Who is Frontier Justice PAC?
A group of people that includes past Gilliam County Court members, past District Attorney’s, past employees and concerned citizens that know there are proper procedures to change the county government structure. The current County Court chose not to use any of these op-tions. Instead, they tried to circumvent these steps by changing the words in a law. Our goal is to give the people a voice in changing their government!
On December 6th, 2023, the County Court passed Order #2023-01 which eliminated both of the judicial Juvenile and Probate functions of the Gilliam County Judge position. One week notice was given to the public that the Court intended to do this. We admit the Juvenile adju-dicating can be eliminated by a vote of the Court members; we don’t agree that the Probate jurisdiction can be. The court used an Oregon Law as justification of their authority to do it. But the Court changed the words in the law, which in turn changed the meaning of the law. Although the words changed were brought to their attention, they chose to ignore everyone who spoke about it, standing by their deci-sion and their right to make it. To them it was a done deal, Gilliam County’s Judge no longer had judicial duties. (This was posted on their web page from December 13th until February 29th)
The latter part of January the Frontier Justice PAC was formed to hire an attorney to write a letter pointing out the changed words in the law asking it to be corrected or else. During this time members of the Court (along with Harney County) went to the Oregon Legislature to change a law, a law that would give our Court the ability to keep their change. The law, which the two counties wanted changed, included 4 other counties that were adamantly against changing it. The legisla-tion that was proposed would allow any of these County Courts to change their structure of government immediately, with no public in-put. Exactly what the Gilliam County Court did! This attempt to change the law, failed.
Frontier Justice wasn’t formed to bully the Gilliam County Court. We feel that if a change of the government structure is going to happen, it should be at the request of the voters. Below are a couple ways for the Court to do this:
1) Send it to the voters and, upon approval, go to the legislature and request to be removed from the group of six counties. With voter ap-proval, there’ll be no issues being removed no matter how many peo-ple testify in opposition. Then begin the restructuring of the govern-ment.
2) Have a County Charter committee create a county constitution, put it on a ballot to be voted on, upon passage, begin the restructuring of the government.
—Steve Shaffer, Condon
Reader Comments(0)