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07/31/2007: "Hubris, Waste, And Public Trust"

Hubris, Waste, And Public Trust
By Mike Macdonald

The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer. -Edward R. Murrow

San Juan County is currently investigating placing a trash and garbage-handling facility on three sites that the 2003 county board of commissioners found presented “unavoidable adverse impacts to air traffic safety.”

On Monday, July 16, 2007, Councilman Alan Lichter and the Solid Waste Advisory Committee toured sites explicitly rejected in 2003.

Development continues on another property implicitly disqualified as a transfer station site four years ago.

Time and money continue to be wasted. The county has purchased two pieces of property for use prohibited by the county’s own findings and regulations.

The unavoidable question is, don’t county officials, past and present, read their own documents before spending our money?


On August 15, 2005, the Board of County Commissioners, then Alan Lichter and Kevin Ranker, closed escrow on a $1.8 million 27-acre property on Beaverton Valley Road for a transfer station, and a public works maintenance yard.

In early August 2005, neighbors, at a meeting with Ranker and Public Works Director Jon Shannon said essentially, are you crazy? The site drains poorly, is covered with wetlands, drains into several protected neighboring wetlands, and is directly under the landing pattern of the airport, presenting a safety problem. Neighbors believed over the years it had been rejected for county ownership at least twice and perhaps three times.

In June 2005, after 51 minutes of closed session discussion, Ranker and Lichter passed a BOCC resolution via consent agenda without public discussion that authorized the purchase.

The resolution read in part, “...authorizing San Juan County to acquire a parcel of approximately 27 acres...for $1,800,000 under the purchase agreement... in lieu of condemnation, and authorizing the Director of Public Works to sign all documents necessary to affect the purchase.”

In February 2003, the BOCC, then Rhea Miller, Darcie Nielsen, and John Evans, passed resolution 40-2003 in an effort to site a solid waste transfer station and a recycling center on land it had purchased on Sutton Road.

It read it part; “Any solid waste facility attracts birds, which can create significant safety hazards for aircraft operation and therefore hazards to public safety. For two of those sites...the proximity to the Friday Harbor airport presented unavoidable adverse impacts to air traffic safety and thus were found to be incompatible with existing and planned land use. The same situation exists at a third site, (Olerin LLC) which abuts a private airfield.”

The San Juan Islander reported in this way: “Birds attracted to the transfer site would present safety problems for the air traffic near the three rejected properties according to Planning Director Laura Arnold.”

The property purchased by Lichter and Ranker in 2005 adjoins the rejected site, and is closer to Friday Harbor Airport. Landing pattern altitude over the site is 1,000 feet, but many aircraft approach lower.
Pilots say it is directly under a turning point, where pilot workload for landing is highest, making the threat of bird strike more dangerous.

In mid-June of 2007, the public works and planning departments held a scoping meeting prior to an environmental impact study of four potential trash transfer sites. Three of the sites under consideration had already been rejected by BOCC resolution 40-2003.

At the June meeting, members of a local pilot’s association said three sites, the same sites rejected by BOCC 40-2003, presented severe hazards to aircraft, and development was either prohibited by federal regulation or compliance was prohibitively expensive.

Pilot Bob Miller said he had located and printed the pertinent federal regulations in less than an hour’s search on the Internet.

Ed Hale, the senior public works employee present, said that the aircraft safety issue had not been considered on the three properties in question.

Todd Peterson, the trash management consultant hired by public works to conduct the meeting, had no answer to several comments that no progress had been made in a year and that the same issues were being discussed. One of the pilots commented that the aircraft-bird strike safety issue had been raised the previous year at a Solid Waste Advisory Committee (SWAC) meeting and had been ignored by public works.
The meeting ended on an angry note when Peterson refused the request of three citizens for a vote on the location.

Afterwards, several participants expressed the opinion that this was a dog and pony show, with some facts being concealed and others revisited without action to fit a decision already made by public works.

To find out if this was true, a review was initiated. A few minutes on Google led to BOCC 40-2003, located in the planning department files. Total elapsed time was less than an hour.

A copy of the resolution was given to Councilman Ranker, who said he had not seen it before. Ranker made copies for the other councilmembers and Pete Rose, the county administrator.

At a meeting on the subject property, now called the Beaverton Valley Road site in early July, Rose said he had not seen the resolution before Ranker gave him a copy. Rose also said he would obtain a legal ruling from County Prosecuting Attorney Randy Gaylord about its significance to further county action.

During the time we spoke, about 25 aircraft flew overhead on approach to Friday Harbor Airport, some low enough that we had to cease speaking until they passed.

On July 16, 2007, Lichter, SWAC and a group of concerned citizens toured three potential sites near the airport that had been determined unsafe for transfer site development four years before.

It was reported in The Island Guardian that Lichter wondered aloud, “Why are we even here?”
According to Rose, Lichter received a copy of BOCC 40-2003 in late June.

Development continues on the Beaverton Valley Road property. Public works is planning a 50-foot by 450-foot by ten-foot high berm composed of nearly 5,000 cubic yards of material to shield a neighboring property from the view of what the resolution implicitly prohibits being built there. Cost estimates for the berm range from $40,000 to $100,000.

Public work’s plans for the berm now must be altered as a state Department of Ecology wetlands delineation completed in June, 2007 found four additional wetlands on the site, including one under the proposed berm that will require an Army Corps of Engineers permit.

In the winter of 2006-07, much of the flat ground on the site was underwater for months, confirming the neighbors’ 2005 warnings to Ranker and Shannon. Stormwater runoff flooded across Beaverton Valley Road on the way to the protected marsh.

I believe BOCC 40-2003 is not a simple overlooked document, but evidence of systemic dysfunction in county government that led voters to approve the Home Rule Charter in November of 2005. The charter was a stinging rebuke to the incumbent county commissioners, and a rejection of county department heads running out of control with the public purse.

Subsequent events have demonstrated that county officials not listen to citizens and they do not read their own documents before embarking upon expensive actions.

BOCC 40-2003 is not some toothless study to be ignored or dismissed by current government as inconvenient. It is a resolution passed after comprehensive staff study, public meetings, and announcements in the local news services. A resolution is the most public document county government produces.

It was not buried in some obscure vault, but filed in at least six county locations. Its existence was reported on at the time of its passing.

Its location and reintroduction to the ongoing public trash discussion took no great feat of reporting, but the skills you would expect of a tenth-grader researching a term paper.

I believe that a measured and timely response from the county administrator and the county council is owed to the taxpayers.

The logical and ethical steps would include:

1. Suspend all transfer site action until an independent counsel renders an opinion on what effect BOCC 40-2003 and pertinent federal regulations will have on the process.
2. Determine why Shannon and Gaylord failed to disclose 40-2003 to the new council and administrator.
3. Determine why Lichter and Ranker failed to find BOCC 40-2003 during their due diligence period before closing escrow on a $1.8 million property that they were prepared to condemn to obtain.
4. Direct the new county communications director to research the entire transfer station issue since 1999, to identify errors, quantify costs, and offer suggestions to prevent us from making the same mistakes again. The flawed process to date has sapped county employee morale, wasted thousands of hours of citizen, volunteer, and employee time, and cost millions while the trash disposal situation worsens.

On April 1, 2004, Claudia Mills won her suit in Superior Court against San Juan County over the Sutton Road transfer station siting. She had claimed the county had not followed its own rules in the permit process.

“Mills won on every ground,” Gaylord said at the time. Soon after, steps began to acquire the Beaverton Valley Road property.

It is not credible that the commissioners, Gaylord, and Shannon overlooked BOCC 40-2003. They had passed it the year before.

It had been submitted as evidence in the Mills suit, where the judge essentially handed the commissioners, the public works director, and the prosecutor their heads in an embarrassing defeat that cost the county approximately $800,000 for legal costs, lost grants, and land purchase.

WSU 4-H Program Director Cindy Gauthier was one of the neighbors who attended the August 2005 meeting with Ranker and Shannon. Her particular interest was stormwater runoff, as much of the county property drains through wetlands on her family farm.

Shannon and Ranker brushed aside the neighbors’ concerns. One remembers Shannon saying they could work with public works or work against them, but a trash transfer facility would be built here.

This was done against the backdrop of a steady stream of airplanes turning over the property to land at the airport.

The noise could have been the sound of hubris colliding with BOCC 40-2003.



(Mike Macdonald lives on a family farm adjacent to the county’s Beaverton Valley property,/I.0.