What's behind the other Dorr?

You have got to love Washington politics in August. This week, after Congress adjourned for the summer, President Bush made a recess appointment of Marcus native Thomas Dorr to be Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development after the Senate failed to act on his appointment. Dorr can serve through next year without a Senate vote.

A week ago, before Congress recessed for the summer, Dorr's nomination moved out of the Senate Agriculture Committee on a voice vote with no recommendation. This is roughly the equivalent of a vote of no confidence. Without an endorsement from the committee, the Democratic-controlled Senate now has little obligation to vote on Dorr before Congress adjourns later this year, effectively killing the nomination.

Dorr's nomination has been languishing in committee since March of this year, with good reason, we feel. Dorr is now in charge of federal economic development. His decisions will impact many rural states, including his home state of Iowa. That being said, here are some of our concerns with Mr. Dorr.

In an appearance at a seminar sponsored by Iowa State University's department of agronomy on December 11, 1999 that was videotaped, Mr. Dorr made some very interesting - and disturbing - comments.

According to Dorr, "the economically ideal Iowa farm would be 225,000 acres in size." Using that parameter and the latest US Census of Agriculture data, making Dorr's ideal farm size a reality would cut the number of independent farms in Iowa from roughly 90,000 currently to 139, driving 99.8 percent of farms out of business. (There are currently 31,166,699 acres of farmland in Iowa, averaging 343 acres per farm.)

In Plymouth County, this would mean the number of farms would drop from 1,490 to 2. Yes, in the utopian world of Undersecretary Dorr, there would be two farms in our county.

If the Dorr formula was applied to the entire country, the number of independent farms would plummet by 99.7 percent, from 1.9 million to roughly 4,200. The nation's farms currently encompass 931 million acres of farmland, averaging 487 acres per farm.

This is the guy that's supposed to grow jobs? What kind of economic growth do you think we'd have in Iowa if we lost 99.8 percent of our farms?

Unfortunately, this wasn't the worst of what Dorr said that day.

The new Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development lamented the fact that Iowa had not been "more aggressive" in attracting the type of factory hog farming that has taken hold in North Carolina and other Southern states. He went on to point out that the reason Carroll, Lyon and Sioux Counties have been successful is due to their being "very non-diverse in their ethnic background and their religious background."

More factory farms and homogeneous communities. Sounds like a utopia, right?

We think not.

Oh, and there's the small matter of submitting false paperwork to the Department of Agriculture and receiving as much as $34,000 in payments that have since been repaid.

Did we mention that Dorr has been raking in $125,000 a year as a "consultant to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman" while his nomination has been in limbo?

How about the fact that Dorr is a former campaign official in the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, serving as co-chair of the Iowa campaign's finance committee? Dorr was also a contributor to Bush's campaign, and he served as a transition adviser.

The Chairman of the Senate Ag Committee, our own Tom Harkin, put it best when he said, "The Senate Agriculture Committee went out of its way to review this nomination fairly and evenhandedly. That review showed that Mr. Dorr lacks the judgment, outlook and temperament for this very important position for rural America."

It isn't often that one can say that Tom Harkin is guilty of making an understatement. This certainly is, though.

Monte Hall, could we trade this Dorr for what's underneath the box that the lovely Carol Merrill is bringing down the aisle?