Port, city explain airpark scuttle

Attorney for Scappoose calls Port of St. Helen's LUBA appeal an ‘expensive over-reaction’

By Kelly Moyer

The South County Spotlight, Oct 22, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

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Attorneys for the city of Scappoose are calling the Port of St. Helens’ appeal to the state’s Land Use Board of Appeals over Scappoose’s newly adopted airport related zone “an expensive and confrontational over-reaction” that doesn’t seem to understand the city’s intent.

In a legal brief filed Thursday, Oct. 16, attorney Jack Orchard, writing on behalf of the city of Scappoose, says the Port of St. Helens, in its quest to overturn the city’s decision to create an airport related zone, has “persisted in converting a limited legislative and policy action into an assumed set of land use proposals without any basis for its assumptions.”

The Port of St. Helens and the city of Scappoose will argue their cases before Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals on Thursday, Oct. 30 in Salem.

At the heart of the matter is whether or not the city’s new airport related zone allows residential uses at the Scappoose Airport. The Port says it does. The city says that’s not true.

“The airport related zone was not applied by the city to a specific parcel of land nor has a specific proposal utilizing the Airport Related zone been proposed,” Orchard states in his brief for the city. “How and under what circumstances the zone may be applied are left to the future, including to any proposed residential use … the zone identifies many uses; whether applications for particular uses will materialize is conjecture at this point.”

Orchard contends that the city, in its passage of Ordinance No. 799, which adopted the Airport Related zone to expand the city’s economic opportunities, did not open the door for land use changes or authorize residential use at the airport.

The ordinance, Orchard argues, “was an appropriate exercise of the city’s planning authority. Notwithstanding (the Port’s) adverse reaction, no changes to land use were permitted by this action nor were (or are) the Scappoose Airport’s operations or federal funding compromised.”

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