Narrators: Troy Clark, Emily Roth
Interviewer: Donna Sinclair
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999
Transcribed by Donna Sinclair
Interview with Troy Clark, Vice-President of the Friends of Smith & Bybee Lakes, takes place near the St. Johns Landfill near Smith Lake and the sloughs.
[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]TC: Describes geography of the North Slough. . . . We’ll walk right down here and we’ll see a water control structure. The water control structure was put in, this is the North Slough. . . it continues on and makes a canal, and this canal hooks Smith & Bybee Lakes together. But it was once a part of a dynamic system. This little bit of a slough is called the Blind Slough. It used to wind right up and join with the North Slough right there. But it’s been filled in by the landfill. . . the landfill served Portland for fifty years. So, we’re sitting on fifty years of Portland’s finest, right here. . . In 1985, a decision was made by the city to extend the life of the landfill. The landfill was filling up rapidly, and so they added fifteen acres to the St. Johns Landfill, fifteen acres into Smith Lake which also wiped out this slough. . . For fifteen acres they bought five years of dumping capability, that’s all. What sprang out of this additional utilization of the landfill was a tipping fee, they added a tipping fee for those last five years, and that tipping fee was for the closure of the landfill which they figured was ’90, ’91. And then a trust fund set up for the management of Smith & Bybee Lakes. So that’s Smith Lake, Bybee we can’t see, but Bybee’s over there. So that tipping fee created a $3 million trust fund, and so Smith and Bybee Lakes is managed now. And I’m on the management committee, I represent Audubon on the management committee for Smith & Bybee Lakes, which is the largest freshwater wetland in the city limits in the country. It’s also just about the largest remnant of the once immense tidal floodplain, where the Willamette River and the Columbia River come together. . . A natural waterway that drained from Fairview Lake, right through this system, there used to be another lake right over here, but it was much bigger. It’s called Ramsey Lake. Now the port filled Ramsey Lake completely, and then they, it was against their fill permit, and so they had to restore a piece of Ramsey Lake. This is how they restored it, and it’s been a failed mitigation for years.
DS: And wasn’t there a Pearcy Lake over there too?
TC: Yeah, right in here there was. But it was filled under permit. It was filled legally. It’s just that Ramsey, they really botched Ramsey, and then they had to restore Ramsey Lake. . .
Ramsey Lake, the Columbia Slough, all the way to Kelly Point Park, which is actually. . . Bonneville Power Administration Lines run right through here. . . They come across Smith & Bybee, they come across the Willamette, the Columbia River, they come across Smith & Bybee Lakes, they come across the Columbia Slough, and they go west up over Forest Park. So, that swath right here, going across, that goes across the Willamette and up over Forest Park. This swath is in our management area also. . . These areas are so complex in their situations, it’s just a headache, nightmare.
This is Emily Roth. . . she’s the wildlife manager for Smith & Bybee Lakes. . .
[talks about weekly bird walk]. . . this morning was great, we had forty-two species. . . as you see, last week song sparrows were predominant. They are ubiquitous, they’re here year-round. Mallards are here year-round, starlings of course, are here year-round, crows and robins are here year-round, but at lesser populations. . . Now we’re seeing a big change. Going back a few weeks we would have common yellowthroats, willow flycatchers, various swallow species. They’ve all migrated. I saw one barn-swallow today, kind of a late barn-swallow right here. But he’s migrating. Now as these tropical species head out, in are coming the duck species, shovelers, widgeons, who have summered in Alaska and up in Canada. Now they’re coming in for, this will be their winter ground. . . [high water for the past three years has nearly wiped out the smart weed which provides a lot of food and shelter for the ducks]. . . We’ll get a lot of ducks in here, but whether there’s a lot of food to support the kind of populations we had prior to the ’96 high water.
DS: And so that water is still there because there’s no way to lower the water levels?
ER: It comes out through the dam. We’ll go look at that. But it will only go to a certain level. But in ’96 and ’97 we had high water all the way through July. And we have, as you’ll see, this little opening, and the volume was just too much to get out too fast. But this year we didn’t ever have that high a water level even with the snowpack. Plus, you know, we haven’t had any significant rain since the middle of July.
TC: This is the lowest the water’s been since pre-’96. So it’s getting down, beginning to look like what it used to look like. . .
[EM and TC talk about beavers taking down an ash tree that was a couple hundred years old]. . . one of the things, when the dam was put in in 1982, and the motivation. Oregon Fish & Wildlife was responding to a warning that was coming from Washington Fish & Wildlife. There was an outbreak of Avian botulism in the late ��70s, early ��80s.
DS: Do you know the dates in particular?
EM: Well the dam was put in in ’82, so.
TC: So, it’s probably ’79 and ’80. We had an outbreak of Avian botulism. And before this was put in, in the summer Smith and Bybee Lakes would drain out and create a lot of small pools, and that’s how an infected duck would come in, it would die in a pool of water. The disease would be in the water and the other ducks who would come in would pick it up. So you’d have an epidemic. So they said, we need to protect Smith & Bybee from this ponding effect in the summer. So this was put in. The irony that we’ve inherited is that there was no protocol in terms of follow-up. It was just stuck in there, and, so in perpetuity it’s been there, and Smith and Bybee Lakes have become a couple of reservoirs. Instead of a dynamic system connected with a tidal influence, tidal influence, high tide, low tide, twice a day. The scouring effects of the tides. What you’ve had is a dam and reservoirs. Now we’ve ended up with water quality limited water, for temperature and phosphorous, and we have a beaver population that’s in hog heaven. . . So here we’re dealing with the Oregon State animal, and everybody loves beavers. I love beavers. . . yet we have too many. And we can see just what happens when a system gets manipulated, and the ramifications. It’s very, very interesting. . .
. . . [talks about what happened because of the high water of ��96] The high water of ’96 exposed some raw garbage. Down the slough, the water was so high and Solid Waste didn’t really realize the integrity, that there were spots where the garbage was actually close to the water. So some garbage got exposed, and so right now we’re in the middle of negotiations with Solid Waste, and here we’re dealing with a wildlife habitat, they want to armor part of this north slough, with rip-rap, like, you know the rock here, to protect this, this one-one thousand foot area that they feel is weak. And if we removed the water control structure and begin to get tidal activity, a water exchange. See, the tide comes up now. You can see the tidal influence right now. You can see there was a high tide, the tide’s gone out, so, but you don’t have the volume of water exchanging. If we removed the dam, you’d get a higher, more water exchanging, and so they were worried about this. Well, we’ve got problems with them riprapping the south side, because, if we get a lot of high water and velocity, what’s it going to do to the north bank of the slough. . .
DS: So, are you trying to get the dam removed?
TC: Yes. We want to return it to its original hydrology. But what we want to do is put in a weir, you know a concrete weir, where you can take stop-logs and drop stop-logs in there if you needed to hold the water back. Let’s say we return it to the original hydrology and we do have a problem with botulism. We’ll want to hold the water back. Well. See that could have been done in ’82. You would have had both, you’d have had the capability of holding the water back, but then you could remove the logs, or you know, they wouldn’t be logs, they would be probably metal sheets. . .
DS: And who was in charge of putting the dam in?
TC: . . . It was at the suggestion of Oregon Fish and Wildlife. . . [someone pulls up in a truck and asks about the tape recorder]
DS: What’s he taking away?
ER: Yellow Iris. . . It’s an exotic that came in, also with the ’96 flood. And it’s in the channel between the two lakes and it will really start to choke things out. So he’s been digging it for the last couple weeks and uh, last week, it’s way in there, so last week we had to hook up a little barge system and canoe it out. So we barged it up to here and then he’s taking it. . .
DS: And is the channel a natural channel between the two lakes?
ER: Um-hum. This is actually where the north slough used to end is in Smith Lake. So this wasn’t here and it would come through in the channels right there, it meanders in and then just goes into Smith Lake. Actually we can walk almost all the way along here.
TC: This is wonderful, this is wonderful. This is all reed canary grass. . . we’ve had also, right in here, some purple loosestrife. Another one of those exotics that’s reallyproblematic. . . a lot of it got pulled and then the rest got mowed, and we’ll expect it again next year. But it’s very, we, in fact Emily and I just hosted a conference concerning purple loosestrife in this region, trying to come up with a strategy where we could get everybody, the port, the city, everybody in concert or in agreement of how we’re going to try to manage purple loosestrife. The fellow we had who came to speak was great. He had been studying purple loosestrife for twelve years, and he said, “It’s not going to go away. . . you’ve just got to accept it now, it’s a part of your habitat situation. But it can be controlled.”
DS: Where did it come from?
TC: . . . western Europe, okay. . . 1814 was the first.
ER: They used to sell it as, and actually you can still get gardening catalogues that sell purple loosestrife. You can’t buy it in Oregon, they’re not allowed to sell it in Oregon. Supposedly these seed catalogues are not allowed to send you seeds to Oregon. But you can go to people’s gardens all over Portland and you can find it. . .
TC: It is so invasive. It’s an incredible plant. . .
DS: What kinds of native plants have difficulty with the purple loosestrife?
TC: It can be anything. . . even the reed canary grass has problems with the purple loosestrife, and reed canary grass is an invasive. . .
ER: [says that their strategy is to mow the reed canary grass, then replant with ash and willow. The water level is really low. In June or July, a �� mile away from the lake would all be mud and water.]
. . . Look at all those dead trees. They’ve all drowned out in the last three years because the water level’s been so high. . . [most of the willows died this year]
TC: What happened, you see all the dead material in the water there. That was, that’s the remnant of what was drowned when they put in the water control structure to hold the water back. They drowned out, Emily’s estimated by looking at aerial photos, 350 acres of riparian habitat around the lakes was killed. Three hundred and fifty acres. So you say, well, if we open this up again, isn’t there going to be a huge amount of mud flat exposed. And the answer is yes.
ER: Perfect habitat for reed canary grass and purple loosestrife, so we’re going to try to get the trees planted back in and. . .still be able to manipulate the water, so if we need to hold it back longer which will drown out the purple loosestrife and the reed canary grass, we’ll be able to do that. Well, we could just let it function as it is, but we’d probably end up with lots of reed canary grass and purple loosestrife.
TC: So we’re trying to make decisions to return it to its natural hydrology and at the same time recognize that since ’82, these species have come and just dominated. . . To see some places where the purple loosestrife has taken over, it’s pretty awesome to think that it only took three or four years for it to, to become a monoculture. . .
ER: [water goes out of the water control structure to about 7.5 feet before the inflows are out of water. Now at 8.3 feet.]
. . . The lower slough itself is not controlled, it’s tidally influenced. When does the slough really start getting controlled? Isn’t it above. . .
TC: The cross-levy at 17th, so if you haven’t been to the Multnomah County Drainage District, that office. That cross-levy there at 17th is where the tidal influence. And of course that represents the beginning of the middle slough, the end of the lower slough and the beginning of the middle slough and then you have the other cross-levy at 142nd, which represents the break between middle and the upper slough.
ER: So the slough down here isn’t manipulated, it’s just tidal.
TC: And it’s got great habitat. The lower slough has got great habitat value, even though the sediments are really bad. And it’s been heavily impacted over the years, but it has still got, it sits down in a trench, so to speak. So it’s diked on one side by the Corps of Engineers around the race track, but it sits down and so, it actually provide some protection for critters and. . . [decide to walk along the slough. Talks about the Columbia Slough regatta] But each year, this was the fourth annual. I’ve been on each one and it’s gotten better and better, more and more publicity, more and more participation. Where we came in at the landfill bridge, that’s where we put in this last, and you could either paddle upstream or downstream. I think we had. . .
DS: Can you talk a little bit about pollution in the slough?
TC: . . . Well, the most significant pollution in the lower slough. See, each again, this is where each, each section of the slough has been impacted differently than the other sections. The lower slough, the biggest impact has been the combined sewer overflows. There’s 13 combined sewer overflows, flowing into the lower slough. Do you understand what a CSO is? Okay, so, it uh, you have all the street run-off, plus you have all the fecal coliform and all the stuff just in raw sewage, you know. Diapers and just whatever, condoms, and all, everything people throw in their toilets ends up. You know when we have any measurable rain, the whole Portland stormwater system is so antiquated, any measurable rain, you have combined sewer overflows going into the slough and into the Willamette. So, the contribution into the lower slough, because there is, there are no CSOs above 17th street. In fact, the first CSO and the nastiest one of all is at 13thstreet. Now, those CSOs will be eliminated by the end of next year. The end of 2000, the city of Portland entered into a stipulated consent order with DEQ to eliminate the CSOs on the Columbia Slough. Now Portland has until the year 2011 to mitigate or to remedy the CSOs on the Willamette. Again, there are 44 CSOs on the Willamette. It’s huge. It’s a huge, huge issue, because it costs a lot of money. A billion dollars is the rough price tag. And it’s going to be paid for by people’s sewer bills. . . And so the lower slough has been hugely impacted by the CSOs. . .
[he was part of a committee that did a sediment study in 1997. A sites were the nasty ones. All 13 CSOs were A sites. Then there were B sites, where there was some contamination. C sites, just barely contaminated]. . . The next step was to take a B site on the slough, and it was, the place that was chosen, there are some side arms of the Columbia Slough. And one of the side arms is called the Buffalo Slough, and the Buffalo Slough starts almost at the Multnomah County Drainage District Office, and it goes up, parallels the slough for about a mile and half going east, goes through Broadmoor Golf Course. . . What they found in the Buffalo Slough Sediment. They took sediment samples in various places and they found that the primary chemicals of potential concerns, COPC, were DDT which wasn’t a surprise. Was it holdane, Emily?
ER: Yeah, I think so.
TC: And PCBs. And they were ubiquitous. And I remember sitting in that meeting going, I can understand DDT being ubiquitous, because you would have sprayed all your ditch banks, and holdane’s a, it’s kind of another chemical like DDT. But how could PCBs? Which is the oil that came from electrical transformers. How could it be ubiquitous? Didn’t make sense. And then one old-timer said, “Way back when, when you had a lot of gravel roads, like this, in the whole basin, the Columbia Basin, they weren’t paved. They were gravel. They used to oil them and what they would do is they would take transformer oil and dump ��em in these oil trucks, and spray the roads with transformer oil. So, that means like the whole area is saturated with PCBs. Now the problem is, DDT takes fifty years to break down; it takes a couple hundred years for PCBs to break down naturally. And so what was discovered, or it was decided, or recognized, let’s put it that way, is that if you could dredge the Buffalo Slough. You pull out all the sediments going down six inches. In probably twenty to twenty-five years, the contamination would be back. Because there’s that much oil on all the roads, all slowly leaching, being washed into the slough.
DS: So this is throughout the area, not just in Buffalo Slough?
TC: Right, right. Because see the recognition was, ��cause see there was this whole issue. We want to improve the water quality of the slough. Well, how are you going to do that if the sediment is full of toxins? Well, let’s look at dredging. Well it was discovered that with dredging you could spend a billion dollars, I don’t know how much, but you could spend a lot of money dredging the slough.
[End Side A, Tape 1 of 2] [Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2] [talking about what will be done to prevent garbage from going into the slough again]ER: They take disasters as they come. The port takes development as it comes.
TC: Right, and we’re here left to respond to whatever the port or different groups think is expedient. . . It’s amazing to me that when Solid Waste took over the management of the landfill they didn’t realize that there’s garbage underneath this road. Everybody thought that the garbage cut off, and here you had a road way. Garbage is underneath the road over to here.
ER: Well, and there’s also some sort of fill there because it’s, after ’97 Troy and I were out here canoeing and, on the banks of the slough you could see garbage.
TC: Garbage. And so what they propose to do now. . .one of the reasons for the armoring is they want to dig a trench right here, right down the middle of this road, when we get to the thousand feet, and put in a wall, a stop-wall, that will halt the migration of stuff that’s in the landfill coming this way. But they don’t think they can open this up without putting a foundation of rock down below. So, it’s pretty complex, and like we’ve said, Solid Waste hired one consultant and depended everything on this one consultant’s opinion. And when we asked because we were both on the subcommittee, well is there another way to do it? Is there another point of view?
“No.”
And so it’s been frustrating for us because we’re concerned as much as they are about not having garbage exposed, but putting a lot of rock in the slough is kind of like a traditional way of doing things that, we’d like a little bit more, a look at it. Do we really want to do it that way. . .
Emily, that’s an American pipit. It flew from here up on that piping. . . [points out the pipit, a western meadowlark was seen there also]
DS: Can you explain again what these pipes are for?
ER: . . . Well, the landfill produces methane gas, and so if they don’t pipe it off the landfill is covered with a plastic sheet basically. It would rise up, probably create a large boom and explode. So they pipe off all the methane gas which is produced. And it used to go and be off flared off, but now we, it’s sent over to Ashgrove Cement, and they use it as part of their production of cement.
TC: Lime.
ER: Lime.
TC: . . . There’s wonderful dynamics going along here, but again it’s so difficult because things are so disjointed so often. I mean we talk about every once in while, this agency’s doing this thing, this agency’s doing that thing. This plan is on the books. And, but who’s talking to one another? Or what decisions are being made in light of this other agency’s plan? . . .In the Portland area, there is this trail system called the forty mile loop. It’s actually much larger than a forty mile loop and we won’t get into why it was historically called the forty mile loop, and now we have this huge trail system and connections to this trail system. And the whole thing is included in the forty mile loop map. Now the other side of the slough, this north slough I mean. You come down from Kelly Point Park on the east side of the Columbia Slough, on the north side of the north slough to where we were at, and cross the landfill, that’s one of the forty mile loop sections on the map. That’s why we’re uncomfortable with throwing a bunch of rock down there, which would force the water to erode the north bank. . . [says the 40-mile loop is really an orphan concept even though it’s on the maps, but not built. Where will the trail piece be?] But the problem is, how do you keep people away from the methane collection system? Because you don’t want people traipsing over the landfill meddling with all this sophisticated piping. So, it’s hard to, we don’t know where it’s going to go. If the trail goes here, you’re going to have a big fence. It’s not real conducive to what you think about a trail. However, as a wildlife manager like Emily, having people looking at your resources as opposed to traipsing through it, there’s a value in that as well. . .
DS: What would you like to see happen with the landfill itself?
ER: Well the landfill is within the Smith & Bybee Lakes wildlife area. When the landfill eventually is no longer under Solid Waste permit and all these discharge permits, it will be managed as part of the wildlife area, as open meadow. [sound of walking and rocks crunching] So, we kind of watch to see what they do on the landfill to insure that now it stays somewhat for wildlife habitat.
TC: And of course, look at this. We have to trust that there’s monitoring wells all over the place. Well, how many are there in Smith & Bybee? See, we don’t even know that. There are monitoring wells monitoring whether or not any leachate is going from here to there. And, so far we’ve basically taken it on trust. [laughs]
DS: Who monitors it?
ER: Well, the regional environmental management and solid waste people at Metro monitor it. . .
DS: So how did you get involved in this, Troy? You said that you’ve been in Portland for thirty years and that you’ve been involved in the Friends of Smith & Bybee Lakes for the last, what, seven and a half?
TC: Six, we’ve been in existence for about six years?
DS: What is it that got you to, to actually put time into this?
TC: I got into birding. I think that had a large influence. And in the process of birding and going to Sauvie’s Island and different places, I found Smith & Bybee Lakes and, and wondered why there wasn’t a Friends group. I looked in the phone book a couple of times, I asked questions, I didn’t. There wasn’t anything, there was nobody advocating for the place and I thought, I didn’t know the dimensions of it. I didn’t really know what was going on, because it was just. It became a part of Metro’s responsibility, what, ’91? ’92?
ER: Actually, it was ’90. . .
TC: And then the management plan was in ’90. Shortly after that I. Well, there was a fill [laughs sardonically]. Leadbetter Peninsula, the infamous Leadbetter Peninsula fill, the last fill by the Port of Portland. I was already involved out here, and I hadn’t been to this one part of the lakes. And there used to be a couple ponds and a, and a lot of wetlands, and this one time I was taking my walk, and all of the sudden it was all filled. And I couldn’t believe it. I said, “What is going on?”
Because I kind of thought that the filling was done. Well, I called Jim at Metro, and I just screeched, and he said, “It’s time, we’ve got to do something.”
And with his help we started the Friends of Smith & Bybee Lakes.
DS: Jim who?
TC: Jim Morgan. And that’s in a way, where the Friends, there was already a Friends groups, I didn’t realize. But it had been a part of the St. Johns Neighborhood Association, and it was defunct. And we basically contacted the person who had been responsible for starting that Friends group and asked if they wouldn’t mind transferring the papers of incorporation over to us and so then we went out and got our own 501C3 and you know, those kinds of decisions. . . Ever since then for the last six years, its been pretty intense. There has been thing after thing after thing come up. A large project on the other side of the lakes here, the road you were on, Marine Drive.
DS: I was going to ask what kind of response you have to that?
TC: It’s a fascinating thing. We were having our regular friends meeting, was it three years ago. . . October. And a fellow from the Port of Portland came. He’s, I was on the management committee at the time representing the Friends. He was representing the port. Nothing was ever discussed in the management committee, that the port had an intention of enlarging Marine Drive. Well, this fellow came to our Friends meeting, and he said, “I thought you guys might like to see what the port’s going to do.” And that’s the way it was presented.
DS: There was no public input?
TC: Oh, no. What happened because of that was the first time the port ever did public process. They showed them enlarging Marine Drive to five lanes, wiping out the little parking lot. And then they were going to run a railroad spur right along the edge of Smith Lake. [sees a kestrel]
ER: Cutting off basically all access to any trails that we’ve built.
TC: And we had already built the trails and the port was already on the management committee when we were building the trails and they never said anything. So it was, oh, the fur hit the fan. People called Mike Burton at home, that night, saying, “What’s going on?”
Mike didn’t know anything about it. Mike Burton is the executive director of Metro. . . [an elected official] He wasn’t particularly amused to find out what the Port was going to do by a phone call at home at 9:00 o’clock at night.
DS: He didn’t know?
ER: No, he had no idea. . . I came to work. I mean I had been on the job for a couple of months and I’m sitting at my desk and I’m talking to Jim Morgan about something and all of the sudden we look up and there’s the head of Parks and Greenspaces and you know, Mike Burton, senior policy advisor, and this other person, all standing there. . . at my desk. . . [says the Port hadn’t contacted anybody] And that’s when the three years of public process started that just ended last month. . .
DS: So, do you feel like the public had any impact on?
TC: Oh, big. We, they were going to, their project was a twelve million dollar project. They were going to; they wanted to eliminate the at-grade crossing on Marine Drive. Where that railroad tracks went across the road. And that’s how they were going to eliminate the at-grade crossing [points out some kingfishers]. That’s how they were going to eliminate the at-grade crossing, but they were going to wipe out everything that we had worked on for years now. And, the city, the port, and Metro, all three heads [of the organizations], they all met, they agreed we’ll have public process. Well, we moved them from what they were going to do to a completely different process. To, twenty what, three million dollars? Big. . . . [the Port] They added words to their mission statement. They added words to the effect of “in an environmentally sensitive way.” . . . and they’ve committed to it, even though the bottom people, the PR people at the bottom, talk the talk, and the top people talk the talk, middle management hasn’t got a clue yet. What does that mean, in an environmentally sensitive way? But, it was a huge shift. Huge. So, and they have committed to public process now up front, as opposed to. They learned a lesson, or, or so it seems. . .
DS: So, what exactly are they doing now?
ER: Well, they’re still going to widen the road.
DS: [talks about all the development that has taken place]
ER: . . .Anything that has sand fill on it will eventually have a building. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to widen north Marine Drive, at least in front of Smith & Bybee, maybe to the north. And build us a sound berm for the forty mile loop on top. And then they’re going to build a overcrossing over the railroad tracks.
TC: Like the one that’s already in existence on the other end, they’re going to do another one.
ER: So it’s going to be like a roller coaster.
DS: But rather than tearing it all up. . .
TC: . . . it consumed three years. And of course, some of us in a volunteer status. But the one thing you learn, though, is you’ve got power, that people who are elected officials or agency officials don’t necessarily have. You can speak your mind and get angry if you so choose. And it happened! [laughs] And it was very contentious at time, but we came through it. The thing is, the moment. We weren’t even halfway through that and all of the sudden another huge development, on this Leadbetter Peninsula. I told you, when the Port filled it, that was kind of the trigger point to start the Friends. Now their jail is going there. The new county jail is going there. And it was huge. But we, we, again, through hard work we got a lot. We got the county to give a lot.
ER: The Friends have been incredible. For their small.
DS: How many people are there who are involved in the group, generally?
ER: There are like eight to ten that are active.
TC: We have a mailing list of a couple hundred of people who have gone on canoe trips. But it’s a huge difference showing up to meetings and doing the grunt work. But the Smith & Bybee Lakes management plan calls for a ten foot vegetative buffer between development and the lakes. We got two hundred feet �? twenty times. And also, Emily and I are both on the buffering subcommittee. What is it going to look like? What do you mean buffering two hundred feet? It could be two hundred feet of sand. That doesn’t do any good. So, we’ve helped them see that our gain is sustainability and invisibility, so it’s this tricky balance. You could make the jail invisible if you could plant forty foot trees that would survive. But given that you’re not going to be able to plant forty foot trees and have them survive in sand. So we’ve had this tricky dance to try to come up with, how long before it’s invisible.
ER: Troy’s black heart has come out.
TC: Someone’s gotta do it, someone’s gotta say �? you’re asking me for X amount of time and I have to decide whether I’m going to give you that much time before it’s invisible. What we’ve asked for is a forty foot evergreen forest around the perimeter of the whole jail
[the jail is not yet under construction. It is still in the design stage]ER: The county really listened to the Friends.
TC: The county’s bent over backwards because they wanted our support, and what’s happened to us. . . we have to step back a couple of steps to understand the psychology that I brought to this. The county came to the Columbia Slough Watershed Council three, again it was another three year process. Three years ago, and wanted help to site a jail. And it had to be in industrial land, and it had to be away from schools, and it had to be away from recreational areas. It had all this criteria. And they looked out through all over Multnomah County, and nine sites they found were all in the Columbia corridor. So that’s why they approached us to say, we need your help. Well, all the stuff in east county. Some of the commissioners had pickets in front of their house. It was huge �? all this energy that people poured out �? “We do not want a jail.” So, they moved out to three sites out here in north Portland. Actually, one was in northwest. There was a place called Radio Towers, right between, you know where the, between Expo and PIR. You see it right off of I-5, those two radio towers. That’s a wetland. . . and then Rivergate. But not the site, not Leadbetter Peninsula, there’s another site at Rivergate. . .
ER: The port said, “absolutely not in Rivergate.” They will not have a jail in Rivergate. . .
TC: The Rivergate site was the first one chosen. It fulfilled most of the criteria. It was away from residential schools. It had all the infrastructure already in place, power, plumbing, water, road. It was perfect. The port said, “No way.” So they went and they fell back to their second position, which was Radio Towers. Now, certain people, me included, told the sheriff, “Radio Towers is a bad idea.” Radio Towers is a wetland, ninety acre wetland, and you’re going to have to fill, you’re going to have to get a fill permit. And a part of the 404 permit process is you have to show that there isn’t any upland sites available. . . A year and a half, and a million and a half bucks later, the county commissioners decide, and we took them out on the lakes. . . they decide, we’ll never get the permits. And all of the sudden, out of the blue, comes the port saying, “We’ve got this piece of land in Rivergate.” After saying, “No way would we ever sell the county land for a jail at Rivergate,” they say, “we’ve got this piece of land. It was the Leadbetter Peninsula that juts out [shows interviewer on map].
ER: It’s the last piece they filled. . . it has absolutely no facilities that go to it. No code, no water, no sewer, no electricity, no gas. It is undevelopable, except now the county. . . they sold the county this very end tip, and the county’s going to bring in the road. . . the electricity, the sewer, everything. Which now makes this whole site developable. . . Plus, they sold the county this twenty three acres for $5.5 million with no services. . . But I will tell you, the day before it appeared in the paper, that they were going to do this, the PR people at the port did make a phone call to me. And they did say, “This is going to be in the paper tomorrow, Emily. We want you to know in advance of you reading it in the paper.”
TC: [shows interviewer on the map where Leadbetter is and the area that was unexpectedly filled six years earlier].
. . . Here was my position, the psychology, of when the county pulled out of Radio Towers, we said, “Bravo, bravo.” It had to be that way. But the next time we turn around, the port is offering Leadbetter Peninsula to the county, and it kind of caught us flat-footed. But I recognized that all the hard work the county did to try to fit that jail into the Radio Tower site, they were willing to invest a whole lot of money on the environmental mitigation. We said, okay, the county would probably do far more than anybody else, than any industrial company, a trucking firm goes in there and you’re going to ask them for 150 foot additional buffering. You’ve gotta be crazy. They wouldn’t do it. So that’s where we gave our conditional support. The friends said, “We conditionally support the county buying Leadbetter and putting their jail there if they give us 150 foot vegetative buffer, if they help us with a boat launch, if they make it invisible through the vegetation scheme, and the storm water.” There was a clause about storm water. Well, so we gave our conditional support. Well, there was a group in north Portland that came after us big time.
ER: Another citizen group.
TC says that the group took over the St. Johns Neighborhood Association, then came to a Friends meeting and changed the Friends position, notifying the county the next day, that the Friends of Smith & Bybee Lakes had changed their position. They used a loophole in the Friends’ bylaws. They wrestled control of the organization back and then let the county know that the group had returned to their original position. The citizen group derailed both narrators because neither of them actually live in the area. Both of them say they spend more time on the lakes and the slough than most people in north Portland. ER says Metro didn’t take a position on the jail.
TC: So here you are, a volunteer group, and you got all this stuff going on and all of the sudden someone throws you a curve like that. It was fascinating. Well we got our Friends position back, we got our position back, we plowed through, we changed our bylaws, and the jail is going to be built. And we got now, our request was for 150 foot vegetative buffer. Well we got 200 feet.
ER: . . . it’s 200 feet from the toe of the slope, so it’s all the same.
TC: Well, we got what we were after. We’ve got a strong commitment from the county to make it as invisible as possible, as quickly as possible. The ultimate invisibility depends on that evergreen forest growing up and we all know you don’t grow evergreens quickly. So, sustainability, we want them to live, and hence you’re going to have to start with small enough material to guarantee that they live.
DS: Is there a committee to decided what kind of vegetation will be there?
TC: Yes, we’re both on that committee. So, this whole area is so dynamic. And, going back to that whole. The fascinating thing about the trail is, on the forty mile loop trust, the trail goes on this side of the slough, right along Leadbetter Peninsula. Along the north slough, and then across the landfill. . . Now, you have all these things, you have a jail going in here. . . what’s the relationship here? You have the armoring of the north slough. What’s it going to do to the north bank of the north slough? Now, so we had a trail summit about four months ago. . . January. Trying to push the powers that be to pay more attention to, where is this trail really going to go? Because it could go on this side, along, between Ramsey Lake. . . there’s a development going in right there. It’s too late. I don’t think there’s going to be enough room. I don’t think the port of Portland would give an easement to put a trail on this side. It’s too late. So now we have the decision �? where’s the trail going to go along? So, it’s along the slough.
DS: So, what other groups are your advocates? In terms of, you are in conflict with the St. Johns Neighborhood Association. Who would you say are your supporters?
Both ER and TC: Audubon.
ER: The Watershed Council, Audubon.
TC: The Wetlands Conservancy, probably if we solicited help, don’t you think? Audubon and the Watershed Council are two groups that really came out and supported us. They actually did something. I don’t know of any other groups that �? we didn’t go looking for help. Hey Emily, you could run across the north slough today! [the water is low]
. . . the funny question is we lead canoe trips all the time and people like to ask, “Well, why would they put a landfill in a wetland in the first place?” You know, you just kind of roll your eyes. Well, one, this wasn’t a wetland, it was a swamp. In the psychology back then.
ER: In 1941 it was a wasteland.
TC: It was a wasteland, what do you do? You’re getting rid of mosquito habitat, this is good. Why did they put the airport right in that primo bottomland along the Columbia River. Same thing. Everywhere you go, it’s the same thing. . .
ER: That’s another whole controversy that’s brewing is that the airport wants to put in a third runway. What’s the effect of that on the whole slough system? . . . So I think, you know when you look at the Columbia Slough. I mean the Port of Portland is such a huge player, from the top to the bottom.
TC: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
ER: It’s just incredible. And up until a couple years ago nobody really paid much attention to what the port was doing. Well, I can’t say that, there were a few people who were paying attention.
TC: Mike Hough, yeah. . . [Audubon Society] [End Side B, Tape 1 of 2] [Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2] [narrator and interviewer are sitting at the boat launch near the landfill, on the slough]
TC: . . . Push the garbage off the edge, push your yard debris off the edge. It’s the way it’s been treated, has always been treated. . . [the Halton Company] they have forty acres on the slough, and they did a major slough revitalization. It was great. There’s another one called Atlas. . . Copco Wagner. In the upper slough, did a big streambank restoration, using volunteer kids and I think they let the kids design the restoration project and everything. Very few people have taken leadership, or very few companies. Most of the companies treat it the ways it’s always been treated. Even today, they still treat it as just a dump. I mean I’ve canoed, I’ve turned in a couple of people who’ve illegally filled and it’s hard work, you’ve gotta follow up, you’ve gotta call DSL, Division of State Lands and. . . the first Columbia Slough Small Craft Regatta, so that was four years ago, we went by this one place, and somebody had just taken a bulldozer and bulldozed the excess material when they were grading their parking lot area, just bull dozed it off the side. Illegal fill. . . a number of us got down here, because we got out right here, “Did you see that?”
And so I was the one who called DSL, reported them, DSL came out, it happened to be an individual of color. The individual of color took the position, you’re just hassling me because I’m a black man. Excess fill �? just bulldoze it off the edge. See, that has been the mentality, and continues to this day. The Columbia Slough is just, a lot of people think it’s manmade. A lot of people just, you know, I would say, I don’t know how much of the population goes across everyday on all the arterials that go across the Columbia Slough. Lots and lots of people go over the Columbia Slough; how many have come down the slough on the canoe? . . . If you were to try to take some kind of point and counterpoint, or juxtaposition of two mentalities, there it is: Every single day many thousands of people are exposed to it, but how many people realize what it is?
DS: So you feel like the relationship that people have with it, even when it’s in their back yard, is a distant one. Whereas it takes canoeing or being on the slough and really looking at it to have a more intimate relationship with it?
TC: Absolutely, absolutely.
DS: What about people fishing in the slough? Have you seen a lot of that?
TC: Oh, not so much since the signs have been posted numbers of times. And there have been outreaches done by the city of Portland numbers of times, getting flyers out to poor communities. . . [an immigrant group has also received flyers] particularly for Mung, Cambodian, Vietnamese, those populations that heavily depend, and eastern European, heavily depend on fishing. The eastern Europeans in particular, they fish for carp. I’ve watched them many, many times. That’s the fish of choice. And so, the city’s tried again and again to communicate to people who might use subsistence fishing to augment their diet, to communicate, here’s what we know. And if you won’t, if you’re going to fish, eat the fillet. Throw away the fat and the skin. And of course, if you know, a carp that’s very hard. It’s hard to get a fillet out of a carp. So the city’s worked hard. And a number of groups, Urban League was in concert with the city for the posting of the signs. All the signs I think are gone now, but there was this posting about don’t eat. Well, that sign that you saw where we parked on the landfill, in six dialects. . . Cambodian, Vietnamese.
DS: Laotian, Spanish
TC: . . . and Cyrillic Russian. . . But they’re there because of subsistence fishing. So there were a lot of signs posted in this area. Now you don’t see people fishing very often, but they still fish.
DS: So, after the signs went up, you stopped seeing as many people fishing as there were before? Or, has it kind of been over the course of time. . . ?
TC: Course of time. I think that the last time that the city did a really concerted outreach, getting flyers to this one group [an Immigrant group �? can’t recall the name]. But they have really worked hard to try to get the message out, so. People are going to fish. A lot of people go and fish Smith & Bybee Lakes, and Smith & Bybee Lakes is water quality limited, but for temperature and phosphorous, not for the kind of stuff that’s in here.
DS: So the fish is safe from Smith & Bybee?
TC: Oh.
DS: Would you eat it?
TC: Oh, I, no way. I don’t fish. I eat very little fish to start with.
DS: But if you did?
TC: Oh, I definitely wouldn’t eat a fish out of this. And there’s a carp jumping right there. I definitely wouldn’t eat a fish. . . .
[agreement that it’s time to go]I just want to. Look at the raccoon prints here. There is something that we have to continue to remember. There’s deer track.
DS: A deer in the city of Portland.
TC: Yeah, oh yeah. Oh, right here, this is a, it’s heavily used. It’s very important that we provide wildlife corridors. Again, this is that homocentric mentality that we think about well, what’s the slough mean to people. And then we have to broaden the argument. [emphatically] We have to broaden the argument. It’s not just people. Right here, right on the other side of this bridge, one of the first times I canoed down the slough. So this was six, seven years ago, a family of otters came up, and they came up and I had my dog. My friend was with me, and my dog was in the middle and I was in the back, and they came up on a log, and I’m assuming it was the adult, the male, came up and arched his back and bared his teeth at us and hissed at us and then, turned around and clucked at the other two. Then turned around and arched its back, and barred its teeth again and hissed, you know. It was mom and dad and the kid. . . But otters are wonderful creatures, and they come through here all the time. And if you follow, and of course your study area is the Columbia. The whole problem of the Columbia, one of the indicators that came out on the poor health of the Columbia was the reproductive problems in the otter, river otter population. And so, that’s the hard thing, it’s the hard thing to get people to understand that it’s. Okay, so you’re not planning on water-skiing in the Columbia Slough, and you’re not planning on drinking it, we still have a lot to do. We can’t limit ourselves to, what should the slough be like for people. It’s a wildlife habitat. This is a wildlife corridor, eighteen miles long. And if you think about species that have migrated over time, what a wonderful corridor for migration. But how are they going to do it? Especially if they’re, if they can go in the water like the otters, the otter can go upstream and they can go over the cross levies. What about the deer? Once it narrows down into the middle slough and there’s not even fifty feet on either side of the slough, where are they going to go? What kind of wildlife corridor have we provided for species who want to migrate from Forest Park to the Columbia Delta where the Sandy River comes in? Or do we assume that’s just too bad?
[end of interview]