Wetlands: A barrier to growth?

Issue called 'cloud' on site development

By ANN PORTAL
The Register-Guard

Rohr Industries Inc., struggling with plans to build a manufacturing plant in west Eugene, could become the test case for dealing with federal wetlands laws affecting many of the city's best industrial sites.

Officials dealing with the California-based aerospace firm say the wetlands situation on Rohr's chosen site -- 100 acres just east of Mahion Sweet Airport -- is well on its way to being resolved.

But even if all goes according to plan for Rohr, property owners say the company's experiences illustrate how wetlands regulations are stifling industrial development in west Eugene.

"The wetlands issue has put a cloud on any development," said Russ Svingen of Eugene, part of a group of local investors that owns a 16-acre industrial parcel on Danebo Avenue.

Svingen and his partners bought the land about nine years ago after city officials earmarked west Eugene for future industrial growth and invested $12 million of public money in sewers and streets.

But even though the Eugene economy is prospering "it's difficult to get anyone real interested" in the property, Svingen said. "When they hear 'wetlands,' they just walk away."

The city has been grappling with the issue of wctlands preservation vs. industrial development since the fall of 1988, when Portland biologist Esther Lev documented about 760 acres of wetlands in west Eugene. That included 465 acres zoned for industrial use and some of the city's largest vacant sites.

Lev's estimate was more than tripled in November after release of a new federal definition that local officials interpret to extend wetlands protection to so-called "disturbed agricultural lands." Those are areas that do not currently support wetlands plants but could if farming were halted.

City and state officials are urging the federal government to change the new definition. Property owners, meanwhile, are wrestling with the result.

Wetlands fall under federal protection for their wildlife and plant habitat and their aid in flood control and water purification. Developers must obtain fill permits from the state and federal governments and must agree to create new wetlands elsewhere before they can build on such sites, a process called mitigation.

Rohr is the first company to try to build a new manufacturing plant in Eugene since the wetlands were discovered. Ironically, it chose the site near the airport last summer partly because "we told them there weren't any wetlands there," said John Lively, executive director of the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Partnership.

That was before the federal government released its new wetlands field manual last fall, which when applied to the site -- a ryegrass field -- turned up at least 60 acres of wetlands, said Jim Saul, a Eugene land use consultant representing the property owners.

For Rohr, as for all developers, the main concern about wetlands is not financial but logistical, Lively said. "The issue (for Rohr) then became timing - not that you couldn't build on it, but ultimately how long it would take to do that."

He hopes not too long. Rohr already has orders for the parts of jet engine shrouds that would be manufactured at the Eugene plant and must begin construction by spring, company officials said.

Rohr "obviously has run into wetlands in other places," Lively said. "if we can work with them to get it mitigated, then ultimately, they're agreeable to that." Company officials have not yet committed to building in Eugene, awaiting the resolution of the wetlands and several other issues.

Saul said a wetland mitigation plan for the first phase of development, involving 10 acres, already has been submitted to state and federal agencies. It calls for the creation of an equal amount of new wetlands on adjacent property that is under the same ownership, he said.

Lively said the state will pay for the cost of mitigation, which is not yet known. "That's been confirmed to the company," he said.

Mitigation costs range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per acre, not including the price of buying the land, which could easily double the total, said Steve Gordon, senior program manager for the Lane Council of Governments.

The difficulty when advising potential developers is that not all wetlands are created equal, he said. Some, such as marshes and ash forests, are of much higher value and, as a result, are much more costly to replace than lower-quality wetlands, such as the disturbed agricultural wetlands on the Rohr site.

"Almost any kind of wetland you could imagine would have greater functions and values than an agricultural wetland," Gordon said.

Such differences in quality of wetlands also account for big differences in the amount of time it takes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to approve mitigation plans, he said. "There's always uncertainty," Gordon said.

In routine cases, approval of mitigation plans can be obtained within 90 days. But if a case is controversial or if one of the federal agencies doesn't like the mitigation plan, "it can take a long, long, long, long time," he said.

Spectra-Physics Inc., also in west Eugene, has been waiting more than a year for the Corps of Engineers to approve its plans to mitigate about five acres of wetlands that would be lost in an anticipated $7.5 million expansion.

That case also involves creating another 20 acres of wetlands to replace an area that was filled when the company built its original Eugene plant in 1979. The company was not told of the presence of wetlands on the property.

While the spotlight is on Rohr, other owners of property in west Eugene say they have been equally frustrated by federal wetlands policies for a couple of years now.

Former Eugene Mayor Ed Cone said he gave his children a 160-acre parcel just west of Danebo Avenue that is "just sitting and waiting" for a large industrial plant.

But after spending several thousand dollars studying the extent of wetlands on the property, using the old definition of wetlands, he has since had to bring engineers back to take another look using the new definition.

The consultants determined that about one-quarter of the site meets the new wetlands definition, he said. There have been potential tenants -- including Rohr -- but no takers, he said.

Small businesses and property owners are coping with wetlands along with the big firms.

George Wingard, a Eugene real estate investor and former state senator, said he would like to expand his six-acre development on Stewart Road, where he builds small warehouses and leases them to people opening small manufacturing firms.

But when he began to build last year, "the next thing I knew, I got a letter from the state saying I had to move the fill dirt," he said. "I was astounded that (the property) was considered a wetland."

Wingard said his wetlands were created when the city improved Stewart Road about 10 years ago and in the process interrupted the normal drainage off his property.

"I've talked to the fellow at the state about this. He said, 'We're not concerned about how it got there. We're concerned that it's a wetland,'" Wingard said.

Wingard said he hesitates to complain too loudly about wetlands regulations because he respects their contribution to the environment.

"My first reaction was, 'I don't want to talk about it,'" he said. "I guess it's so upsetting because I've been involved in environmental measures all my life."

Gordon said Wingard's concerns are common among developers, especially companies that are new to Eugene and don't want their introduction to smack of disregard for the environment. "A lot of firms don't like that. They're trying to be environmentally sensitive, a lot of them," Gordon said.

Wetlands

Here are the different types of local wetlands, ranked generally by their value as wildlif habitat and how difficult they would be to replace. An exception is the praine grasslands. Experts are uncertain about whether tufted hairgrass, the dominant plant, successfully can be replaced.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Transportation and Oregon Department of Tranportation environmental impact statement for the West Eugene Parkway; Lane Council of Governments
GRAPHIC: FERIL ANDCO/ The Register-Guard