IWhen Clark County gets ready today to sign a groundbreaking deal with state environmental regulators over how to keep local rivers clean, almost none of the county’s thousands of environmentalists will have a clue what to think about it.
The handful of wonks who keep up with county politics will have opinions on the proposal, under which the public would pay for pipes leading to big, new storm-drainage ponds and swamps.
But armchair greens — the kind who rely on the opinions of informed activists such as Vancouver attorney John Karpinski or planning Commissioner Ron Barca — have every reason to be confused.
“The community is split,” Barca said Monday.
Favoring the county’s plan are environmentalists like Barca, state official Garin Schrieve and county Commissioner Steve Stuart, an anti-sprawl lobbyist turned local politician, who say the county’s new system will chill urban sprawl while focusing money on the local streams that need the most help.
On the other side are environmentalists like Karpinski, Rosemere Neighborhood Association president Dvija Michael Bertish and out-of-town watchdogs like Earthjustice and Columbia Riverkeeper, who say they share the same goals — they just don’t trust Clark County, an institution that has broken green hearts for decades, to do the job right.
Here’s the problem they’re all trying to solve: when developers redevelop sites like the Steakburger in Hazel Dell or pave fields like the 179th Street interchange near Ridgefield, should they build it so all the water seeps straight into the ground on-site, like nature intended?
Or should they let it flow to big regional facilities that double as parks, trails and wildlife habitat?
And who should pay for the cost of repairing the damage that’s already been done to the county — developers? Or the public?
The skeptics
Those who hate the county’s plan say their argument is simple.
“It just gets back to three words: do it right,” said Karpinski. “If every step of the way, everybody does what they need to do it right, we wouldn’t have so many of these problems.”
So Karpinski says every site should be built to drain on location, just as well as it did when forests covered Southwest Washington.
That’s expensive — especially on sites like Steakburger, which were paved long before the government worried about the damage being done to rivers.
Should taxpayers pick up some of that cost, rather than make developers pay for the sins of the past? Many oppose the idea reflexively.
“If the people of Clark County want to shortchange schools and police so they can subsidize developers, that’s up to them,” Earthjustice lawyer Jan Hasselman wrote in an e-mail Monday. “But that decision should only be made after everyone has had a chance to be heard.”
Skeptics of the new plan say it might be possible to solve some of the problem with regional drainage facilities. But that’d require expertise the county — and other jurisdictions that might imitate the county, like Battle Ground and Vancouver — don’t have.
“They haven’t developed a metric to track it,” Bertish said. “Without money and without basin planning and without hydrology, there is no way that they will actually be able to assess whether anything to do with this scheme will do any good.”
The believers
For Barca, a former president of Friends of Clark County who is now the county planning commission’s most reliable green vote, the perfect clean-water solution is a field near the Gresham factory where he works.
It’s a swamp that takes runoff from the huge industrial complex surrounding. It’s also Barca’s lunchtime running track, thanks to a half-mile loop of asphalt on site.
“It’s very low-key and it’s meant for waterfowl and the wildlife and for people to be integrated,” Barca said. “It is effectively filtering all those acres of industrial land.”
Facilities like that one build public support for clean-water rules, Barca said.
“I think that we should expect that these facilities are able to do double duty, and try to create win-wins,” he said.
The problem: those facilities cost money.
Stuart’s solution: just as they do today, developers would be required not to do additional damage to sites they rebuild. Every new bit of hard surface would require a new bit of swampy drainage.
Here’s where backers of the county plan depart from Karpinski and Bertish: they don’t think developers should pay for damage already done to a site.
Stuart says that if developers are forced to fully repair the drainage systems on any site they develop, they’ll simply push every new project to undeveloped fields at the edges of cities.
Instead, every time developers redevelop a site that’s already been damaged, the public should reward them — by shouldering the cost of sending the water to a new off-site facility like Barca’s running track.
“We will make it millions of dollars less expensive to redevelop than to sprawl,” Stuart said.
The alternative, Barca fears, is for developers to keep setting aside part of every development with fenced-off ditches he calls “water jails,” which he said have little public use.
“If (skeptics of the county policy) feel like the developers should just go ahead and consume the extra land and continue to turn it into water jails, then they are not representing the best benefit for the public at large,” Barca said. “That’s just more land that’s fenced off.”
