Channel-deepening plan clears critical hurdle
Friday, August 1, 2008 12:51 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleAug. 1 Daily News editorial
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and lower Columbia River ports won’t be needing the 447-acre island owned by the Colf family after all. The Woodland family can continue farming and grazing cattle on Martin Island. It turns out that nearby Cottonwood Island, already owned by the ports, will satisfy the channel-deepening project’s mitigation needs quite nicely.
This apparent conclusion to the decade-long struggle over the Colf family’s land, reported Thursday by Daily News business writer Erik Olson, is both welcome and surprising. Welcome because it would appear that everyone benefits from the agreement, and surprising because it took 10 long years of back and forth between the family and the Corps to find a workable compromise. As Roy Heikkala, a spokesman for the Woodland family observed, “We got what we wanted, but it shouldn’t have gone on this long.”
Indeed, if the 650-acre Cottonwood Island largely satisfies the project’s mitigation requirements in that stretch of the river, it would seem that the long-running dispute could have been settled earlier.
It was clear that no one involved in the channel-deepening project wanted to exercise the government’s power of eminent domain, taking the Colfs to court in an effort to force them to sell the land at what a judge deemed to be a fair-market price. The ports voted this year to delay votes on eminent domain even as a July 2 state Department of Ecology deadline for acquiring the land approached. In late June, the state extended that deadline to Sept. 15 to allow more time for negotiations.
The agreement announced this week may owe much to deadline pressure. Perhaps negotiators simply reach deeper for workable compromises in the eleventh hour. In any event, the solution negotiators have arrived at is most welcome. It’s good for the Colfs. They are out the expense of carrying on the decade-long struggle, but they will not be forced to compromise their Woodland Bottoms farm land. Certainly, it’s good for the ports. “Not only do we save the public money from not having to buy (Martin Island),” Port of Kalama Director Lanny Cawley told Olson, “but we avoided condemnation.”
Most importantly, the agreement is good for the citizens who live and work along the lower Columbia River. It removes what may be the last obstacle to completing the channel-deepening project — a project that will significantly benefit the regional economy for many years to come.
TDN Bad Boy wrote on Aug 1, 2008 9:31 AM:
mole wrote on Aug 1, 2008 10:09 AM:
Atrucker wrote on Aug 1, 2008 1:11 PM:
they have found only certain areas attract terns . So if the place does not look good to them they will not come. Sand has been dumped on cottonwood island for a lot of years. "
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