Faced with staunch public opposition to a bike path through private farmland, Benton County Public Works Department officials already were reluctant to appeal the Planning Commission’s Feb. 17 rejection of their request for a conditional use permit. But any lingering hopes they may have had of contesting the decision were dashed the next day by a phone call from the Oregon Department of Transportation.
This week the county called an indefinite halt to the project, saying it needed to re-evaluate all possible routes and re-engage the public in the planning process. But interviews with state and county officials and a review of contract documents shed new light on the dramatic turn of events in the long-running bike path saga.
The conditional use permit would have allowed Public Works to move forward with plans to extend a bicycle and pedestrian path that currently ends at the Corvallis city limits through the Highway 20 corridor to the edge of Albany. The planned route would be separated from the busy two-lane highway, hugging the north side of the Union Pacific Railroad right of way.
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To make the plan work, the county had to acquire easements across 27 parcels of private property. Some willing landowners had already sold the rights to cross their land, but a dozen farmers in the middle of the proposed route dug in their heels, hiring a lawyer to represent their interests and vowing that any attempt to take their land through eminent domain would be tied up in court.
Any significant delay could be costly for the county, which was relying on a $2 million grant from ConnectOregon, a lottery-funded transportation program, to pay for right of way acquisition and other costs associated with the path. Those funds came with a deadline: The county had six months from the time it was awarded the ConnectOregon grant to sign an agreement accepting the money.
That deadline was Feb. 18 (not Feb. 21 as previously reported), and Ed Schultz, the Albany attorney representing the farmers, had argued that, under ConnectOregon rules, the county couldn’t sign the agreement until the project was “construction ready,” with all permits and right of way easements in hand.
Despite that looming deadline, however, county officials thought they still had plenty of time. That’s because they had negotiated a funding agreement with ODOT that gave them until April 30, 2016, to obtain necessary permits for the project, plenty of time to appeal the adverse Planning Commission decision to the Benton County Board of Commissioners. Even more crucial, the contract gave them until June 30, 2016, to complete the right of way acquisition, which was shaping up as the most challenging obstacle to completing the path.
County officials had signed their copy of the contract on Jan. 29 and sent it back to ODOT for a countersignature. Then, according to Public Works Director Josh Wheeler, the state agency changed the terms of the deal at the last minute.
Around 2 p.m. on Feb. 18, the day after the Planning Commission denied the permit request and the last day to execute the funding agreement, one of Wheeler’s staff got a call from Chris Cummings, ODOT’s freight program manager and the coordinator of the ConnectOregon selection process.
“He said ODOT Director Matt Garrett would not sign it unless we agreed to a June 2015 date,” Wheeler told the Gazette-Times. “It kind of blindsided us.”
Wheeler says he called Cummings back and was offered the option of signing the revised agreement and then requesting extensions for key project milestones through a change order process, but that would introduce additional levels of complexity and uncertainty that county officials found unacceptable. Coupled with the Planning Commission decision and the pushback they were getting from farmers and others in the community, they decided to turn down the $2 million state grant and put the bike path on hold.
“We were already leaning toward withdrawing our application anyway just because we wanted to slow down the process and get the public more involved,” said Wheeler, who inherited the project from his predecessor when he became the county’s public works director in August. “That fed into our decision.”
State's about-face
Wheeler said the county never received any explanation for the sudden about-face from the state after ODOT staff had already agreed in principle to the June 2016 timeline.
But Shelley Snow, a spokeswoman for the state agency, said this week that Garrett just couldn’t accept such a protracted schedule.
“He decided that two years to get the land acquired would be too long for this cycle of ConnectOregon,” she told the newspaper.
“One of the elements of the ConnectOregon legislation is readiness,” Snow pointed out.
“There are guidelines around readiness,” she added, and while the guidelines allow some flexibility, “what Matt decided was that was too long.”
That question of construction readiness has been a hot topic in recent months for the Oregon Transportation Commission, the advisory body that sets transportation policy for the state and has the final say on ConnectOregon funding recommendations.
Schultz, the farmers’ attorney, hammered on that point in testimony during the commission’s Jan. 15 meeting in Salem. “This project is not going to be ready to go” in time to meet the signing deadline for the funding agreement, he told the commissioners.
At the same meeting, Corvallis resident Catherine Mater made the same point about ConnectOregon funding for a proposed coal terminal on the Columbia River. Mater had recently been fired as the commission’s chair by then-Gov. John Kitzhaber for her opposition of the coal export project, which the OTC had refused to fund on a 3-2 vote.
That project, however, was revived by a review committee and is once again being recommended for a $2 million ConnectOregon grant. The OTC — minus Mater — is scheduled to vote on that proposal at its March 19 meeting.
Back to square one
Meanwhile, Benton County is going back to square one on the Corvallis-Albany bike path. Public Works plans to hire a consultant with expertise in transportation planning to take a fresh look at all possible routes through the Highway 20 corridor — including the one that failed to win Planning Commission approval — and facilitate a series of community meetings to discuss the options.
Dennis Aloia, the county’s chief operating officer, said the state’s change of direction on the ConnectOregon grant merely pushed the county to take those steps a little sooner than it would have otherwise.
“Even if ODOT hadn’t given us this deadline … we were already looking at withdrawing the application,” Aloia said.
The proposed route had proved far more divisive than county officials had expected, he added, and appealing the Planning Commission’s permit denial would only have made things worse.
“It would just have put this community through more angst on this decision,” he said. “It’s not a solution the commissioners or any of us felt would be a positive solution.”
