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The
port's current plan would set aside 595 acres for marine
industrial use and leave 230 acres of open space.
Mikey
Jones, the Burlington-Northern rail engineer and environmental
activist who previously prevailed in a lawsuit against the
Port over the Rivergate industrial park is preparing to
sue to stop development at West Hayden Island.
After
resigning in August, Mike Thorne, who has led the port since
1991, agreed late last month to stay on the job indefinitely.
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To develop or not to develop--that is the question that the
Port of Portland can't seem to answer when it comes to West
Hayden Island.
Last week's reversal of what had seemed to be a major concession
to environmentalists just days earlier left Port watchers
puzzled by the Hamletesque behavior of Port executive Mike
Thorne and his staff. "They've got a habit of making categorical
statements and then backing away from them," says Bob Sallinger
of the Portland Audubon Society.
For most Portlanders, Hayden Island conjures up images
of asphalt, big-box retail and the second-tier hotels of
Jantzen Beach. But west of that unlovely agglomeration lies
an 827-acre parcel of undeveloped land that enviros say
is one of last unspoiled jewels in the metro area.
Since acquiring the land from PGE in 1994, the port has
suffered the slings and arrows of anti-development forces
who argue that the site, which contains more than four percent
of the remaining cotton/ash forest on the lower Columbia,
should be preserved as greenspace.
For the past two years, a task force that includes Sallinger
has wrangled over how best to reconcile the port's desire
to build a new grain terminal and automobile-unloading facility
with the wishes of nature lovers.
On Nov. 2, Thorne called together 28 leading environmentalists,
regulators and community activists. As he looked around
the conference room, Thorne may have been thinking of a
scolding email he received from Sallinger's boss, Mike Houck,
in the middle of October. In the email, Houck, the Audubon
Society's urban naturalist, slammed Thorne for not including
enviros and government regulators in the preparation of
the port's recently released Airport Master Plan Summary.
With the assistance of his new communications director,
Debby Kennedy, Thorne tried--or at least appeared to be
trying--to counter such criticism. During the Nov. 2 meeting
Thorne sought to reassure the environmentalists about the
Port's commitment to preserving natural areas. And according
to those in attendance, he implied that a decision about
the status of West Hayden Island was imminent.
Sallinger attended the meeting with high hopes. That morning,
he says, West Hayden Island project manager Paul Shirey
spilled the beans in a voice-mail message. "After a lot
of analysis, the conclusion we have reached is that the
market and the pursuit of permits that far in advance of
the markets does not make a lot of sense to us," Shirey
said in the message, which Sallinger transcribed and provided
to WW. Translation: The Port would withdraw the federal
permits needed to implement the long-planned West Hayden
Island development .
News spread quickly. "The phones were ringing off the hook
all day Friday," Sallinger says.
Susan Crisfield of Northwest Environmental Associates confirms
that many people in the environmental community believed
that a decision had been made.
But in an interview with WW the following Monday,
Thorne declined to provide specifics about his plans for
West Hayden--and he was little more forthcoming at the Port
Commission meeting Nov. 8, saying only that he wanted to
discuss how shifting market conditions might affect the
project.
But later that same day, Sallinger says, Shirey reversed
his earlier comments and told Sallinger that the port had
decided not to withdraw its development permits. (Shirey
was unavailable for comment).
For his part, Thorne told The Business Journal that
no decision about West Hayden Island had been made. "Any
speculation is totally unfounded," he said, in an article
published last Friday.
As for Sallinger, he feels as though he's been watching
a production in which the actors kept changing their lines.
"The whole process has been baffling to me," he says. "I
don't know what Thorne was thinking when he said, 'Any speculation
was unfounded,'" Sallinger says. "It was founded on things
they said the previous week."
Thorne is in Asia, but his spokesperson, Kennedy, says
the port will probably withdraw its federal development
permits.
So why wasn't that done at the Nov. 8 commission meeting?
"A decision of this magnitude is something that the commission
needs to be involved in," Kennedy explains. "Our agenda
is set weeks in advance."
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