Narrator: Peter Tenow 
Interviewer: Donna Sinclair 
Date: Feb. 7, 2000 
Place: Portland, Oregon- Columbia Slough

Transcribed by Melissa Williams

[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]

DS: This is Donna Sinclair from the Center for Columbia River History. I’m interviewing Peter Tenow in Portland, Oregon on February 7, 2000.

PT: My name is Peter Tenow, I was born in 1929 and I was born in Nurishell, New York.

DS: How did you come to the Pacific Northwest?

PT: Well, I came to the west coast via California and started in Southern California after I graduated from college, spent a couple of years in the service and then in Southern California for about three years and moved to Northern California various places, Carmel and took graduate work at San Jose State University, and upon graduation went up to Washington to teach– I’m an artist or was an artist– to teach at a college up there for one year, quit that and it was more or less homesteading for another year and an offer came up in Oregon to teach at Linnfield so I went down to Oregon then and lived in Linnfield, lived in McMinville for probably ten or twelve years and then left for a little while, left for about a year, left the state for a year, came back and have been living in Portland ever since. I have no inclination to go anywhere else now [short laugh].

DS: How did you get involved in the Columbia Slough. You said you’ve been working on issues for about six years.

PT: Yeah, I moved to north Portland after living a couple of other places in Portland, I moved to north Portland and I kept running across this strip of water and didn’t know what it was, in some places it looked pretty good when you actually stood on top of a bridge perhaps and looked down on it and other places it looked terrible, absolutely desolate, no vegetation on the banks, and it seemed like probably some kind of a drainage ditch, it was larger than that, I didn’t know where it started and where it went and I got curious about it so I kept noticing it appear in different places, of course it has several arms so I didn’t know which particular arm I was crossing, whether I was crossing the main Slough or not. Well, at that time I started to get interested in Lightrail and I was becoming interested in activist work. So I called up the people whose names seemed to appear most often, Mike Houck being one of them, I remember speaking to him, and Susan Barthel, who I believe had been hired by the city shortly before that, maybe a year or two before that as a coordinator of Columbia Slough activities and particularly as a contact with citizens who might be interested in it and she gave me a great deal of information so that just interested me more, so I started to go to Columbia River Watershed meetings because there were people coming to speak about Slough problems and I figured I could learn something about the Slough by going to these meetings and Columbia Slough Watershed was, at that time, really not talking about anything substantive, they were in an organizational phase which lasted about a year, deciding how they were going to function as a council, how all of these disparate groups would be represented, some of whom had really different objectives entirely, could work together on a council. And those meetings were admittedly rough by anybody who went through that earlier stage, that formative stage of the Columbia Slough it was pretty rough, and not too much was covered. But they finally got it together, I didn’t go to all the meetings so I don’t know what happened and I don’t know exactly how it was resolved, don’t need to get in to that. But when these rough periods were smoothed out they worked out a way to function and got a facilitator, they started to act like a council and were inviting all these people from different agencies and so forth to come and speak and talk about the Slough and its problems. So after coming to several of these meetings Mike Houck asked me to take his place on the watershed council, he had so much other stuff to do that I agreed to do this, and have served on the council I think two or three years, and with the last meeting I’m dropping out for a period of time, I’m just vastly overextended. From that point I got involved in all kinds of things, many of which are related to the Slough But I work independently or with other groups, for example, I serve on the board of the Friends of Smith and Bybee Lakes and presently temporarily the management committee of Smith and Bybee Lakes. So there’s a lot of stuff when you live in this area you realize how important the Slough is to the community, particularly I’m interested in its recreational potential and so forth, but primarily my interest is in restoration, and improving it, undoing some of the damage which has been done to it, and to helping, with other people, to restore it to its potential at this point, it’ll never return at this point, never be anything like it once was. It was a natural system and a vast system and that extending through marshy terrain and historically this is what’s left. So I think that it is to be protected will all possible vigor. It represents a lot to the city and it is, after all, where all of the drainage from the watershed collects. So there are water quality issues as well and that’s a very serious concern to us. I became involved in the Slough clean-up so to speak, or the CSO projects, was a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee, which formed early for the determination of the routing and concern with the construction implications and so forth of the big pipe, and then I became a member of the Wastewater Treatment Plant Citizens Advisory Committee, which collects about seventy-five percent of the waste water in Portland, and sits basically right on the Slough and the restoration projects, particular small restoration projects going on right on the plant property. The crossing trail is crossing it, there’s a new bridge now, the eastern part of the Sewage Treatment Plant is being restored to a natural habitat area, and some of the area on the north bank of the Slough, just Southeast of Triangle Lake, will be restored too. So I’ve been involved in subcommittees that are working on these kinds of small fragments.

DS: Are you staying involved in those things…

PT: Yeah.

DS: Even though you won’t be attending [indistinguishable]?

PT: Well yeah. I’m taking some time off, I’ve been pumping for about five years now and this is like full time work for me, I am retired, but it got in my blood, once you start in those stuff and you start to learn about it, you find that you have a place, you have a part of the action and what’s difficult is quitting because you know the players, you know the people and you know how it works and you learn how to work politically and so forth and I work in all kinds of ways, I mean I lobby, I’m not, although I am in committees and advisory committees and so forth I don’t particularly groove on the standing work of going to committee meetings, I mean it’s not because I need a social life to go to committee meetings, but it is a way you meet the people, it is a way things are decided and fortunately in Portland we have a city that acknowledges citizen participation probably like no other city in there country or so they say, and it’s very easy here, relatively speaking, to have an influence on the way things go.

DS: Have you found that to actually be the case?

PT: Oh yeah. Absolutely. We’re getting things done.

DS: Can you give some specific examples?

PT: Well, I think the projects of the Slough itself, like, I would site no better example then revegetation Well, of course, we’re working in conjunction, I mean it’s BES that does the work, but the impetus and the citizen’s viewpoint comes from others. We have agency people represented heavily on the Columbia Slough Watershed, they teach us, they tell us what’s going on and we reinforce them and their efforts and we all determine, to some extent at least, which way those efforts will work, which way they’ll go. So I think that perspective, not to say that BES wouldn’t do this anyway, but that perspective can be very valuable. In the Sewage Treatment Plant we cover all kinds of things, I mean some of them quite technical as a matter of fact and we’re cut right into the process. Now, I happen to have a great deal of respect for the Sewage Treatment Plant people and the job that they’re doing and I think they’re trying to do it the least environmentally damaging way possible, I mean, last year they purchased a fuel cell to use some of the waste gases, so they’re interested in recycling. Prior to that they had constructed a composting facility that takes some of the solid waste from the treatment plant and mix it with wood chips and produce compost; it proved not to be economically viable, so that presently, I think there’s production of a small amount remaining that serves the city, but it isn’t the enterprise it once was because they found a farm out in eastern Oregon that will take the sludge from the Sewage Treatment Plant and what not. But these are problems. But these are processes that are really recycling processes you might say, and that’s where their interest is and really doing it the right way, conserving energy and that type of thing, and I am an out and out conservationist and environmental advocate, wherever I am this is what I talk on if I’m involved, and this is the point of view that I take and this is the point that I push. In north Portland neighborhood affairs, for example, and I’m involved in a lot of that kind of stuff, like Lightrail and planning, now we just had a conference at north– Commissioner Washington got a whole bunch of city players together, Charlie Hale, and probably about fifteen representatives from industry and political representatives together last week and we had this conference for planning for north Portland, particularly along the I-5 corridor. Well, in a presentation I always take the point of the environment, what this means environmentally, like I talk about the area Pen 1, just north of north of the Columbia Slough from Kenton neighborhood here and that area comprises the golf course and the PIR, and now a ninety-two acre mitigation site recently purchased last year by the Port of Portland and scheduled to be a mitigation site for their PIC, wetland fill.

DS: What is PIC?

PT: Portland International Center. That’s where the Lightrail goes out to the airport, it goes through that area. There will be two stations in what will be called PIC, it’s not constructed yet, but they’re building it. The interesting thing about this is one thing connects with everything else, particularly in north Portland, this is an activist paradise. If you’re interested in environmental activism, there is no place like north Portland, everything in the world is going on up here, and one of the reasons is that the Port of Portland is such a big player in those areas, owns so much property and the size and scope of their facilities is just enormous. So there’s a lot of work directly with the Port of Portland. One of the committees I serve on is the Mitigation Subcommittee of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council and we were involved with the Port of Portland in helping them select mitigation sites for the wetland field that they were going to do out at PIC. And this committee will now go on and just deal in mitigation sites in general.

DS: What criteria did you use for selecting mitigation sites?

PT: Well, the criteria here was an interesting one. There were several sites, we had a long list of about twenty and it was whittled down to about five or six, and most of them were in the east, either in the mid-watershed or out toward Fairview Lake, and these properties were being bought up and developed fast so. In fact, some property was probably sold when we were in the process of considering them over the year, you know, which sites would be most appropriate for the Port to use, and some of them were too small, we were considering everything, how the proximity, in one case one was very close to the Slough, and that would have been good to mitigate right adjacent to the Slough, extends the watershed, the boundary of the Slough itself. And so it’s generally better for it not to be isolated and near some other natural area. I know more about this area so I was advocating radio tower site, well they considered it too big, too much of an investment, but then after talking it over they determined that the Marine Division needed some mitigation property too, so maybe they should consider a larger site, and by acquiring a larger site now they could meet future needs as they saw them coming down the line for other things that they wanted to do, and they probably had in mind West Hayden Island, that’s another subject, you know [laughs]…

DS: Well, maybe we can come back to that.

PT: West Hayden Island, yeah that’s the next hot one.

DS: We’re working on Hayden Island too, by the way [indistinguishable].

PT: Yeah. So anyway the good thing about this area is, one of my favorite points is activity and the holistic view. And that’s another reason I tend to spread out so much too, is that I tend to look at things holistically, from a natural environmental point of view. You know [indistinguishable] don’t see these distinctions and the way, when habitat is lost it’s lost a little bit here, a little bit there ’til finally you don’t have any habitat, or the habitat you do have is so disconnected that it can’t sustain a population anymore of a certain species. So I tend to look at Pen 1 as part of an ecosystem and a great deal of it is used, I mean the PIR activity and the golf course. Both of these activities, by the way, up here, feature man-use, golfers and races, most of the activity at PIR is really small scale and it’s pretty confined to a small area, the cars go around the track, that’s for sure, but contained within the bounds of PIR, and this is really unusual, you have open spaces and you even have environmental areas, and it’s remarkably rich. According to a study made with the Natural Resources Management Plan for Pen 1, the area’s remarkably rich, I mean it affords real habitat, some of it is habitat for wintering birds, Canada Geese, for example and that tends to be a problem for the golf course and so forth. But you’ve got this very delicate balance you see. I consider that the Natural Resources Management Plan is like the Bible up there, it’s a document you can actually use and say “Look, this area’s designated,” like resisting an amphitheater on the new Expo property. It says in the NRMP that this designates that particular eight and half acres as a potential mitigation site, not that it will be a mitigation site, it’s actually zoned industrial, but the intent and the vision of the NRMP is for that to be a mitigation site. Now when the Port of Portland secured the ninety-two acres, my argument was it’s close to these other natural areas, just across North Forest Road you have Forest Lake and then you have the continuation of a corridor that extends across the northern boundary to a heron rookery, that’s a very important natural asset out there. And then across North Portland road you have Smith and Bybee Lakes, two thousand acres of wildlife are. So looking at all this together, looking at the contiguity of it all, it becomes a much more valuable area than this same number of equivalent acres you would have if it were in isolated pockets. If you look at it on a larger scale, we’re part of a system that goes all the way from the Sandy River to Ridgefield up in Washington. This is what we have to preserve so it’s not only a matter of saving each individual piece, it’s exerting a particular effort in saving those pieces that are naturally close together.

DS: How does the Port respond when you point something out like this.

PT: They were responsive. They know that, they have their own environmental person, but they’re driven primarily by economic and commercial concerns. For instance, with regard to airport, and the Port isn’t entirely free to decide what it can do and what it can’t do, I mean it’s regulated by the FAA and the airlines basically [indistinguishable] customers, so you know the interest of the Port, and they’re big and they’re powerful, and they’re a formidable opponent, when they want to do something you don’t want them to do, like the expansion of North Marine Drive, you have a hard time, you have to really get your act together, you can’t just jump up and down and emote, you’ve gotta really get down and convince them that you’re serious about this, and “This is why you shouldn’t build that railroad line and intrude into the Natural Resource Management area,” that’s got another NRMP up there, Smith and Bybee Lakes you see, which we relied on very heavily. So these folks went on for about a year and a half, I don’t think they had to go on that long, but part of the meetings was the Port trying to convince us of its important mission and contribution to the economy and so forth. Well, you know, they’ve got a lot of PR people and they’re being the Port. They act very much like a large corporation, although they’re kind of quasi-public and I think that needs real definition, they also need more citizen environmental representations on the Board of Commissioners, the Port Commissioners.

DS: Who’s on the Board of Commissioners?

PT: Well, the only one I know is, and I’ve been to some of the meetings, I understand they’re even changing the organization of the room up there when they have their meetings. Mike Thorn has made the statement several times that they have to be more concerned, they have to be more considerate of public concerns and environmental considerations and so forth and so on, so I do think they’re trying to move in the right direction, but with the Port it’s like three steps forward and two steps back, and they’ve learned some lessons in the past couple of years I think, particularly in confrontation, I think North Marine Drive was one and the other one was the airport deicing issue, I worked on both of these, you see, so that’s how the word gets out, you can’t stop it, it’s all got to do with the Slough, indirectly or directly, you know. Like this piece up here, this ninety-two acres, the purchase of that really changed the whole balance of the future of Pen 1

DS: Because of the possibility of building?

PT: There is a possibility of building because it’s zoned industrial, but to build up there, you can build on very little of that land and I know that because I was also on the citizens working group for the jail when the jail was gonna be sited out there see. So…

DS: I imagine you’ve worked with Troy Clark.

PT: Oh yeah, I’ve worked with Troy Clark, all there time, Troy is almost like a counterpart, we each take our own individual directions you know, but we served on some of the same– we served on Marine Drive Expansion, I don’t think he was on the jail one, but we’re both on the board of Smith and Bybee Lakes, we’re both on the Watershed Council, so I see Troy all the time probably about as much as anybody else.

DS: Can you talk a little but about there jail? You did actually talk to me a little bit about that.

PT: Well that jail, there was a selection committee, it’s responsibility was to figure out where the jail was supposed to be, so they came up with three sites in the end and one of them couldn’t be– it boiled down to three sites. One of them was in northwest Portland, and because of the danger of a chlorine plant near by, and because of subsurface contamination they would have had to have capped it, so there were environmental reasons of why they should not, and they really shouldn’t have located the jail there, it would not have been a good location. The first choice, in the first place, turned out to be a Port of Portland property out in Rivergate. Not far from where the Rivergate jail is going to be now, but on the south side of the Slough It was in what they call their Marine Sanctuary and the Port of Portland decided they did not want to make that land available to the county for a jail, they wanted to keep it for marketing, for leasing to marine related industry. So, the county backed off, there was a way for them to actually override the court on this and that was to get the city to condemn the property, and under eminent domain they could locate the jail out there. But the city, as you can understand, was a little loathe to do that, to do the bidding of the county to get the county’s jail out there. It could have been successful I don’t know, but probably not because the Port of Portland could have tied it up legally for so long that, you know, they had to get this jail built, not right away, but very soon, so because the money is allocated, the bond measure is passed and so forth, so they decided not it go that route, and that would be the way to fight it. If I were the Port that’s the way I’d fight, you just tie it up in legal knots and the county sees it’s approaching the deadline to get this jail built and they still haven’t resolved it legally, you know, so they saw that, no doubt. And the last site, which was really a second site as they organized their priorities, was Radio Towers. Well, since the Port wasn’t going to release Rivergate, Radio Towers became the site. So that was an interesting thing, Sheriff Noley came around, he talked about it to us, to all the neighborhoods, the outreach program in that was terrific and I have great respect for the way the sheriff’s department and the county handled the whole thing, excepting they made one mistake, against the urging of some of us, particularly Mike Houck was certainly sounding this note. Mike knows more about this stuff than any other ten people put together, the guy’s amazing and it’s a pleasure to work with him, he’s an incredible individual, some people probably hate him, but I’ll tell you I’ve never seen an operator like that in my life, not only that but he knows what he’s doing and he knows how to do it. Anyway, he was saying you’re not gonna get this through the Corps of Engineers and DSL permitting, they’re pretty tough on wetland fill, if you fill wetland now, I mean, this is what we rely on and this is one of the jobs, is to follow up DSL and the Corps just like airshed people, you have to keep pushing the agencies to do what they should be doing, they don’t take the initiative, they’re battered, they’re hit on all sides, they’ve got industry and the legislature and everybody else would just as soon there be no regulations, I mean this legislation, I’m expressing a deep political bias, let me tell you, but I don’t care, you know [laughs], there’s a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans down there, you know. So anyway, Sheriff Noley himself was going around and talking to groups…

[Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]

PT: … this neighborhood to the jail, we were not opposed to it, and that’s really odd, and so uh…

DS: Why do you [indistinguishable]…?

PT: Well, first of all, we don’t have a NIMBY, there are different sentiments expressed and different attitudes expressed in different parts of north Portland. For example, like out in St. Johns they don’t want anything, they don’t want any public agencies, I think they didn’t even want a health clinic or something, and I don’t know what the reasons are, I can conjecture, I can conjure up what their reasons might be but…

DS: [Indistinguishable] historical connections…

PT: Basically, it’s NIMBY. And here we’re probably– it would be considered progressive, because we’ve been strong advocates for Lightrail, seeing what it could do to helps us in redevelopment in our little downtown area down here, little commercial district. Some people probably felt, in the neighborhood, some of the active players maybe on the neighborhood association and Kenton Action Plan probably felt that there could be some benefits coming out of this to Kenton and everything, but mainly we didn’t see this as a threat, the main concern of the neighborhood was the height of this building. There was general resistance to the scale of the thing more than anything else is I think is what it was, I mean it was gonna be like fifty-five feet high, you know, and how could you hide it, where should you locate it to keep it as inconspicuous as possible? Well, all this came out in the subsequent talks, but anyway in the beginning, during the formative stage, when I was called in I said look, I will serve on this committee, but I want you to know, and I will serve in good faith, I’m not gonna wreck it from within, but I’m opposed to the jail being here, and I’ll tell you why I’m opposed to the jail being here, and I think this should be a mitigation site. So the idea that this should be a mitigation site I’ve had for a long time, Mike Houck longer than I, we didn’t know how we were gonna get it done, you know. Along comes the jail, there’s a process by which you can create a mitigation bank and then other industries and entities can buy into that bank and work off, like they’re filling a half acre of wetland on their property, and they could buy maybe a couple of acres into this mitigation bank. But that’s kind of cumbersome and it can be worked out in various ways. It can be worked out by land trusts, or and the agencies that have a part in it they can be formation, sport of a consortium of groups, but it’s kind of complicated and somebody has to take the initiative, and actually there has to be the money there, you have to have the money to actually buy the property. OK, so when the jail comes in, the county’s gonna buy the property and they’re gonna put a jail on it, and they’re gonna do so much wetland fill, and they were very good about really being intent on doing the best possible mitigation on the remainder of the property that they could, I mean really a good job. So they hired Adolphson and Associates, Adolphson, they’re consultants, they do good work, and I worked on the subcommittee in which we worked that out, but I’m getting ahead of myself, I wanted to say this. When I came on to that committee, I said it’s not a jail per se that I oppose, and I was one of four representatives from the neighborhood association, it’s not a jail per se that I’m against, and although I’m concerned with the location with the jail, I’m primarily concerned with the environment, and frankly, as I see it, I don’t think you’re gonna get this permitted, I think it’s just too difficult. It’s gonna be turned down by the DSL and the Corps, and the county eventually, but I said I’ll serve on this committee if the jail is going to be here, if somehow you can squeak this through against my opposition, because I’m gonna be testifying at the hearings, it’s a full review, against the location of a jail on this site, and if I lose and you get the jail at least I want to be here and have something to say with where that jail goes. And that was kind of a minority view, the rest of the neighborhood was not at all concerned about the jail being here, you know, we didn’t considered it a threat, you know, criminals were gonna escape, if anything you have more security around the jail, and it’s a quiet neighborhood and we saw it as something that would probably create less traffic then maybe if an industry developed on the same amount of land, the same usage out there you’d have more traffic impact perhaps, and maybe there’d be some perks and you’d get this good mitigation. So it isn’t all bad, it’s just I didn’t think anything should be built out there, which is kind of a radical point of view, but I didn’t think anything could be built out there considering where you could build in order to aid the wetland, it would be a very strange kind of development. So, he said OK, and I said well, that’s good faith, these people are OK; they know I’m opposed to this thing, they take me on this my own personal perspective. So then we started to work on things, work on where the jail’s gonna be on the property and I took a different view than the other three Kenton Neighborhood people, I was the maverick there because they though it should up in the northwest corner, I said no, that northwest corner is gonna destroy the productivity between the mitigated parts of the site and Forest Lake, and at this point, interestingly, Expo came in, some kind of a parking quid pro quo deal and then there was another parking quid pro quo deal with the city, so there would be shared parking with PIR and shared parking with Expo, you know, overflow parking. So all these kind of deals were going on between the city, Expo, and the county, but one of them was that Expo made eight and a half acres available to be added to the mitigation on the jail site that would be the exact area where Expo now proposes to have an amphitheater. That area’s valuable because it’s a finger that comes down basically between Radio Towers and Forest Lake. With it mitigated, it’s designated as a mitigation site, it creates that corridor that I’m talking about, it preserves the conductivity to Forest Lake, not only that you could even create a little recreational enclave, picnic table area, which would be very close to the parking area that already exists on the south of Forest Lake. So when you look at the map, and the scheme, and what could be done, you start playing around with the design of that area, you see how important that area was. That was recognized, certainly, and stated in their report when we came up for mitigation plans at Radio Tower site, uh, that was one of the points that was raised, the importance of the addition of this eight and a half acres. By this time the county decides, yeah, that’s right we’re not gonna get this through, it’s just too much risk, we’re gonna continue this for another year or so only to fund out maybe we can’t build this jail here anyway, maybe we’ll be turned down, the permit will be turned down by DSL and the Corps, mainly the Corps. It’s a joint permitting procedure and they have a lot of the same requirements, but not in all cases, so it’s gotta go through both of these major hoops. And we had, I think Fish and Wildlife was on our side, you know, the various agencies, you know pretty much where they’re gonna be, they’re gonna [laughs] always be for preserving habitat, like they are now up in west Hayden Island, so they abandon the whole project; that made the area available; then it was on the market, we knew the price, we knew what the seller was going to sell it for, the Port had a higher price, they somehow got it in their head, or maybe it was convenient for them to say that they couldn’t purchase that price for, I think their price was eight million or something like that. I eve went to the assessors office to find out what the accessed value of the property was. It became available as a mitigation site, and it was seen more as a mitigation site, and only a mitigation site, after the county pulls out, I mean that’s a real statement to the owner, that’s saying I’ve got a problem with developing this property [laughs]. You know if the county wants to build a jail there and they can’t get the damn thing through, you know, this guy knew any great plans of developing that area commercially just probably were dim. So then the Port came in and purchased the property, and now we had this first amphitheater thing with the Blazers, we fought that and beat it and we’re not fighting the other one, and we’re doing this in a different way though, we’re asking that the Metro take it off their rolls as part of Merck and they dedicate that land to Metro Greenspaces…

DS: Do you think they’re responding to that?

PT: Well, we don’t know. Ed Washington has asked the Metro attorney to write that proposition for the Metro council to consider, as soon as we find out that that’s going before the council we’ll start to lobby like mad, there are a couple of us working real, Richard Elmeyer and myself are working on this real hard, and we’re working with Ed Washington and throughout the Chairs too, through the North Portland Chairs who are pretty much behind us on this. But you’re kind whistling into the wind, when you meet with chairs, and I meet with the chairs and I work with the neighborhood office and everything, the neighborhoods are very focused in on themselves, what can we get out of this, that’s kind of their attitude, their thinking is pretty local [laughs], first me, then my family, then my neighborhood and it goes on like that; on environmental issues you can’t be that way, you have to kind of take things in context, you have a more holistic view, so, part of my work is just driving these pints home about the conductivity and things like that. So it’s a real education process going on. Environment is not on the minds, it’s not a very big thing on the minds of most people, it really isn’t, you have to really drive hard to punch the thing home, you gotta really work on it, you know, and then people come around. I think that without getting in there and going to these meetings and saying look this is what we’re losing, and this is a another vision for this space that otherwise they would have thought gee an amphitheater, an amphitheater in the woods, just think of that, that’s a groovy idea; never questioning if that’s good land use for that property, or no familiarity at all with the Natural Resources Management Plan, or what goes on up there, or that sensitive balance I’m talking about, or even the hydrology and -it’s a very interesting hydrological system up there. So basically that’s kind of like my backyard, that’s my turf, I’ve claimed that and I make a point to know everything that’s going on up there. Like on the PIR master plan…

DS: You said you were involved in it.

PT: I was on that, I was on the working group for that. It started out as I was only working with environmental, but there were only three people on it and the meetings were downtown and one of the people wanted to drop out so I got on to that, but that’s got the trail, you know, a portion of the forty mile loop trail going right along the southern bank and that’s a Slough thing and because it’s a Slough thing that’s my concern. And at the end of that particular lake is the sewage treatment plant, and then other projects I worked out there, so this is why it’s difficult to quit. I know how these things fit together.

DS: Are you trying to pull out slowly?

PT: Yeah. I’m trying to pull out temporarily. Well, I dropped out of the, and I hated to do it because actually I love this work. [Talks about his rental home he’d like to fix up and how he would like to improve his health]. But I love it, I simply do not have enough time, I’d continue to do it, you give me another twenty-four hours a day, I’d do it because I love this as much as anything, I love this as much as doing art when I was an artist, I swear to God, it’s great. And there’s a feeling of accomplishment, we lose a few, we win a few, you know, but you figure out what’s doable, you dig in, you learn all about that issue, and my philosophy is you should know as much about this issue, or more about this particular issue than anybody else and you should be there first, in other words be proactive. And when you get the connections, you know how to do that, when you start to learn who these guys are, and they know you, and you start to develop a certain amount of credibility then you can actually get things done, just like you can get things done that people on the inside can’t get done. ‘Cause they have bosses and everything, they have the whole political, I don’t have that political dimension. I can say exactly what I want to say, I don’t believe in trashing people, I think I’m a pretty responsible activist, and being fair, and over a period of time there are successes, when you stop that amphitheater, that’s a good example, we were against huge amounts of money, I mean in the worst way they wanted to build that Blazer amphitheater out here.

DS: Would you consider that one of your greatest successes?

PT: Well, that was one of the hardest battles we ever fought. Marine Drive– they’re not gonna build a railroad down there, they’re taking an entirely different route up there, that’s another success. There are many successes. No question about it they would have gone a different way. Yeah, I mean, I don’t sit down and enumerate them, but I feel that there’s a large measure, I’m amazed at the measure of success. Look, we’re winning a few battles, we’re losing the war, I recognize that as much as anybody else, we’re definitely, in the long run we’re losing. No question about it, I figure winning a few battles make you feel better than sitting down whining and not doing anything about it. So you get the feeling that you’re actually getting [laughs] something done.

DS: Do you think…

PT: Whenever I go to a larger scale I think we’re losing habitat, and what we’re not losing is being invaded by nonnative species like Reed Canary Grass, like Purple Loose Strife, like Amalia Blackberries, that’s the other battle on the ground and we’re just being overrun by these invasives. You know, for the little bit that’s left my policy is don’t allow another inch to be lost, not another inch. And in order to do that, the best people to do that are the people that are on the ground, right there working locally. So I said that’s what they mean when they say, they use all these terms, like I didn’t know what networking meant before I went into this, what the hell is this? They’re always talking about networking. I sure is hell know what networking is now. You got take like two dozen people and you recycle them, they all know each other [laugh], and then you have the computer, you have e-mail, and so you kind of multiply yourself, that’s networking, and if something’s going on I know who’s working on that, I can call them or they’ll call me or something like that. OK, now I’ve got networking down, I know what that is. And the other one is, that I’ve been thinking about lately is, oh yeah, I remember in the ’60s we all wanted to think locally and, what is it…

DS: Act locally.

PT: Act locally. And that’s true. So if you’re on the ground you can know more about it than anyone else and at else and at least you can claim you know more about it, I’m not talking about the technical stuff, but that’s one of the reasons I wanna take time off. I often feel I’m over my head, I’m pretty good at the engineering part of it and I can pick up on that fairly fast, but I really constantly feel I should really know more about watersheds [laughs] generally and everything. I just jumped into his and I’ve learned on the job, and I’ve read thousands of pages of documents, and you can pick it up, if they’re well-written you can learn that way, not only can you learn about that issue, but about how bank stabilization is done and you get on the web and figure out who’s doing what, with regard to sewage treatment plants or something. So your issue that information is out there so I just like more time to do research and then the idea is when I come back I’d be more issue oriented and maybe uh, because I’ve got the connections now, more issue oriented and pick two or three issues, like Goal 5 which is coming up. I tune into the larger issues sometimes, but more or less, just as a kind of a lobby, I testify and stuff, you know, [laughs] they need a lot of bodies up there, and my issues are related to something like they certainly were with Title 3, and now Goal 5 will deal a lot more with buffers and stuff. Well I’ve learned a lot like on the new Rivergate jail thing we created a buffer zone of two hundred feet. In the process of doing that we had the experts, we had landscapers out there, all these people are talking about this stuff, so this is the second or third time I’ve been involved in this role, you come to know pretty much what’s it’s about, how you have to plant and what you plant and this type of thing, you get lists of things and stuff, so get to be kind of a– not an expert, but you get to know about that, so you can be of some use. So that’s basically the way I work and I’m talking pretty much that’s the way it appears to me, it started out all over the place, but it all relates.

DS: Do you find that the neighborhood is involved, do they feel a connection to the Slough? 

PT: Yeah, they do, they do but more or less in a picturesque way or they may view it more as more of a recreational asset, which I think is great because that familiarizes, that gets people out on the Slough, every year we have like fifty more people going, we had, I don’t know a hundred and fifty boats or something. Well, the theory is get people to know it, to know it is to love it, when they get down there invariably they will say, my god, when you’re in a boat you don’t see that the bank is twenty five, you’re down in the water and you look up and you see these trees and everything that are twenty five to fifty feet deep if there are tress at all, and on the dikes you can’t plant trees on the dike because of the Corps regulations for maintenance and it would destabilize the dike and so forth, well, we’re working on that too.

DS: I talked to Dave Hendricks about that the other day, what do you mean you’re working on that?

PT: Oh, well Dave Hendricks and the Drainage District, those people are great, I talked with Groncznack too at this meeting, we just had this big sort of summit, north Portland planning meeting, it was actually amazing a week ago, and he was at that and I talked with him, it was the first time I talked to him, I talk with Dave Hendricks a lot more because Dave’s the guy that goes to Watershed meetings and he works a lot with BES because within these dike districts hydrology, there are water quality issues like there’s what’s the condition of the sediment, they’re doing a study up here which will determine to what extent and how they will do the dredging up here, but those people are really our allies, and he gets frustrated, Dave gets frustrated by some of the regulations of BES and so forth, I know that, but he is doing something up at Bridgeton that’s very interesting. Bridgeton is a little fragment of the Slough and he’s doing this alternate side casting method to create a meandering Slough, where before that there was a straight Slough Well, this is a way of slowing down water flow, which means that you get less sediment loss and so forth, there are certain advantages to this. But it also makes it nicer looking, but it also creates, most importantly, habitat, it creates natural shelving and riparian zone, and he’s very interested in doing this. We…

DS: Yeah, I was very impressed.

PT: We have to address that problem out in Pen 1, both for the golf course, these remnant sloughs and lakes and so forth, and let’s face it the protection and the habitat riparian zone, you know, there’s no shelving, it’s pretty bad and on golf course I think they need much bigger buffers and…

DS: [Indistinguishable] runoff in the gold courses too…

PT: Yeah, the runoff, apparently they’re better than most. They have been certified by the New York State Audubon, which is an independent Audubon, they have a program of certifying golf courses and we are one of them. They go into the use of pesticides, and insecticides, and so forth, and I know Jesse Goodwin, I’ve also worked with him and tried to get a little bird housing, bowling project going out there for schools, you know, the New York Audubon has a program where a golf course adopts a school, they get involved in educational programs, so operating on that idea I tried to get Kenton school together with the golf course and Jesse Goodwin was interested in that, he’s a cooperative guy. But you have to understand he’s between all the golfers who are bitching about all the Canada Geese turds on the fairways [laughs]. And it is a problem, you can go out there and you can see it so I can see where golfers, who are basically intercede in golfing and nothing more when they go out there, they would rather see clean fairways. So anyway, he’s between these people. Well anyway when you can get a little project going, and building birdhouses out there is away of getting back the species that we want here and that we’re losing. The other thing was it didn’t get funded, and that was handled throughout the Columbia Slough Watershed actually Jennifer Thompson at Columbia Slough, working out of the Watershed office in there. I usually say people and Marv works, the fishing guy, he’s on the Columbia Slough Watershed committee and everything, so basically [laughs] you’ve got a collection of about fifty people. Anyway, that was not passed, but he’s for this too, he’s for what can we do for the environment, but he might be we’re gonna have a master plan out here for the golf course, we have one for PIR, we’re gonna have a master plan for the golfcourse this year, we’re gonna create one, and we’ll see what wee can get done, I’m interested in pushing on creating more natural environment around these pond and Slough areas. And the Drainage District is all for it, David is definitely for it, he’s hot. It’s waterborne dredging, which means you don’t have to have a big contraption killing all the vegetation on the bank to dredge from the bank. You put this machine, I have yet to see it, we’ve made an appointment to go out there, and I want to see the machine, I want to see the machine working and everything. He’s got this kid of spider machine and what it does is it dredges, it just sits in the water, floats in the water and it just throws the casting anywhere you want to throw it, but it operates from the water, doing far less damage. Well, first there has to be sediment testing, they have to get four results to sediment testing and analyze, find out whether it’s a good idea to even disturb the sediment, because some of it’s contaminated, there’s contamination in Forest Lake, for example. So, but he’s for, definitely, so his idea, and I think we agree completely on this, as long as you’re going to do dredging this is your opportunity, there’s no money to do this dredge, there’s no money to improve this habitat unless somebody wants to use this as a mitigation project. You don’t have to have land necessarily to work off your mitigation credit. Say I’m a property owner and I have to fill some wetland and the Corps and DSL say it’s OK, but you have to do so much mitigation, you either enhance, different rations for different kinds of mitigation you do, different intensity of mitigation. Like if you create new wetland, buy, that’s one to one, but if you’re enhancing you need three times as much to enhance, you have to enhance three times the amount of wetland that you’re filling, so these regulations occur across the board. And somebody comes along and they said, well, I don’t have the land to do this, they say, well, we’ve got some projects up here in Pen 1, particularly if it’s a project in Pen 1, you would mitigate in Pen 1, and I’m very strict about that. First of all you mitigate on site, second of all you mitigate as close to that site as possible, you know, so forth, so those are my own values.

DS: [Indistinguishable] activity…

PT: Well, you have to look at a lot of things over all. You have to say, well, there are all these other little sites up there, but it would be better if we combined this with the project in south Slough and made this one site a much bigger development because it is, after all, the richest habitat area in all of Pen 1, see. So that’s why I like getting involved in mitigation, you have to look over the whole scheme of things and see, and you’re constantly establishing these priorities, you get the biggest bang for the buck on mitigation. So his ideas, and I think it’s just great, and he’s all for it, he’s really enthusiastic about this, so I want to give maximum support to him, he’s got everyone interested in what he’s doing up there in Bridgeton, you know, the Corps watching it, Fish and Wildlife is watching it, so forth, they want to see how that works. And the crazy thing about this is it all seems kind of primitive a low tech, some of these things have never been done, that’s how early we are in restoring the environment. I mean this is open to discussion and the idea of Bridgeton being an experimental project is really great, we’re not doing it on the Slough, we don’t want to muck around on the Slough until we figure out how this works, then apply it in other areas. Well, he’s got this technique of alternate side…

[Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]

PT: … he’ll say BES is in the middle of all of these things, they are one of the people who have to issue a permit in any kind of development, and fortunately this part of BES, and what I see at BES, I’m highly respectful of the hard working knowledgeable people at BES, and a lot of them are my friends, and as an activist you either start out with the idea you’re a citizen they work for the city, and it’s us against them, and it isn’t that way at all, it’s not that way, I mean there are people just as dedicated, or more dedicated, on the inside to what they’re doing, I mean they’re serious about really wanting to save the environment, improve the environment, and you just single these people out on these issues and you work together. I don’t see any difference between the city and the county, I mean often I’m pushing beyond where they want to go, I’ll admit that. They know, that they should know that that’s my role, but basically it’s in the role of reinforcing what they know they should do anyway, that’s the way I look at it, and my role is to always be out there in front, as an activist you’re always pushing, you’re always pushing. The point of that push is support ,and you have a lot of people in BES and the agencies that you can work with and you can reinforce and you work with these people, not against these people. Now, sometimes it’s infuriating because you see they are falling down, there is something they should be doing and you can understand the reasons, they’re underfunded and they don’t have enough man power, and they’re besieged in the course of DEQ and you do have to push [laughs]. You know, I don’t think that they’re as hard as they should be, and I do understand their position. But basically you can’t do it just as a activist, you have to work with these people and find out really about what their responsibility is and certainly what the regulations that they stand by are. And if you see the regulation, and this you’re not doing, you know, then you really call them, they’ve gotta do something. But there aren’t enough people to go around, sometimes, like for violations on the Slough, you know, there’s a lot of regarding that goes on with some of these industrial properties or, doing stuff in their backyard and they just casually dump that stuff over the bank. I’ve reported several incidences to whoever it is you report it to, sometimes it’s a BES issues, sometimes it’s a BES industrial issue, there are jurisdictions, sometimes it’s buildings, the Bureau of Buildings of the City, sometimes it’s DEQ, sometimes it’s DSL. So you have to know which one of these agencies to contact, but if you start with any one of them they’ll tell you, that’s not my jurisdiction, that’s their jurisdiction and so forth and get them up here to look this over, this looks like a violation, because a lot can happen and you wouldn’t even know it’s happening. Columbia Steel Castings…

DS: You said you walked the dike.

PT: Oh yeah, I walked the dike, and the guy who does this a lot, because he’s out in the canoe more than anybody else is Troy, Troy’s great, a great guy. He’s been a round a long…

DS: I’m going canoeing with him.

PT: Yeah, he’ll tell you all about it. He takes canoe trips out there and he loves it, he just waxes eloquent out there, and birds, you know, he is a great guy and a real key player, and uh, hell of an activist, and tremendous respect for him. So you all these agency people, all these department people on the council, so this is where it all comes together. The council is really kind of at the center of things. Now, it’s hard to get used to it because it operates by consensus, and I find that’s kind of frustrating, I mean, I’m really forward and all this nodding to heads and everything, I mean how do you word this thing in such a way that you can get consensus? Well, you take out a lot of the controversial stuff [laughs]. Takes some getting used to, but….

DS: Is that effective? Do you think that’s effective?

PT: Yeah, it is effective, sure. You know the good thing it does is that it does people who basically have different interests like the Columbia Corridor Association, that doesn’t represent my interests, they represent commercial landowners and, uh, you know, they state their point of view and this is where you hear it, this is where you get to see the people that are having to implement requirements under these regulations, and you hear their side of it. Well, geez, you’ve gotta do this and you’ve gotta do that, and these regulations are inconsistent and all this kind of thing, so you hear that wrap. And the other thing is, you get to learn, and I think, maybe I’ve mellowed out too much or something, but if you do things in good faith and from a basis of no personal stuff, this is tough stuff, there’s nothing to be afraid of, if you don’t trash people and you don’t get personal about it and so forth, and the Slough shows it’s perfectly all right for there to be these disagreements, I mean this is natural, but you continue to work, you continue to sit at the table; I mean you can have an out and out, you know, in kind of a nice way, that was one of the earlier problems with the formation of the Slough, that there were some people who were just out of the bounds of good behavior at a meeting. You can’t destroy, that kind of good will is hard to come by and it’s basically, it ‘s a trust and it’s a respect for the other person and their point of view, it’s not your point of view, but it was very hard for me in the very beginning to get used to that, there were people who really disagreed with me, now it doesn’t phase me, personally, I took it kind of personally at the beginning, you know, and that’s kind of like when you don’t know your enemy the situation can get real dangerous, you start stereotyping, and at the meeting you see these people all are people, they all have a different point of view, I don’t agree with them, and I will sate that, but there doesn’t have to be recriminations and all this kind of stuff, that’s not good activism; Mike Houck showed me what good activism is, and that is he gets in, and I think he’s a great proponent of getting in there proactive activism, which is you see something coming down the pike, everybody else is busy with other things, but you in particular see one thing forming and you put things together and you say, we’re headed for trouble her, you know, you get in and you try to head it off, and the earlier you can do this, the earlier you can diffuse it, the earlier you can dispatch that issue, the better off you are, the less time you’re gonna have to spend on it. It’s this way with the amphitheater thing. This is a big hullabaloo we’re out there with big placards kind of a thing, that may get the job done, but it’s a last ditch report, newspapers, I would use that if necessary, not the placard thing because it’s not my style, and I’ve been to plenty of rallies. But the thing is getting in before that and talking to people who say, look there’s gonna be trouble, I’m gonna resist this, I’m gonna be there until this issue dies. You’re gonna have to confront me right to the end, I will not leave this issue, I’m gonna stay there and oppose this thing and this is what we did with the amphitheater and they kept pushing beyond that. Now I think with the second amphitheater thing we got them to do a master plan, another success, as I talk I can name successes. Another success is they weren’t going to do a master plan, they got as conditional use permit for the next expansion of building D, but for the rest of the site they badly needed a master plan. We saw that…

DS: Where is that exactly?

PT: Expo property up here, Exposition Center, it’s between Pen 1 and Marine Drive. Well, the neighborhood in this case, the neighborhood association said no we’re not going to, they had to consult with the nearest neighborhood which was Kenton for getting their conditional use permit. The neighborhood, and I worked with Joe Engles, the chair of the neighborhood association, so we knew what we were doing, we knew how we were operating on this amphitheater thing, pretty much convinced him that the value of this is Greenspaces. In the neighborhood I’m the chair, I’m kind of the environmental person in Kenton, now that doesn’t mean anything, basically he gives me all this environmental stuff, so he stopped it as the neighborhood closest to, he objected to their being issued a conditional use permit for building D, and they had to get building D, building D is just a rebuilding, they’re building a new building where there was an old building, it doesn’t have much impact all on itself, it’s squarely on the property. But, they at the same time we’re trying to squeak by this amphitheater for that area I’m talking about, that eight and a half acres and we said this is piecemealing, they want this under another conditional use permit, well that’s the way they slide it through, the neighborhood said not good on the conditional use permit for building D, and they were furious, so it looked like the just, put on the brakes, threw a monkey wrench right in the thing, and this is a power citizens have, real power, you know. People talk about, oh they do what they’re gonna do anyway, that’s nonsense, they’re not in there fighting right, you know. So the condition was they do a master plan for the entire Expo, OK we’ll grant our consent for a conditional use permit for building D if all building beyond that is under a master plan, in other word you issue a master plan and tell us when you’re gonna start this master plan process ,and we were all pushing for that at one point, that was the big point because we saw under a master plan you’d have to consider the true implications, the true impact of an amphitheater down on this site. But it wasn’t a gimmick, it wasn’t a tactic, it’s just that we saw, I took a look at that, three-quarters of that property up there is parking space, if you want an amphitheater put it on that space itself and build a parking structure. Of course, you come down to the real problem, the real problem is always money, the money to do that, they say, well, it’s just not feasible if you have to build a parking structure, well I don’t know how many times…

DS: They have Lightrail going through…

PT: Lightrail is going right through there. However, it’s another reason against an amphitheater down in that southwest corner. Lightrail station would be a quarter, half mile away, you think people are gonna walk from the Lightrail station? So it doesn’t serve the coordination between land use and transportation goals of Metro and here it is Metro’s property, Metro already owns the property, so we could embarrass the hell out of them. When it comes time to lobby, they’re gonna have to support putting an amphitheater down there, they don’t have, the point is that you put together all of the reasons why and they’re very strong reasons why not just environmental, but according to the objectives of Metro itself, it’s in defiance of those objectives, and its their property and they’ve got a greenspace program for acquiring open space and they already own this space. There’s no way they’re gonna get away, if they do this in the process they’re gonna be so badly embarrassed and they’re gonna be embarrassed by people who support Metro, like myself, we’re gonna absolutely rub there face in it, we’re gonna wipe ’em out on this thing. The other counselors haven’t taken it up yet, but that’s why…

DS: Ed Washington has.

PT: Ed Washington has. Ed Washington now is really, he came before a chair’s meeting, he said OK what do you guys want, we said we want amphitheater off the table, we want that to go over to Parks, we want a master plan, we want this, we want a summit of North Portland, he did all these things. We had our summit, and this was an important meeting, I mean, we had representatives from the mayor, the mayor herself wasn’t there, Francis Coney couldn’t make it, but you know, commissioners and agency people, DOT, PDOT, geez, you know, all the higher up…

DS: Where was it held?

PT: It was up at Expo. And they listened, it was for them to listen, they listened, that’s all they were there for. Ed Washington called them together, convene this thing, see we couldn’t have done this without Ed, see, but that’s another way of how you work. We worked Ed and really said look Ed we’re gonna embarrass the hell out of you, you’re not doing anything for us on this, at a meeting he said, OK what do you want me to do, he suggested the summit for God’s sake, so that was great, that was really great, and you can work with these people, he’s up for election, you know, Rex Burkholder’s running against him and he’s gotta sound a little more environmental [laughs], we know that, he knows that, everybody knows that. But this is it, this is the fun of it, it’s a lot of fun. So four of us gave a presentation, and I took the environmental as usual, I took the environmental thing, and John Wygan, who’s a professional planner, retired, and Richard Elmeyer and Walter Valenta and all the other chairs were there and all those people listened to us, we don’t know what’s gonna happen, we need to follow up, we’ll have another chairs meeting and then determine the strategy from here because Ed said don’t let this drop. So this will be an integrated plan, or study, or group, or master plan, or something like that. I don’t know what the vehicle is for all of north Portland, in other words it’s this terrible choke point, it’s got to do with people crossing the Columbia River and the bi-state study, and the Port of Portland, and Port of Portland was…

DS: So this is the beginnings of that?

PT: This could be the beginning of something big. And who is there was, Gil what’s his name, the new planner, it was his fourth day on the job but he was up there [laughs], operating out of the mayor’s office. The Bureau of Planning has been taken out of Joley Hill’s (?) office, it’s now part of the mayor’s office, with a new long range planner from Berkeley with a guy who’s got, from the sound of it, incredible experience in this, he was formerly from Oregon. But anyway, it’s our opportunity and this is why the timing was so important, because of this new reorganization and the City Club report on density, basically it’s a study on density, but it’s an indictment of the city for it’s failure in doing long range planning, and so…

DS: One of the things that Dave Hendricks said to me the other day was that he wants to see a master plan because there are all these little master plans, but they’re not pieced together.

PT: That’s right. I told Groncznack, yeah what I was referring to was a mosaic of master plans. I wouldn’t call it a master plan, but I’d call some overstudy, some comprehensive, holistic study of land use an transportation and calling Metro on it, I mean this is what Metro is all about, this is what our regional government, this is a regional problem. We’re talking about the City of Vancouver, this could include the City of Vancouver, the Port of Vancouver, I mean these are large agencies, so that’s what we need up here because this area consists of everything under the sun, and I cited this, I read the whole litany of the activities that are going on up here and it’s really funny to read because it’s so incredibly diverse, but there are common things up here. It’s not that we’re against more recreation up here, but we’re against high impact recreation. Why? Because of the impact in traffic and we can point to Victory Boulevard as a level of service F during events right now and they wanna talk about another eight thousand seat amphitheater? Or even a give thousand feet amphitheater, I’m calling for a moratorium on any further large scale development. But one of the things we do have going up here, we have this athletic center, you know where baseball diamonds up there in east Delta Park, we have PIR, which for the most part is low impact for the big event, you hear about Rose Festival, but that’s once a year, we only have a couple big events like that that last a total of less than two weeks. Most of the time it serves all these little auto clubs and stuff, and they come around there, classes and stuff like that, but basically it’s only fifty, a hundred, a hundred fifty people coming at one time, so it’s really a low impact facility excepting for Rose Festival, and under the master plan there can’t be any more activities, there for the open space can remain open space, you don’t have to pave it, you ‘re not gonna kill the grass, it’s gonna restore after the big impact events, the golf course, a few people coming at a time, [indistinguishable], a few people coming out to do boating. Well, we can observe that because the people coming into the area to do those things can regulate their coming and going pretty much according to traffic anyway, but you don’t have these large slugs of people. So no, we’re not against entertainment, or we’re not against recreation, open recreation, athletic recreation, we’re against big impact things being built up there of any sort until you have a master plan, you can figure out how you’re gonna handle it. PDOT and ODOT always seem to find a way of packing more cars in and it infuriates me. They say, well, if we manage the traffic, and if we do this and if we do that, and there’s an incredible cumbersome system that they would devise for handling this eight thousand seat amphitheater and it wasn’t gonna work. Already anybody that lives up here knows that that traffic starts bunching up down in Overlook, down on Interstate Avenue, at two thirty, three o’clock in the afternoon, they’re using these neighborhood streets to get away from that jam on the freeway. So a whole study of the whole transportation system, the Port of Portland should be involved in it because they’ve got an important concern with the traffic moving from across the bridge, interstate traffic, out to Rivergate, and I know all about that traffic and the build up of that traffic, by 2020, I think it’s 2020, it’ll be three times the amount of traffic that it is now, and I know that from having worked on North Marine Drive when we had to work with those studies. So seeing it from my perspective and seeing this area holistically from a natural perspective, it isn’t that I’m theorizing that we need a plan up here, we’re constantly running up against the problem of there being no plan, of piecemealing in through conditional use permits this and that activity, without any thought of what else is coming down the pike. Hayden Meadows, that shopping center all the life has been sucked out of it by Jantzen Beach, well it’s just sitting there with Builder’s Square’s been idol for a year and a half now, that’s not gonna sit like that, something’s gonna be done, some developer’s gonna come in there and they’re gonna spruce it all up and it’s gonna be a viable shopping center, when they can figure this all out. The racetrack has another lease on life with electronic betting, but that racetrack is under used and besides we should consider what’s gonna happen out there, they’re already having concerts out there, which present a problem. But something’s gonna hap– a huge amount of land, this close in between Vancouver and downtown Portland, you think that’s gonna stay that way? It’s gonna get more use, that’s why you can permit any more additional big impact projects here until you figure out, I don’t say until, I say no, it’s not that kind of a place, let’s call this the low impact sports area or something like that, if you want to envision all these desperate uses point nowhere. But the one thing we do see is we have these little sports activities out here and they’re not so little, but it’s where people do their baseball playing, it’s where people do their golfing, it’s where people do their car stuff, and their boating. OK, we don’t mind that, we can accommodate that if it’s done under some kind of a plan. You can’t take one area and just live within that area, I can’t do that, that’s been my problem, and because it’s so damn interesting, well you know I’ll go over here and I’ll start working on this, uh…

DS: I can imagine when you look around and see that other people aren’t either that you must have to address it if no one else is.

PT: Nobody else is. But listen, I’ll tell you another thing I though, another big success story was deicing, and that was directly a Slough thing, and boy I jumped into that one. They had meetings up there and they were something, I just have to say this, the Port of Portland, the City Club is gonna come out with a study on the Port of Portland, they’re interviewing people now, but they had this deicing thing, this is what they were gonna do, and they were gonna dump the discharge into the Columbia River basically, as much as they could untreated during these deicing events. The big problem is, it’s not that it’s not poisonous, it’s that it breaks down in seven days, or something like that, the glycol, deicing compounds, and becomes basically harmless, but in breaking down it eats up all the oxygen in the water and if you have not oxygen in the water the life in that body of water’s gonna die, and studies have been made as to what happens to that water, it’s tidal and it’ll slosh back and forth and it doesn’t escape and it can do as much damage as any poison can do basically, excepting it doesn’t linger beyond that point. They thought they’d do this Columbia River, you see the Columbia River and the fish issues out there, you know, nymphs and endangered species regulations, you see nothing but tightening up on that, I’m not for dumping anything into any body of water [laughs], the Columbia River is gonna hit a saturation point at a certain point, that mighty Columbia, as big as it is, can’t take all the stuff we’re putting into it. So I said no way, detention on site, and as much of it, you work with the sewage treatment plant, get a much discharge into the sewage treatment plant, considering their capacity and since I work with the sewage treatment plant I was working closely with those people too, and get it into the sewage treatment plant according to when they can use it, but enough detention to forestall that so you get an orderly and observable flow onto the sewage treatment plant, and you do as much treatment on site, as much detention on site as possible. They were finding all kinds of reasons why you couldn’t have detention, and I remember one meeting, now we’re gonna decide which of these alternatives we’re gonna do, this was at the airport, and we were sitting at this table, there were like fifty people and I looked around the room and I didn’t know any of these folk, I was just like one of three civilians in the whole damn thing, all of these agency people. That’s what you do, you just go to these damn meetings, but in this case I had a seat at the table, if you don’t you go anyway, if you don’t, you go anyway and you sit in the back, and you’ll say something, if you know something about it, and they say well, who’s this guy, you know [laughs], but in this case I was sitting there and they said well how is this gonna play to the environmental community and I hit the ceiling, and I just said the idea isn’t how it plays to the environmental community, you know, I’m in the environmental community, it’s not a matter of selling me on this idea, its a matter of cutting us in on the process so you know what you’re doing and having a place at the table and not presenting us with alternatives without any consideration before. I mean, all of a sudden here’s this full fledged alternatives and you’re supposed to pick.

DS: What were the alternatives?

PT: Well, one of the alternatives, the alternatives at that point, I don’t remember what they were exactly, but they weren’t good.

DS: So wasn’t one of them to dump into the Slough?

PT: Yeah it was to dump it into the Slough, which wouldn’t have taken, but there are TMDLs that wouldn’t have permitted that anyway, the alternative was to dump as much as they could into the Columbia River, and which of these directions should they pursue. But I’d forgotten what happened ’cause that was a long time ago, that was early on. But the net result of that, and a couple of meetings beyond that, was they hired a consultant, and sure enough this consultant, they found new technology of how to measure the pollutant, the glycol, or the BOD as it’s called, instantly and to create a very flexible system where it can divert some to the Slough and some to detention and where the could collect higher concentrations from different bases of the drainage areas of the airport, now they could take the higher concentrations and dump it into these tanks, which was one of the ideas originally in some of these studies that have been going on about these higher concentrations could then maybe marketed and recycled, or maybe detained and metered into the sewage system so it could be worked off in some way, so that you dissipated, since these are single occurrence events, you collect a whole lot then you hold it for a while, and then the system can take a certain amount whether it’s the sewage treatment plant or whether it’s the Slough, you know, it can take a certain amount of this, but the DML studied just how much before the real damage occurs. Well, they got real serious about it with this new consultant, he found this new technology in England, this was the first place we’re using, outside of England, in the United States, this was so fascinating, some of the things that we’re coming up with, the solutions if you keep pushing they will get creative. They don’t want to use it because it’s expensive. Well, we have to get used to the idea the environment is gonna cost money, so they got serious and had a meeting, and the result of theses studies that the consultant

[Begin Side B, Tape 2 of 2]

… human being, they honestly, you know, respect what you have to say, and they realize, not it really isn’t PR pr– these people really wanna cut in they want to roll up their sleeves and get involved, they wanna know what the hell we’re doing, they wanna know the technique, they wanna know the technicalities of the problem. And this is what I love, I mean, I love this stuff, this is what’s so fascinating because they’re doing some things that aren’t gonna work too, that’s the other thing, some projects aren’t gonna work, like Ramsey Lake isn’t one hundred percent success. When I first saw that I went out with, I think Susan was talking about what they were gonna do here and what they were gonna do there. Not a hundred percent successful, some of the water quality features that they built are not a hundred percent successful. The ones that are most successful seem to be the ones that most resemble a swamp, natural, not doing anything, the way it was, [laughs] that’s the way it is. So, you’d think be now we’d get the message, the first thing you should do is to mimic nature [laughs], really ’cause nature did this before, they didn’t have the pollution to contend with. But more and more I become an advocate for natural processes and sometimes you don’t wanna do anything, you just wanna let an area heal itself. Now usually that doesn’t apply, usually you wanna reforest and everything, you wanna give it a head start, you wanna get rid of the invasive species, you wanna keep the invasive species at bay until the natives return. It’s not gonna return by itself, if you leave things alone, for example, on the watershed with regard to revegetation, you’re just gonna get nothing but invasives, that’s all there is to it, we know that. Deadly serious problem, being studied by Departments of Agriculture and all sorts of things. We got another interesting experiment up where, Purple Loose Strife, we had a Purple Loose Strife summit, Troy called this.

DS: I met Troy right after that.

PT: Yeah. Yeah. He’s hot for this one. He was in the opinion, we’re all out there in our canoes and we were pulling this damn stuff, you get it when it’s in flower and you can see it, it’s wily visible and it’s punctuated here and there. You get out of the canoe, and it’s a tough job, you know, if it’s rooted, if it’s been there for a while and it’s big you’re not gonna get it out, you’ll get some of it out, but not all of it. So we had this summit and this guy comes from, what’s his name, Coontz, I think was his name, from the Department of Agriculture and he told us about a study they were doing, biological, or what do you call it, insects, using bugs. Purple Loose Strife came from Germany, so they said OK, if Purple Loose Strife came from Germany, who’s it’s enemy? So they found out who’s attacking it in Germany, they found these three species of bug, one gets the stem, one gets the flower, and the other gets the root, so they imported these three bugs. Introduced the bugs and in a period of about five years these bugs will keep that Purple Loose Strife in check to such a point that it won’t be a problem, and you don’t want to eradicate it all, because if you eradicate it all you eliminate the food for these bugs. Lightbulb [laughs], so that’s the way we’re going. So now through Troy’s efforts, through Columbia Slough Council, and putting together a package of financing, I don’t know, fifty thousand dollars or something like that, to get these bugs established and part of the management area is gonna be a bug farm. And not only will we produce enough bugs, I think the way it goes we’re gonna produce certainly enough bugs for Smith and Bybee Lake, but we’ll also produce enough bugs to move somewhere else. Right now we’ve talent the bugs from somewhere else and put them out there and they’re starting to actually work.

DS: My question is how those bugs get into the already existing ecosystem, whether or not they’ll alter the ecosystem.

PT: Well, that’s, see this is the kind of question that’s constantly arising. We don’t foresee what other damaging effect this might have. But we have no choice. The thing is we’ve managed things to a point, we’ve brought in all these invasives and we’ve really screwed it up so much that we have to manage it, we just have to remain vigilant and more clever and be able to really make quickly changes. We find out, uh oh, that wasn’t the right way to go, that’s what they need, some of these projects aren’t working but you can’t stop trying, you can’t give up, throw up your hands, and say, geez, there’s nothing I can do about this, you’ve just got to be very, very clever, and fortunately there are a lot of dedicated people, there would be a lot more if there were more people hired to do this, if there was the money to hire them, there are a lot of dedicated people who know a lot about the state of the art. But you’re never there, you never know it all. The environment is overwhelmingly complex and to be sure we’re making mistakes right now and we don’t know it, but we’re a hell of a lot less ignorant than we were, like look at dams, we wouldn’t have built these dams, now we’ve got these dams, I mean, you ought to read Cadillac Desert, have you ever read that, oh Jesus [sigh].

DS: I haven’t actually read that. I’ve read Rivers of Empire and I’ve read stuff by Mark Reisner.

PT: It just makes you cry because it was this duking it out between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers and who could built more dams. Well, you look at the map in North Klamath Lake, it’s got all these rigid lines and you say what the heck is this on the map, why are there all these regular lines and no roads, nothing, what is going on here? Bureau of Reclamation Projects, draining the swamps, reclaiming it for agriculture. You know what they’re doing now? Un-reclaiming it, to restore Upper Klamath Lake, which is mighty sick. I mean, you think Woody Guthrie was singing about the praises of dams, of Bonneville, you see we were all incredibly ignorant, so you’re quick to put blame on these people that did these stupid things, they didn’t know what they were doing, but it was a given, this was project. I’m old enough to have gone to the 1939 World’s Fair, and the slogans, “Better lives through chemistry,” they built after the war, on my campus, the chemistry hall was called Olin Hall, Olin Chemical, that was the Department of Chemistry. Universities have bought into this, they’ve been bought, make no mistake about it, I mean good research departments are bought by this, and that World’s Fair gave you the blueprint of the future, the highways, the endless freeways, and you went into the Parisphere and you saw this new world laid out before you, there was no question about that.

DS: So what made you aware of the environmental issues? When did you get…

PT: My father was the first one, and he read Silent Spring. My father and that’s how I’m able to do this work.

DS: So he read Silent Spring and that did have an impact.

PT: He read Silent Spring and he was an environmentalist, the first one and I was down in the Bay area, and when I was down there I was fixing up houses, I had worked for Owens Corning, well, I worked for a lot of corporations, I have a varied background of all sorts of strange things that really aren’t compatible at all, which as a matter of fact helps me now [laughs], some of them are completely unrelated, you know, technical, and basically I was an artist for years before I got into this. But he was the one who introduced me, when I was in Carmel, they came up, I dropped out, I quit my job basically before I knew what dropping out was, good job and they came up and I said I wanna make things so they came up to Carmel, they had a couple of houses that they were fixing up up there, and I fixed up their house, I fixed up another house, all this time I was listening to KPFA. KPFA absolutely turned me around in every conceivable way. I was paining houses and I listened from morning to night, KPFA had all these people from Berkeley and some real good people talking there, and it was radical politics…

DS: I listen to KBOO…

PT: Yeah, I changed my politics, I changed everything, I went from a conservative to a radical in about two years, I’d wondered why I was thinking that all this stuff was bullshit, but I didn’t know how it all fit together, I listened to KPFA for two years and absolutely got radicalized, and that’s the first time I started to hear the term environmental. So my father and I would talk about this…

DS: In the early ’70s?

PT: Yeah in the early, oh no, in the early ’60s, yeah. Yeah, this was the early ’60s, or late ’50s even. I quit Converge down in San Diego in about 1959, just that aerospace job, fun in the sun type thing, sailing fast boats and stuff [laughs]. And they came up there and I was fixing up these houses, and I wanted to do this art, so all this time I’d spent a lot of time with my parents, and my father, who’s a Czech, he’s a very interesting character, a real eccentric, was talking about this stuff and he got me interested, at this time we were also reading, the subjects at that time were Eastern spirituality and the environment. I went up to San Jose, I said I really wanna do this art, then I went up to San Jose State, I got a master’s degree in art there, wasn’t doing much politicking up there, but I was paying attention to environmental issues, basically just reading about it, you know, The Nation and all this left-wing stuff, invariably lots of environmental stuff. But I wasn’t active in it, but it really started to get me in the craw, what we were doing, this is utterly, this is stupid. I remember thinking around 1950 the direction we’re going in is unsustainable, the world cannot take it, we’re not expanding, it can’t take the amount of junk we’re putting into it and the amount of stuff we’re using and the way we’re disregarding the environment, I came to know the word. Then when I was working down there I got this tremendous education in the environment, you know, like listening to KPFA, then I did art and I didn’t do much, I just didn’t do much, I kept following it though. It wasn’t ’til I really got it activated, once you start the action that’s when you can’t quit, you can’t quit. I just started feeling basically so damn guilty, all I’m doing is sitting around bitching about this thing and I’m not doing a bloody thing. And what I learned was, the crazy thing is that this is the best thing in the world you could possible do, for your soul and everything else. I got interested in the garden, this garden has become enormously important to me, we were on the last Metro Tour of the non-insecticide garden, the Garden of Delight Tour. You know, I’m a real evangelist on this thing, people are doing such stupid things, you don’t have to use these things, they don’t even save you time, and had we planted this garden all over again, we inherited most of it, I didn’t know enough about native gardening, but on that property over there it’s mostly native stuff we put in, so it’s kind of like an experiment. But that’s the connection with the soil, and that’s the balance, my feet are in the soil now and my heart certainly is, and it just makes me feel better than anything I’ve ever done. I mean, I enjoyed art, that’s a wonderful self thing, like examine your– you know art it’s a wonderful thing and you learn a lot and…

DS: It’s very individual.

PT: It was very individual, and the thing about the environment is you’re really involved in something far bigger than yourself, you’re not important in the damn thing. The thing is you begin to see nature as, you begin to really see yourself as a part of it, and then you naturally start gravitating to the philosophies that actually contain this, and you say these are the part of these philosophies that I’ve always liked, so it’s kind of a natural. But to get this sense that you’re really a part of it, and that this thing is what you’re working for, you’re just this cell in this much larger, glorious thing and that basically you’re out of ‘me’ too, that’s the other thing, you’re into something really bigger, something that you can damn well respect and can show you the way around, and that’s the way I feel about it. I just feel, uh, it’s powerful, you’re involved in a cause. With that, and I won’t say that it’s not selfish, with that comes a kind of a peace and as kind of a satisfaction, it’s not that this is always fun, I mean I don’t always want to go to meetings, it isn’t that, although I must say I love the political action, I love all aspects of this but it’s a satisfaction, it’s a true satisfaction. And I think, you have to get old maybe to do this, I think that dedicating your life to this, the luckiest people in the world are the people who have found that, I really believe that. I remember reading that once in ARP, you know, old people and they volunteer a lot, but there’s no question about it, there’s more satisfaction in that, by not doing things for yourself, by doing things for something that is bigger, I do thing for myself, you know, but I mean putting yourself in the cause of something else it, that is a benefit, that is a side issue. It’s not that you painfully grit your teeth and go into this, you wanna do it.

DS: And you didn’t start until you retired?

PT: Well, this is where I have to give my father credit. I was the artist, like I was not commercially enchained, I did commissions and I lived on art for the past five years or so after, before I got into this stuff. I didn’t have any money, I had a little tiny house, and I didn’t care, money never meant anything to me. Then my father died, and he a considerable estate, well, I got a chunk of that estate and I said this is basically not my money. I’ve always believed, I’m a real Socialist, I always believed that people should not make money on something that they don’t you work to make money, you work your way, Protestant ethic and everything else, just really square. So I was always doing art and barely put it together, you can make a living at it, but it’s not a good living. In commission work you can make money, but I just didn’t want to got that– I went in commission work but I just didn’t want to do what needed to be done in order to make. But I was sort of fed up with it, I was sort of disillusioned, it’d become a business, I was doing the best I could to do the best work I could, but it was like a business. He died I had to take care of my mother and my father for two years. First my mother for two years, she had a stroke, helped my father with her, my father was declining badly, and he died when he was like ninety-two or something like that. And as eccentric man, and sometimes absolutely exasperating, he was a man of great principle, he gave all his money away. He would have me driving all over town to save twenty-five cents on a special on canned tomatoes or something, and my stepsister and I worked toward taking alternate days and seeing him. He just got old and frail and he finally died. I didn’t know what he had in his estate, but he left this money and half of it, I mean I’m living on these endowments, one of them he did when he was alive is Nature Conservancy, he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars away to causes, like colleges and he had these special things, that’s all he did all day long, he’d just give money away, it was a full time job with him, he wasn’t rich, but his estate was over a million, half of it was already socked away in these charitable remainder trusts and stuff. But there was some left over, enough for me to buy this house, and I realized I didn’t have to work, so now what am I gonna do? He gave me this goddamned money and it was a burden, my attitude is this was a pain in the neck. But I will like this new house and I won’t have to worry about money for once in my life. So I said well, he and I agreed on the environment I will hire myself to dot his work and that’s kind of the way I look at it. So I’m self-employed with his money. But if I didn’t do this it would be against my general principle, the thing I’ve said all my life, I believe that you should earn your money, I didn’t earn this money, so now I’m earning this money, because I’m hiring myself literally to do this.

DS: It’s a combination of Socialist and Protestant ethic.

PT: Yeah, and my lifestyle hasn’t changed a lot, I mean, this is luxurious by far as any way I’ve ever lived. I mean, we’ve got two pieces of property now, and mainly the city wouldn’t like to see this, they’d like to see more houses on here, increase density, but the idea is to turn this into an oasis, to restore this area, and we’re not ant the birdhouse stage yet, but we’ll continue to work with this, I mean, fifteen years from now it’s gonna be ridiculous, I planted like over a hundred trees on both these properties. But you know I’m also learning, so it’s kind of like my lab, and we’re already seeing the birds coming back and everything, there’s far more activity here, the soil is better, the worms are back, there’s no chemicals, the compost I’m getting, I jump-started it with truckloads of compost and I’m producing now eight cubic yards of compost here and all this. So, he’s enabled me to do this, bless his soul, and the thing is, why the hell did he die, I’d like him to see what he’s doing, I couldn’t have done this, people can’t afford the time, I know that, but I can, and I like it, I probably wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. But it’s fascinating one of the great things about it is, I don’t have any interest in social life, but the people you work with, these are the people I wanna be around, this is enough for me, I mean they’re good folks, guys like Troy and so forth.

DS: [Indistinguishable]

PT: Yeah, there’s no bullshit, they’ve got their eye on the ball and they’re dedicated. These are healthy people. They’re people, but they’ve figured out something, they’ve figured out that this is the way to, I think this is the way to happiness, and that’s what you really want. You gonna chase money so you can buy things to be happy? That’s ridiculous. That never made any sense to me. So you might say, now I’m seventy-one, like I found it. I might wanna do some art again. But I just wanna get out of it for a little while and I feel apologetic about it, I called Mike and I said I Just can’t do this anymore and he was disappointed. I represent Audubon on North Portland issues, I have in addition to the Columbia Slough, so does Troy, Troy sits on with me [laughs], there’s an issue we’re interested in and you kind of decide, well, you be Audubon and I’ll be, you know [laughs], you have to have someone behind you, you know, which is funny ’cause it’s not really necessary but you pull all these hats out, you testify and there’s a whole bunch of people from Friends and Audubon, you know, like panels and these big deal meetings and stuff. I’m associated with it, I’m a member of the CLF, and you look over the situation and you see how it’s forming up and you say, well, in this one I think I’ll be Smith and Bybee Lakes or something, you get permission from the board.

DS: So there’s wider representation.

PT: Yeah, so there’s wider representation, but actually it doesn’t matter, no one pays any attention to this anyway, they do pay attention to Audubon, which is the reason why I teamed up with Audubon. Audubon here, some would call it middle-of-the-road environmental group, but they work on several levels and this is real important to me because I’m passing something on to them which I don’t want out.

DS: You want me to turn it off?

PT: Yeah, turn that off. [Tape recorder is shut off]

PT: [Interview continues]. The Slough is my little bit of turf you know, and that’s kind of the anchor point and the closer you get to home, which I can walk out to Pen 1 and I can know that as really my backyard, I feel very possessive about this [laughs], it’s an orphan because theater so many cross-jurisdictions out there and it’s not understood, it becomes a vacuum, they throw things at it, they look at a map and they say, there’s all this open space, why don’t we have and amphitheater there, groovy idea, and no, you’re not seeing this thing right and you don’t even know who the people are that are involved in this, like the city and the parks, and the board, and the drainage district, what’s a drainage district, yeah huh, drainage district is basically a hidden agency, no body knows, they tend dikes, no, no, they have to do with the way water moves, the quality if water and so forth, so they really tie into this. But I think politically you pick this area and this kind of was my political teething. Now I really, quite frankly, I’d like to get into some larger stuff like Columbia River…

DS: Like state politics?

PT: Well, I’d find that frustrating. I certainly have threatened to go down to Salem and sound off to that legislature, I’ll tell you that [laughs], but it would be too frustrating for me, I have gone down there before and lobbied, but I think, yeah, I think we have to have a sweep, at least we have to get the House back for the Democrats ’cause that would be a big improvement, I hope that Kitzhaber works hard for that, I don’t think they’re nearly as, I mean in so many ways I think the weakness is in the state, it’s less accessible. What is accessible you can have the greatest influence on, and it also becomes your anchor point, like the Slough and like Pen 1, and so that’s the way I think about it. But everything that happens on this kind of microscale is applicable in a larger scale. As you go up and down and you start getting involved in like the Columbia Estuary, you say hello, they’re talking about the same problems, and you realize, hey I learned this working on Slough issues.

DS: Are you involved in the lower estuary?

PT: I was involved in a focus group because Troy represented the recreational interests and he brought them to a couple of Smith and Bybee Lakes meetings, these focus groups were in conjunction with the Smith and Bybee Lakes board meeting. So they’re no different, and it’s the same political, in some of the issues like in transportation, yeah, you do get involved with what Blumenaeur trying to do and stuff because he’s big in transportation and livability, and so I think Blumenaeur doing a good job, I’m speaking very well of these people, sometimes I’m critical, you know [laughs], don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s all rosy, but I do think Blumenaeur is doing a good job, and it’s important to know the restraints that the Port of Portland faces, for example, with regard to transportation service to the airport. Brian Campbell of the port told me that it’s because of the funding, they can’t use an of the money they get for this north Port expansion for improving the transportation network coming into the Port. Well, that’s a big glitch on the federal level, you see, so there’s much to still be learned. But the dynamics, the political action, and the process is remarkably the same, regardless of whatever level. So I got involved locally, like on my block, for Ligthtrail, and then I got involved in Lightrail for the neighborhood and there were two of us basically, about three or four of us who thought we should have Lightrail on Interstate because we saw the advantages of development that would come with it and so forth, the neighborhood association was against it. So then we went up to Kenton and were studying Lightrail, and Lightrail was going on, Kenton was for it, and then we were looking at Lightrail in the larger– what it would mean to North Portland, and which way it should be routed on the freeway or on Interstate, and we began to get a larger picture there and that’s when I started to join the Columbia Slough and you started to look out, you started to see the connections to the larger picture, so you’re constantly going from the larger picture back and forth, I find this very constructive because it keeps you plugged in, when you’re on the ground you’re really working with a nitty gritty little thing, see, but that informs and gives foundation for movement above, then the farther you go along the more political it becomes. So I’ve kind of learned that that’s the same process which applies and I think the Columbia River needs a lot of attention so I’d like to get involved in more estuary work and I’m very impressed with The Columbia River United, they’re a tough group. They came to one of our focus group’s meetings when they came out with a draft report of the Lower Estuary study that had been going on for about a year and a half, and they were asking some very serious questions, and I don’t have enough time to cover that and so that’s one of the things I wanna come back and learn a little more and just give it some rest for a while then I’ll be back, no question about it, I can’t stop. And then come back and pick up a couple of issues and really go into it in depth. So it’s been an education.

DS: Did I send you a flier with our programs or upcoming programs? Because we do historical programs on the Columbia River, that’s what we do.

PT: Yeah. No, you didn’t give me a flier.

DS: Well, I’ll drop one in the mail to you.

PT: No, you just gave me the letter and the form. Well, you’re doing a good thing there.

DS; But I will also send you a flier that outlines our historical programs, for those of us who like to attend lectures and things as fun, are really great.

[End Side B, Tape 2 of 2 — Interview Ends]