Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Metro regional government Friday announced its largest single land purchase to date using money from a bond voters approved in 2006.

As Rob Manning reports, one of the state’s oldest timber companies and Metro crossed an ideological divide to strike a six million dollar deal.

Stimson Lumber and Metro don’t agree on most things. Metro enforces and defends Oregon’s unique land-use system. Stimson CEO Andrew Miller speaking by cell phone from California, says government officials have taken regulations way too far.

Andrew Miller: “Over the years, the land-use system has become a club that politicians and regulators have beaten private landowners with, and you can only do that so long.”

CEO Andrew Miller says when it came to the Chehalem Ridge property, near Forest Grove - which Metro bought this week - there had been plans to change direction for some time. But selling Metro wasn’t the plan.

Andrew Miller: “Yeah, we had been talking about for years, and begun making plans to eventually convert it from industrial forest land to some type of rural development.”

Miller could have skirted Oregon’s tight rules against developing natural resource land through claims the company had under voter-approved property measures.

But what Miller didn’t know at first, is that his property fit another voter-approved measure. Three years ago, Portland-area voters approved a 227 million dollar bond to purchase open space.

David Bragdon: “When the voters approved this acquisition program back in2006, there were very clear scientific objectives for the program, and this site rings all the bells.”

Metro president, David Bragdon says Chehalem Ridge was one of 27 target areas identified in the bond measure – due to its value for protecting water quality and wildlife habitat.

It’s easy to see why it’s a priority, just walking through a small slice of the property’s two square miles.

Jonathan Saul: “There are literally hundreds of deer tracks – a deer highway. It’s indicative of this property really being a wildlife magnet.”

That’s Jonathan Saul, the stewardship manager for Metro’s open space program. He says had Stimson built only a few dozen homes on this ridge, it would’ve come at an environmental cost.

Jonathan Saul: “The footprint of those houses may have only been an acre or two of landscaping, but when you add them up over the whole area, you end up with fragmentation. So instead of a large piece of intact habitat, you have small pieces interrupted by roads, and light and sound. All of that subtlely and not so subtlely degrades the quality of the habitat.”

Chehalem Ridge climbs over one thousand feet in the foothills of the Coast Range. It won’t be open to the public for some time, but it will be open to restoration scientists, like Metro’s Kate Halloran.

Kate Halloran: “I just kind of plow through, I’m really not a very good trail blazer. I’m just warning everybody.”

But as we keep up with Halloran, she finds one of her favorite parts of a site that she’s slowly gotten to know in recent months. It’s a series of beaver ponds.

Kate Halloran: “The beaver activity – it’s like a super-highway, there’s all these little trails all over the place. You can see – look around here, all of this has been cut by beaver. And that was a hungry one. That one - that’s a big tree.”

Until a year and a half ago, Stimson was planning to develop land near these beaver ponds. Then, the real estate market tanked, and the Trust for Public Land began talking to Andrew Miller about a different future for Chehalem Ridge. Don Goldberg is the Trust’s Portland-area project manager.

Don Goldberg: “This was one of those dream deals where old timber company, government, and non-profit, all in the past maybe not crossed each other’s paths in positive ways, did. We all did what was necessary to successfully get this protected.”

In the end, Metro paid a little more than six million dollars in bond money for more than 1100 acres at Chehalem Ridge.

Metro president, Bragdon, says taxpayers will appreciate the purchase for generations.

David Bragdon: “Forty or fifty years from now, people are going to be saying ‘well that was priceless, taxpayers really paid peanuts for that back in 2010.’”

Stimson CEO, Miller, says that in theory, the timber company could’ve made more by developing it – but he says it would have cost money up front, and there were risks involved. In the end, he too, is happy with the deal he got.

Metro is planning “sneak peeks” in the months to come, but full public access is probably years away. Officials say the site is big – and it’ll take time to get to know it.  

Full size PDF of map