August 12, 2009

Dirk Rohne Comments at the Clatsop County Commissioners meeting RE: LUBA Remand on Bradwood Landing proposal

Today we are here to discuss two questions for the Northern Star Bradwood Landing application. One deals with the question of what protect means, as in the context of statewide goals 16 and 17 and their application of the traditional fishing areas policy. Traditional fishing areas, fisheries habitat, fishing areas used by Columbia River Fishermen for over 100 years.

The other deals with scale, in the words of LUBA "the county erred in limiting the scope of 'development activities' to the upland areas covered by the LNG facility itself. If this project was clearly acceptable in these two regards we would not be here discussing it today. But we are here today. The county originally contracted with Mitch Rose to evaluate this project. The work he performed for the county made it clear this project does not fit in county or state planning guidelines. And so to prove that the work he did was correct some issues have been remanded or sent back, "the county needs to re-evaluate its conclusions" LUBA says. The issues of protect and scale are couched in legal definitions, planning documents and statewide planning goals.

On June 26th a memorandum was sent to the county from Jeff Bennett and Andy Jordan. The 4th point of the memorandum reads, "We have not made an independent determination as to whether the interpretations of legal terms and county policies, and the legal arguments set forth in the proposed findings, are legally correct." Legally correct, well since a majority of the county commissioners have no interest in independent analysis it could suggest the possibility that the conclusions made could be in error or at least not legally correct.

At the county commissions discussion of the LUBA remand on July 16 the Clatsop County Commission only made some minor stylistic changes. At our next meeting we received our own findings back that had been modified and supplemented, maybe with an additional 15 pages of material that had been added, deleted or restructured. Maybe a majority of 4 votes was inadequate and more work needed to be done on the application. Today I will stand up to recognize the very obvious. The project does not protect our fisheries, and it is not small to moderate in scale. I vote no on the modified and supplemented findings.