Opinion

  A lot of private companies and government agencies have been forced to downsize over the past several years. Plumas County is no exception. More than a quarter of the county’s workforce has been cut loose since the recession began.

  But one job the county needs to consider filling — and soon — is the administrative officer post. Some would argue the CAO is the most important job in the county. Not having a good CAO is like having a ship without a captain or a team without a coach. Would you want to fly into a major airport that didn’t have an air-traffic controller?

  Those of us who work at Feather Publishing believe we’re your first and best source for local news. After all, we live right here in Plumas County with the majority of our readers. We shop at the same markets, eat lunch at the same restaurants, our children attend the same schools and play on the same sports teams and we’re influenced and concerned by the same events that affect our readers.

  We also recognize we’re not only the largest news gathering organization in the county, but the only one to regularly attend and report on the meetings of government agencies such as the Plumas County Board of Supervisors and the Portola City Council.

  When a county supervisor, an environmental attorney and a professional forester came together 20 years ago, they couldn’t have foreseen what lay ahead.

  They had a mission: Treat the forests to keep them healthy and fire resistant, harvest timber to fund the county’s roads and schools, and do it all in a manner that would satisfy environmental concerns and stave off lawsuits.

  It is one thing to have a vision; it’s another to implement it. It took an act of Congress — literally. During a recent trip to Quincy, Congressman Wally Herger said that the phrase “an act of Congress” refers to something that is nearly impossible to accomplish, but that’s exactly what the QLG did. It took hundreds of meetings, dozens of trips to the nation’s Capitol and five years, but the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Recovery Act was passed and implemented.

  Mud slinging and politics go together like apples and apple pie. Politicians of all persuasions, parties and ideologies have been throwing the dirty stuff at each other and trying to make it stick as long as there have been candidates for office. That’s not unusual, and negative campaigning has become a hallmark of many national, state and local races this election season. And it seems to be getting worse.