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The Continuing Battle for Fire Road
By Norm Maxwell
The 'hood at the end of Fire Road. Taken from the top of a recent clear cut.
That's our place with the metal shop & the red pickup truck.
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About three miles outside of Lorane, Oregon is a little dead-end country lane called
Fire Road. A couple of years ago a real estate developer bought the remains of the
original farm/sawmill at the very end of the road. Then he managed to buy the 12
acre place next door when Greg lost his job and had to sell the farm.
Both pieces of property abutted and the developer's land planning minions immediately
began scheming on how to change the current zoning of rural-residential 10 acre,
to RR-5 so they could throw down a half dozen building sites in the flood plain of
the Siuslaw River and run away with a bag full of money.
I got wind of what was going on and went to Lane County's Land Management Division
(LMD)to protest. All the "lot line adjustments" the developer's minions
were pulling were "preliminary" I was told, and therefore couldn't be challenged
until the re-zoning hearing. If I didn't like it, I could challenge it when the re-zoning
came up for hearing. Preliminary or not, the developer was able to sell the two original
houses on phony-baloney two acre lots that didn't even meet Lane County policy, much
less Oregon land use law.
I didn't like it and I hired a lawyer and we won across the board at the hearing.
The hearings official negated the half a dozen main gambits the developer used to
justify packing the flood plain. The developer appealed the decision. Kent Howe,
head of the Land Management Division
appealed Lane County's own decision. This made me suspect that perhaps there wasn't
going to be a level playing field in this game.
The hearings official (HO) is a Lane County employee and he agreed to "reconsider"
his decision. I suspect that somebody had a wee word with the HO and asked if he
would like to finish out the last couple years of his career with Lane County. After
a long time, the HO reversed himself with a rush job couple of pages with canned
exhibits full of misspellings and incomplete sentences. His original decision is
an impressive document explaining why county policy conflicts with Oregon land use
law and detailing each bogus premise of the developer's minions and why it didn't
fly.
The HO now said that I hadn't attacked one of the illegal lots quickly enough so
it was all legal now and the other one required "readjustment." I think
this means that it is still illegal. It is my understanding that the developer can't
readjust anything without the consent of the people who now own the place. The people
across the fence in the illegal lot do not plan to let the developer do anything
to their place without a lawyer representing their interests. They do not trust the
developer for some reason.
I appealed the "reconsidered" decision to the Board of Lane Count Commissioners.
I had to put up twenty-five hundred dollars for the privilege of challenging Lane
County. Kent Howe didn't have to put up a dime the first time around and he has the
limitless resources of the county. The developer has a wealthy daddy so chump change
like this doesn't mean anything to him. There is no doubt in my mind that the developer/LC
tag team was hoping that I wouldn't put my money where my mouth was.
The Board of County Commissioners voted three to two to not hear the case and NOT
adopt the reconsidered decision of the HO and pass the whole mess on
to Oregon's Land Use Board of Appeals. This was the best possible thing that could
have happened for us. If the County Commissioners had adopted the decision, then
the tag team would be able to plead before the state Land Use Board of Appeals that
the commissioners had backed up county policy and therefore it supersedes state law.
Following this logic to its natural conclusion, you should be able to grow dope on
your land as long as it is your policy to do so. Anyway, the tag team is on its own
before Land Use Board of Appeals and hopefully, they no longer own the playing field.
So we have the combined forces of the developer and Lane County LMD on one side and
the Fire Road Defense League on the other. The developer has a former county commissioner
as his lawyer. Lane County has its own full time lawyer. I have an environmental
lawyer in my corner. My original lawyer became pregnant and retired from the fight,
after appointing Marianne as her successor. The enemy has all the money in the world
compared to us. All we have is Oregon land use law on our side--a poor second at
best. Still we have fighting spirit and we know we are right and it is our duty to
rise up and fight the monster.
The politics on Fire Road are interesting. I achieved block captain status through
default. Nobody wants to lead but somebody has to. I am the chief union steward where
I work and have never lost a bureaucratic battle there. It is not because I am so
incredibly smart. Rather, I make sure I am right and then go for the throat and dig
in and call for assistance from an outside agency. Once management discovers that
they can't contain the damage, they come around to my way of thinking, sometimes
even before the Inspector General arrives to poke through their dirty laundry.
Only one neighbor in the hood supports the developer. She wants him to succeed so
that she can cut her place into four lots and make a lot of dough and move away.
As far as I know, she doesn't actively help him other than having allowed him to
divide her 20 acre unit in half at his expense to help him with the numbers game.
She circles overhead hoping he will make the kill and she can benefit and run away
too. Everyone else is against it. Most people quickly adopted the attitude that since
Norm is doing all the work, he might as well pay for it as well, but there is a corps
of neighbors who form the Fire Road Defense League.
One of the developer's minions called a meeting with me and my attorney to see if
we have any "common ground." We don't. The camel only wants to stick its
nose under the tent. As our date with the Land Use Board of Appeals nears, perhaps
the developer will sweeten the pot. There are entirely too many shaky legal aspects
of the Fire Road Affair. The tag team has to win every one of them in order to get
away with changing the zoning. We only have to win one issue and they are out of
business.
I made contact with Land Watch, Lane County and became a member. Land Watch is a
group that feels rampant development in Lane County is only good for rape and run
developers and the fe -driven Land Management Division Land Watch realizes that mass
development must be fought one battle at a time and that Fire Road is the cutting
edge of the frantic dash of developers to slide in under the wire before new state
laws come into effect on 4 October 00 that will rain on their parade.
If you are a rural resident of Lane County, then Fire Road is your fight too. While
you are off at the salt mines, there are professional minions of developers who spend
all day in the basement of the Lane County building quietly filing papers and seeing
who is behind in their taxes, and how they can buy land for not very much that they
can pull some phony-baloney lot line adjustments on and create some more lots to
sell to wealthy Californians who don't know any better than to live on a flood plain.
I would have thought it to be against law or regulation to build in a flood plain
but not in Lane County.
If anybody out there would like to contribute financially to the fight it would be
greatly appreciated. Lane County can shrug off employees walking away with $40,000
(minimum) (see Register-Guard news story week of Sept. 18th- editor) and the developer
has daddy's money but the Fire Road Defense League is on a shoestring budget. The
tag team's main hope for success is just to run us out of money so we can't afford
justice. This would be a shame.
Donations can be sent to M. Dugan at 485 E. 13th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401. Be sure
and earmark checks for the Fire Road Defense Fund. David needs a few extra stones
to take on the twin Goliaths.
Norm Maxwell
block captain,
Fire Road Defense League
Also see Fall issue, Letters to the Editor - Re: Fire Road
and the first chapter of The Battle for Fire Road
Update:
Resist Bogus Re-zoning. Residents of Lame County, please show up at
Harris Hall in the Lame County Building on this October 19th at 0900 to show
support for Bob and Nena in their resistance at the initial re-zoning
hearing for a piece of forest land at Fall Creek. If just a few people
show, the developer figures nobody cares and they will just try to bulldoze the
little people in the way. Many of the issues at Fall Creek should be
decided when the Fire Road case goes before the Oregon Land Use Board of
Appeals. Still, a multitude of smiling faces looking at the hearings
official is what we need. For more info, e-mail Norm at scm@guppy.pond.net
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