understand fully what it takes to run a business when 73% of the area’s resources needed to run that business are manipulated by the U.S.  government. Further, ranchers are honest, compassionate, environmentally astute, ethical people who depend on one another to help each other when the need arises.

With this being said, I am making the following request to those ranchers, grazing allotment owners and any other entities who have been asked to bid on the Hammond Ranch allotments.

Request: I am hereby asking all these ranchers and allotment owners, who were invited to bid on the Hammond allotments, to decline to do so and if the process leads them to be chosen to get these allotments, I would ask them to refuse the contract.

I make this request not just for the Hammonds but for all the allotment owners everywhere in Oregon and the West!

I have asked the BLM via a Freedom of Information Act request for the list of all entities who were asked to bid on the allotments. The local BLM people were helpful, but I doubt I will receive the FOIA information before the filing due date of the 14th of April.

I think it is very telling that even the application allotment maps are referred to as “Hammond FFR #06100” etc. Even the BLM knows these are Hammond’s allotments and are “real property!”

Now our community needs to come together and make this request to decline-to-participate to all the ranchers, and any others we know, who may have been invited to bid. Please do your part and inform the potential bidders, that you may know, of this request to make justice prevail.

I have discussed the issue and this approach with Dwight Hammond and he neither supported nor rejected this approach, so I’m moving this request forward. Pray that they win the appeal to the revocation of their allotments. We must do what we, as a community, can in the interim.

If they can do this injustice to the Hammonds, they can do it to any other allotment owner. We need to stand together as a community against tyranny and injustice!

Tim K. Smith

Hines, Ore.