An Explanation on Audio Tape

Chuck Missar, Facilities Manager for Spectra-Physics in Eugene, Oregon in 1988 on the Company's Reaction to Discovery of Wetlands

"Trying to think about how the decisions were made and what the decision points were as we went through this process, here's a little bit of my take on the world. I'm looking at it from the concept of what is new at any given point, what caused us to change our thinking, what caused a change in direction, then once we saw that action, what sort of the problem we saw, what we heard, what were the alternatives, which were the best the alternatives, what were the risks of those alternatives, and the course of action we took. I'm recording this as I'm driving into work, so if I stop once in a while . . . . understand.

In the spring of '87 the news was when Bill Sloat of the city [of Eugene] from the Business Assistance Team came out and said "We think there may be some wetlands on your Phase III [site]. The problem with that was that if they were indeed there, you didn't know what it really meant, and it sounded like it was going to slow down or impede our ability to develop phase three (See site plan showing planned Phase Three building.) We looked at the options, and the alternatives were (1) do nothing, just kick back and say "Hey this is no problem, Hey, what's the issue?" or, we could, ah, pro-actively go after more information. What we did was , we basically said, "Hey, we've got to know more. This doesn't look like a wetland, doesn't smell like a wetland, etc., What's going on?" And that's what we opted to do, and that's when we began working with the city and with LCOG (Lane [county] Council of Governments), formed sort of a self-help study group.

The next decision point was probably some time in early '88. The issue there was that we had been doing a lot of homework, through our studies, and it was possible to get a fill permit; you had to go through a lot of hoops, and there was certainly some bureaucratic time delay, but it was possible to get the fill permit, and the decision at that time was to go after a permit. And that was based on the news that, . . . all of the stuff that we had learned. The alternatives were, again, don't go after a permit now--do it later--a little bit after the dust settles on this, or just turn off on the whole permit thing and pretend it's going to go away. We opted to pursue the permit because our criteria, all along, were that we wanted to be able to develop Phase III WHEN WE NEEDED IT. We would have to move very quickly when business conditions changed, and we had a need for that space.

The next major decision point would have been early '89. That's when the EPA sent us a letter--we'd heard about it from the informal channels first--that said No, they weren't going to issue the permit for the fill of Phase III until the issue of the Phase I and Phase II fills, which had been completed in 1979 and 1985, respectively, was addressed. It was their contention that those fills were done illegally, and that we did not have proper permits. That, of course, was very traumatic when we heard that, because we thought we were progressing on the Phase III fill and now here it was stopped for an issue that we didn't even have, that we didn't have any knowledge of.

Alternatives at that point were simple, one is just to tell 'em to go fly a kite, we're going to do whatever we're going to do, and let them take whatever action they wanted. The other option was to say, OK, we'll back off on this Phase III permit, we don't want that, maybe all this phase I and II stuff will go away. What's their jurisdiction? Another alternative would be to go ahead with the fill and to mitigate for the earlier inappropriate fills. We opted to do the latter because of the uncertainty factor. WE WANTED TO BE ABLE TO FILL THIS SITE WHENEVER WE NEEDED IT, and that was the whole contention when we moved out to this site, and all the master planning and all the other stuff that we had done was to be able to move quickly when we needed it.

. . . . Our stance was, "Hey, this wasn't inappropriate, we were permitted to do this by the city. We were urged to do it by the state. But the reality of this thing is that the only people who are going to make any money off of this thing is the lawyers, no matter what we do if we fight it. And at least we know there is some finite length to the process for the permit, and we felt at that point in time we had a pretty good chance of getting the permit but it would it would be a long and pretty expensive process. . . . .

We also talked about picking up our marbles and going home. If they get too tough, we can always move out. That had some downside, though. The cost of moving a professional is around $50,000 per person, and we had at least a hundred people we would take along if we moved. Ph.D.s and technical specialists essential to the business. A lot of them liked living here, going over to the coast on Saturday or out to climb and hike in the mountains after work, people who wanted to come to work for us BECAUSE we were in Eugene, Oregon.

Not that you can't get something like that environment in some California places, but the price of dirt's not cheap in California, either, or the taxes. But of course, that was an option we had to consider. And we were at a point that we could see over the horizon; we could see that our business was going up a sharp curve and we would need more capacity. The total cost of the expansion appeared to be $8 million. The cost of dealing with the mitigation and permitting might be between $350,000 and $500,000, depending on which land we bought and how much it cost to restore it. The cost of legal fees if we fought it would be about $4000 per lawyer per day, and the battle might drag out for a year, not with the lawyers working forty hours a week, of course, but a steady drain, you see, for quite a while out in the future, and meanwhile that money is not going to do anything toward getting bar code scanners built to meet the demand and hold on to our market share.

It was also notable that no other company in the area was stepping up to do any mitigation right off; we were out there by ourselves in this decision; since we were the biggest employer, others were sort of kicking back to see what we did before making any commitment, and the local people such as the former mayor and some of the important families who had invested thinking that the land could be resold were under no pressure to act quickly. But there was some urgency in this decision for us.

We had been bought up by a foreign firm, Ciba Geigy, and there were expectations about our growth and plans for expansion abroad if trade restrictions eased and Asia kept growing as a market. We were on a track, and we didn't want to be derailed. We had bought the site originally and done a master plan specifically to avoid derailment. And in the mean time we had put people in a building a mile away and everyone hated it; I mean hated it. We liked coming to work on a campus site and having everyone able to talk to everyone else and just walk across to the next building and give some technical help to the production people. The people at the other place couldn't be taken care of and worked with in the same way. We were only running one shift, and that was the way we wanted it, because you can't get your senior technical people to work a night shift and it's no good running production if you don't have technical support.

Well, you can see there were several important concerns that we had, and we were completely surprised by the reception we got when we went to present our permit request and got a letter back saying that the permit was not only not going through, they were thinking of penalties for our past "transgressions," things we had no idea were going to matter when we got our original permits to fill in a flood plain and build.