All Wet in Oregon

Report 2

Nature Conservancy, September/October 1993
ALL WET IN OREGON

All Wet in Oregon: One city's
model solution to a wetlands dilemma; by Sally-Jo Bowman
Steve Gordon trudges through watery mud meandering through hummocks of grass at the west edge of Eugene, Oregon. Songbirds twitter in the leaves of native Oregon ash and a ring-necked pheasant honks. To the northwest, a freight train rumbles, and white smoke billows from a lumber mill. Beyond a field blooming blue with camas lilies, traffic hums on asphalt.

Gordon walks part of a 13,000-acre remnant of western Oregon prairie that covered perhaps 360,000 acres when settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. The settlers turned most of the Willamette River Valley, of which this prarie is part, into farmland. During the next 150 years, the farmland gave way to industries, businesses and homes in Eugene, which became Oregon's second-largest urban area. Then in 1987, federal regulations gave the west fringe of the city a new identity: wetlands.

"That surprised a lot of people," says Gordon, a land-use planner for the Lane Council of Governments, a public ageney that provides planning services for the county. "We had the impression 'wetlands' meant swamps and bogs. Everybody knew West Eugene was gooey with bootsucking mud in winter. But it dries rock hard in summer. We were slow to realize we had significant wetlands."

The federal action, which meant that the West Eugene area had to be protected, came while then-Governor Neil Goldschmidt was in Japan marketing the land for industrial development. With the announcement, property owners feared their investment was suddenly worthless. City officials imagined potential jobs and tax money vanishing. Tempers were on edge, to say the least.

The city handed the mess to Gordon, a gentle man with a graying beard and a gift for listening. Over the next several years, he worked patiently, with a wide variety of groups and individuals to engineer a plan that both protects the environment and provides for economic development.

The West Eugene wetlands plan, which The Nature Conservancy helped craft, has won the support of corporate leaders, government officials and conservationists. It earned Gordon a 1992 National Wetlands award, an honor jointly sponsored by the EnvironmentaI Law Institute and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And, perhaps best of all, it has become a model for other communities facing wetlands challenges.

"We ended up with government, environmentalists, landowners and businesses all supporting the plan," says Robert Moulton, an attorney who represents a number of wetlands property owners and a member of the Eugene Chamber of Commerce, "and it's because we were all brought into the educational process."

THE WETLANDS ISSUE in Eugene first came to a head at Spectra Physics, a bar-code scanner manufacturer that, with 500 employees, is one of the largest firms in the city.

The company came to West Eugene in 1980, constructing a one-story wood building on 12 of 32 acres it had purchased. Five years later the firm filled another eight acres and added a two-story manufacturing unit.

In late 1987 Spectra Physics applied for a permit to fill its remaining acreage and erect a third building. Facility manager Chuck Missar remembers: "A city official called and said, "Chuck, I need lo talk to you." That's always a bad-news phrase. He told me wetlands had been discovered on our property in a n environmental assessment.

"'Wetlands?!,' I said. I had been a member of The Nature Conservancy for 25 years and I thought I knew what wetlands were. You know, a tidal slough. But I was naive."

Not only did federal wetland regulators deny the permit, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that Spectra Physics had filled the first 20 acres without authorization.

Says Missar: "We had jumped through all the hoops. We weren't trying to slime anybody. lt's just that nobody locally was aware of the federal land-use planning requirement. The process wasn in place and there was no precedent."

Missar, a string-bean guy with an easy, warm smile, continues: "At that point we could fight and make some lawyers rich, or we could say, 'OK, we don't agree, but we'll try to resolve the issues.'"

The EPA agreed to hold Spectra Physics' fill permit application until the company "mitigated"--bought additional acreage in the same Amazon Creek watershed and did whatever was necessary to make it a functioning wetland .

Over several years, Spectra Physics rehabilitated about 30 acres of wetlands near its plant. "We had consultants three layers deep," Missar jokes. They moved 15,000 cubic feet of fill in a rye grass field and created a winter pond. They burned and plowed invasive reed canary grass, then planted the native tufted hairgrass. They hired a nursery to grow other native plants.

Spectra Physics spent about $900,000 on the project (about half of which has been reimbursed by city and state governments), all on the chance that government regulators would approve the work and grant the fill permit. But other developers were less willing to take the risk. As Missar says, "no one wanted to get arrows in their backs."

The Willamette Valley
Daisy
WHILE CHUCK MISSAR was busy learning more than he thought it was possible to know about wetlands, the city hired Steve Gordon to lead them out of the quagmire.

The veteran planner had to come up with something that would prevent the loss of wetlands, improve water quality, control stormwater, protect rare species, provide a stable development environment for business, help educate the public and allow for recreation. And it had to make business expansion a lot easier than it bad been for Spectra Physics.

First Gordon put together a team of engineers, planners and financial experts from several city and county departments and from The Nature Conservancy, which manages about 350 acres of the West Eugene Wetlands as the Willow Creek Natural Area. Under Gordon, who believes hard work should be leavened with humor, the group became known as "The Wetheads."

Gordon calls the process "25 percent science and 75 percent human interaction." Indeed, the key was citizen involvement, including contacting the 125 property owners who held from 1 to 200 acres in the area. Says Eugene wetlands coordinator Deborah Evans: "In looking at other models, things disintegrated into winners and losers. Because of that, we rejected the idea of a task force or a citizen advisory committee and instead involved as many citizens as possible."

Between 1988 and 1991, the "Wetheads" led field trips to the wetlands, spoke to civic groups and school and university classes about wetlands issues, mailed information to property holders, and held eight public workshops. Thev also met individually with property owners and others wanting to ask questions or express concerns.

The workshops drew as many as 150 people, and many property owners attended them all. The atmosphere was dominated by a sense of frustration--until early 1990.

"In that workshop we finally had an official wetlands inventory and maps," Gordon recalls. "Some people were relieved to find they didn't own wetlands after all. Others realized their land did fit the definition and that they had a common problem that was caused by changes in state and federal regulations, not by local folks. They started to understand we'd all have to work together."

As the public--especially property owners--found they could take officials at their word, the atmosphere mellowed. "All sides compromised, and those compromises make sense," says Deborah Evans. "They meet state and federal wetlands law and they return certainty to development."

THE NATURE CONSERVANCY played an important role in the process. Gordon says. "The Conservancy is very good at negotiating with private property owners. They brought that tool box to the planning group. They're scientifically sound and interested in the broader ecosystem. And then they brought in Ed Alverson as staff in Eugene, so we had day-to-day contact with the Conservancy."

The Conservancy had set the tone for wetlands protection a decade earlier when it leased its first acreage in the southeast corner of the West Eugene wetlands. The organization had identified the site as the best remaining piece of the Willamette Valley wet prairie--an important habitat for rare species that has been reduced to less than 1 percent of its original size.

Ed Alverson was hired in 1991 as Willamette Valley stewardship ecologist for the Conservancy. He also serves as a wetlands consultant to the city, and his shared salary is a good example of the cooperative spirit that developed as the Wetheads proceeded.

That's just how Catherine Macdonald likes it. She's the Conservancy's director of stewardship for Oregon. "Protecting biological diversity in an urban setting can involve complex land-use and engineering issues " she says. " By forming a partnership with the city of Eugene, we can take advantage of each other's expertise and resources.

Alverson fords the east fork of Willow Creek, the only stream in the Amazon Creek drainage that hasn't been channeled for flood control. He heads for several acres where the endangered desert parsley is flourishing. This open area also fosters the endangered Fender's blue butterfly. On the west fork of the creek he checks a beaver dam, looking for the rare western pond turtle. These wetlands contain five other rare endemic species, such as the Willamette Valley daisy, Kincaid's lupine and the shaggy horkelia.

"Our philosophy has always been to seek a win-win solution," Alverson says. "The wetlands plan is a reincarnation of that on a bigger scale."

The Conservancy now owns 200 acres in West Eugene outright, and is negotiating to purchase 150 acres it manages under leases. The Conservancy's dream has been to connect its acreage to other pieces of wetlands through a greenway running north to Fern Ridge Lake. With the West Eugene wetlands plan, that dream could well come true in the next two decades.

THE WETLANDS PLAN balances ecology with industry, protecting the most ecologically valuable areas while allowing development on the less important ones, says Steve Gordon. It calls for recreation and educational opportunity, with waterways, trails and an interpretive center where citizens can learn about wetlands.

Central to both preservation and enhancement of the wetlands and to economic development is a "mitigation bank." In effect, this allows developers to pay for the kind of work Spectra Physics did on its own and hand off all the details of land acquisition and rehabilitation to the local or federal government. In addition. a streamlined permit application will reduce the papenwork wait from months to weeks.

Federal agencies, including the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), will help implement the plan. The BLM has already purchased 18 acres of West Eugene wetlands and has offers pending on 200 more. Ultimately, the BLM will own about 1,000 acres in the area as a public trust.

Daniel Bowman, BLM wetlands project manager, points to Danebo Pond, not far from his office. in the heart of the wetlands. "In 1967 this was a barrow pit. It filled in, and now there's beaver in it, and great blue herons. Mother Nature is taking it back. This makes me think that mitigation can work."

He gestures to an expanse of grassland once used for trap-shooting but otherwise undisturbed. "This 75 acres is possibly the largest native grassland in the Willamette Valley. In these wetlands we're dealing with a habitat that is in much shorter supply than old-growth forest."

Wetlands acquisition, rehabilitation and maintenance will cost an estimated $16.4 million over the next 20 years. Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, Representative Peter DeFazio and former Representative Les AuCoin helped appropriate $3 million in federal funds to the BLM. Other sources of funding include the state and city governments, the mitigation bank and private nonprofit organizations such as The Nature Conservancy.

STEVE GORDON envisions a future in which business and industry coexist with nature, where businesses will locate in West Eugene because of the wetlands--not in spite of them. Employees could spend their lunch hours canoeing or bicycling, strolling among wildflowers or watching waterfowl. He even sees businesses using an image of environmental sensitivity to attract customers.

To Gordon the future is bright for both ecology and economy. Others agree. Says Clayton Walker, a developer in Eugeane for 20 years and president of the West Eugene Community Association: "In the late 1980s we didn't know what to do and couldn't get any direction. I've supported the West Eugene wetlands plan because it has the goal of providing certainty for the future. It's a good approach. Now it's starting to look like there will be a demand for industrial development again. Most of us involved are now cautiously optimistic."

The plan itself can be used in other communities dealing with wetlands management. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, which funded about 40 percent of the cost of planning, had that in mind from the start. They knew that many cities--16 in Oregon alone--are facing wetlands issues as they grow.

"We were looking for a community we could use as a model," says William Riley, EPA regional wetlands program manager in the Northwest. "The plan had to be good for wetlands and also good for the communitv in terms of predictable growth: We got Steve Gordon's leadership and drive and a community that took a problem and turned it into an opportunity."

The EPA has allocated $100,000 to help other communities adapt the West Eugene wetlands planning process to their own wetlands issues. Officials from at least 25 cities have expressed interest and Gordon already has made more than a dozen presentations at national and regional planners' conferences.

CHUCK MISSAR STRIDES along Amazon channel, grasses waving halfway up his long legs. He's five minutes from his office, on the 30 acres Spectra Physics bought to rehabilitate. Pink, blue and white flags locate reintroduced native plants. Missar surveys stream bank and field, alert for red fox, pointing to a spot where a pair of Canada geese nest. A kestrel falcon soars above.

"I wish we hadn't had to do this," he says. "We have enough challenges making scanners at a profit without becoming wetlands experts. But we did get what we wanted, our permit. The city retained us as a reasonably happy business and got a first-class wetland reconstruction that will be a standard.

"Normally this situation would have all the elements of a battle, but there's been a lot of effort to communicate. People feel listened to," Missar says. Steve Gordon's style, openness and grace under pressure make a lot of it work."

Gordon is humble about his role and his accomplishments, "It's not just me, you know," he says. "We have a wonderful community of active citizens, local elected officials and public agency staff, a supportive Congressional delegation, and state and federal agencies who wanted us to be a good example.

"Most of all," he adds, "moving forward depends on trust and communication among environmentalists and developers. That's the magic."

SALLY-JO BOWMAN is a freelance journalist who divides her time between Oregon and her native state of Hawaii.

Report 2
	Nature Conservancy, September/October 1993 ALL WET IN OREGON
Steve Gordon trudges through watery mud meandering through hummocks of grass at the west edge of Eugene, Oregon. Songbirds twitter in the leaves of native Oregon ash and a ring-necked pheasant honks. To the northwest, a freight train rumbles, and white smoke billows from a lumber mill. Beyond a field blooming blue with camas lilies, traffic hums on asphalt. Gordon walks part of a 13,000-acre remnant of western Oregon prairie that covered perhaps 360,000 acres when settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. The settlers turned most of the Willamette River Valley, of which this prarie is part, into farmland. During the next 150 years, the farmland gave way to industries, businesses and homes in Eugene, which became Oregon's second-largest urban area. Then in 1987, federal regulations gave the west fringe of the city a new identity: wetlands. "That surprised a lot of people," says Gordon, a land-use planner for the Lane Council of Governments, a public ageney that provides planning services for the county. "We had the impression 'wetlands' meant swamps and bogs. Everybody knew West Eugene was gooey with bootsucking mud in winter. But it dries rock hard in summer. We were slow to realize we had significant wetlands." The federal action, which meant that the West Eugene area had to be protected, came while then-Governor Neil Goldschmidt was in Japan marketing the land for industrial development. With the announcement, property owners feared their investment was suddenly worthless. City officials imagined potential jobs and tax money vanishing. Tempers were on edge, to say the least. The city handed the mess to Gordon, a gentle man with a graying beard and a gift for listening. Over the next several years, he worked patiently, with a wide variety of groups and individuals to engineer a plan that both protects the environment and provides for economic development. The West Eugene wetlands plan, which The Nature Conservancy helped craft, has won the support of corporate leaders, government officials and conservationists. It earned Gordon a 1992 National Wetlands award, an honor jointly sponsored by the EnvironmentaI Law Institute and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And, perhaps best of all, it has become a model for other communities facing wetlands challenges. "We ended up with government, environmentalists, landowners and businesses all supporting the plan," says Robert Moulton, an attorney who represents a number of wetlands property owners and a member of the Eugene Chamber of Commerce, "and it's because we were all brought into the educational process." THE WETLANDS ISSUE in Eugene first came to a head at Spectra Physics, a bar-code scanner manufacturer that, with 500 employees, is one of the largest firms in the city. The company came to West Eugene in 1980, constructing a one-story wood building on 12 of 32 acres it had purchased. Five years later the firm filled another eight acres and added a two-story manufacturing unit. In late 1987 Spectra Physics applied for a permit to fill its remaining acreage and erect a third building. Facility manager Chuck Missar remembers: "A city official called and said, "Chuck, I need lo talk to you." That's always a bad-news phrase. He told me wetlands had been discovered on our property in a n environmental assessment. "'Wetlands?!,' I said. I had been a member of The Nature Conservancy for 25 years and I thought I knew what wetlands were. You know, a tidal slough. But I was naive." Not only did federal wetland regulators deny the permit, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that Spectra Physics had filled the first 20 acres without authorization. Says Missar: "We had jumped through all the hoops. We weren't trying to slime anybody. lt's just that nobody locally was aware of the federal land-use planning requirement. The process wasn in place and there was no precedent." Missar, a string-bean guy with an easy, warm smile, continues: "At that point we could fight and make some lawyers rich, or we could say, 'OK, we don't agree, but we'll try to resolve the issues.'" The EPA agreed to hold Spectra Physics' fill permit application until the company "mitigated"--bought additional acreage in the same Amazon Creek watershed and did whatever was necessary to make it a functioning wetland . Over several years, Spectra Physics rehabilitated about 30 acres of wetlands near its plant. "We had consultants three layers deep," Missar jokes. They moved 15,000 cubic feet of fill in a rye grass field and created a winter pond. They burned and plowed invasive reed canary grass, then planted the native tufted hairgrass. They hired a nursery to grow other native plants. Spectra Physics spent about $900,000 on the project (about half of which has been reimbursed by city and state governments), all on the chance that government regulators would approve the work and grant the fill permit. But other developers were less willing to take the risk. As Missar says, "no one wanted to get arrows in their backs." WHILE CHUCK MISSAR was busy learning more than he thought it was possible to know about wetlands, the city hired Steve Gordon to lead them out of the quagmire. The veteran planner had to come up with something that would prevent the loss of wetlands, improve water quality, control stormwater, protect rare species, provide a stable development environment for business, help educate the public and allow for recreation. And it had to make business expansion a lot easier than it bad been for Spectra Physics. First Gordon put together a team of engineers, planners and financial experts from several city and county departments and from The Nature Conservancy, which manages about 350 acres of the West Eugene Wetlands as the Willow Creek Natural Area. Under Gordon, who believes hard work should be leavened with humor, the group became known as "The Wetheads." Gordon calls the process "25 percent science and 75 percent human interaction." Indeed, the key was citizen involvement, including contacting the 125 property owners who held from 1 to 200 acres in the area. Says Eugene wetlands coordinator Deborah Evans: "In looking at other models, things disintegrated into winners and losers. Because of that, we rejected the idea of a task force or a citizen advisory committee and instead involved as many citizens as possible." Between 1988 and 1991, the "Wetheads" led field trips to the wetlands, spoke to civic groups and school and university classes about wetlands issues, mailed information to property holders, and held eight public workshops. Thev also met individually with property owners and others wanting to ask questions or express concerns. The workshops drew as many as 150 people, and many property owners attended them all. The atmosphere was dominated by a sense of frustration--until early 1990. "In that workshop we finally had an official wetlands inventory and maps," Gordon recalls. "Some people were relieved to find they didn't own wetlands after all. Others realized their land did fit the definition and that they had a common problem that was caused by changes in state and federal regulations, not by local folks. They started to understand we'd all have to work together." As the public--especially property owners--found they could take officials at their word, the atmosphere mellowed. "All sides compromised, and those compromises make sense," says Deborah Evans. "They meet state and federal wetlands law and they return certainty to development." THE NATURE CONSERVANCY played an important role in the process. Gordon says. "The Conservancy is very good at negotiating with private property owners. They brought that tool box to the planning group. They're scientifically sound and interested in the broader ecosystem. And then they brought in Ed Alverson as staff in Eugene, so we had day-to-day contact with the Conservancy." The Conservancy had set the tone for wetlands protection a decade earlier when it leased its first acreage in the southeast corner of the West Eugene wetlands. The organization had identified the site as the best remaining piece of the Willamette Valley wet prairie--an important habitat for rare species that has been reduced to less than 1 percent of its original size. Ed Alverson was hired in 1991 as Willamette Valley stewardship ecologist for the Conservancy. He also serves as a wetlands consultant to the city, and his shared salary is a good example of the cooperative spirit that developed as the Wetheads proceeded. That's just how Catherine Macdonald likes it. She's the Conservancy's director of stewardship for Oregon. "Protecting biological diversity in an urban setting can involve complex land-use and engineering issues " she says. " By forming a partnership with the city of Eugene, we can take advantage of each other's expertise and resources. Alverson fords the east fork of Willow Creek, the only stream in the Amazon Creek drainage that hasn't been channeled for flood control. He heads for several acres where the endangered desert parsley is flourishing. This open area also fosters the endangered Fender's blue butterfly. On the west fork of the creek he checks a beaver dam, looking for the rare western pond turtle. These wetlands contain five other rare endemic species, such as the Willamette Valley daisy, Kincaid's lupine and the shaggy horkelia. "Our philosophy has always been to seek a win-win solution," Alverson says. "The wetlands plan is a reincarnation of that on a bigger scale." The Conservancy now owns 200 acres in West Eugene outright, and is negotiating to purchase 150 acres it manages under leases. The Conservancy's dream has been to connect its acreage to other pieces of wetlands through a greenway running north to Fern Ridge Lake. With the West Eugene wetlands plan, that dream could well come true in the next two decades. THE WETLANDS PLAN balances ecology with industry, protecting the most ecologically valuable areas while allowing development on the less important ones, says Steve Gordon. It calls for recreation and educational opportunity, with waterways, trails and an interpretive center where citizens can learn about wetlands. Central to both preservation and enhancement of the wetlands and to economic development is a "mitigation bank." In effect, this allows developers to pay for the kind of work Spectra Physics did on its own and hand off all the details of land acquisition and rehabilitation to the local or federal government. In addition. a streamlined permit application will reduce the papenwork wait from months to weeks. Federal agencies, including the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), will help implement the plan. The BLM has already purchased 18 acres of West Eugene wetlands and has offers pending on 200 more. Ultimately, the BLM will own about 1,000 acres in the area as a public trust. Daniel Bowman, BLM wetlands project manager, points to Danebo Pond, not far from his office. in the heart of the wetlands. "In 1967 this was a barrow pit. It filled in, and now there's beaver in it, and great blue herons. Mother Nature is taking it back. This makes me think that mitigation can work." He gestures to an expanse of grassland once used for trap-shooting but otherwise undisturbed. "This 75 acres is possibly the largest native grassland in the Willamette Valley. In these wetlands we're dealing with a habitat that is in much shorter supply than old-growth forest." Wetlands acquisition, rehabilitation and maintenance will cost an estimated $16.4 million over the next 20 years. Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, Representative Peter DeFazio and former Representative Les AuCoin helped appropriate $3 million in federal funds to the BLM. Other sources of funding include the state and city governments, the mitigation bank and private nonprofit organizations such as The Nature Conservancy. STEVE GORDON envisions a future in which business and industry coexist with nature, where businesses will locate in West Eugene because of the wetlands--not in spite of them. Employees could spend their lunch hours canoeing or bicycling, strolling among wildflowers or watching waterfowl. He even sees businesses using an image of environmental sensitivity to attract customers. To Gordon the future is bright for both ecology and economy. Others agree. Says Clayton Walker, a developer in Eugeane for 20 years and president of the West Eugene Community Association: "In the late 1980s we didn't know what to do and couldn't get any direction. I've supported the West Eugene wetlands plan because it has the goal of providing certainty for the future. It's a good approach. Now it's starting to look like there will be a demand for industrial development again. Most of us involved are now cautiously optimistic." The plan itself can be used in other communities dealing with wetlands management. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, which funded about 40 percent of the cost of planning, had that in mind from the start. They knew that many cities--16 in Oregon alone--are facing wetlands issues as they grow. "We were looking for a community we could use as a model," says William Riley, EPA regional wetlands program manager in the Northwest. "The plan had to be good for wetlands and also good for the communitv in terms of predictable growth: We got Steve Gordon's leadership and drive and a community that took a problem and turned it into an opportunity." The EPA has allocated $100,000 to help other communities adapt the West Eugene wetlands planning process to their own wetlands issues. Officials from at least 25 cities have expressed interest and Gordon already has made more than a dozen presentations at national and regional planners' conferences. CHUCK MISSAR STRIDES along Amazon channel, grasses waving halfway up his long legs. He's five minutes from his office, on the 30 acres Spectra Physics bought to rehabilitate. Pink, blue and white flags locate reintroduced native plants. Missar surveys stream bank and field, alert for red fox, pointing to a spot where a pair of Canada geese nest. A kestrel falcon soars above. "I wish we hadn't had to do this," he says. "We have enough challenges making scanners at a profit without becoming wetlands experts. But we did get what we wanted, our permit. The city retained us as a reasonably happy business and got a first-class wetland reconstruction that will be a standard. "Normally this situation would have all the elements of a battle, but there's been a lot of effort to communicate. People feel listened to," Missar says. Steve Gordon's style, openness and grace under pressure make a lot of it work." Gordon is humble about his role and his accomplishments, "It's not just me, you know," he says. "We have a wonderful community of active citizens, local elected officials and public agency staff, a supportive Congressional delegation, and state and federal agencies who wanted us to be a good example. "Most of all," he adds, "moving forward depends on trust and communication among environmentalists and developers. That's the magic." SALLY-JO BOWMAN is a freelance journalist who divides her time between Oregon and her native state of Hawaii.