Floods threaten job site

Johnson Creek Watershed: Leaders, neighbors clash on future of prime industrial land

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Jan 22, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (10 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Johnson Creek (top) was running fast and high on Jan. 2 because of heavy rains and snow melt, churning up mud and uprooting trees along its path.

The early January flooding of Johnson Creek is raising questions about the future of one of the last large remaining tracts of underdeveloped industrial land in the city — a site considered key to the future of Lents, one of the poorest parts of town.

Some business owners along a stretch of Southeast Foster Road hit hard by the high water blame the property for the severity of the flooding. They claim that decades of dirt fills on the so-called Freeway Land site has destroyed historic drainage areas, pushing the water onto Foster and into their properties.

“The water has no place else to go now,” said Gary Sargent, owner of Sargent’s Motorsports at Southeast 102nd Avenue and Foster Road. Although the business also flooded in December 2007, Sargent said January’s flooding was much worse.

Freeway Land owners deny their property made the flooding any more severe than it would have been, however. Even though the site is almost directly south of Sargent’s business, he does not believe it affects the water flow in the area.

“That’s an urban myth,” said Kevin Loftus, a spokesman for Jameson Partners, a limited liability corporation that owns and manages the property. “We don’t cause the flooding. Johnson Creek is in a flood plain. If you live in a flood plain, you have to expect you’re going to get flooded.”

In fact, Loftus also said that Jameson Partners — which only bought the property in 2006 — has spent millions of dollars over the past two years keeping stormwater from their property out of Johnson Creek.

The controversy is more than a dispute between neighbors, however. The Portland Development Commission has targeted the Freeway Land property for potential redevelopment. It is located along Interstate 205 in the Lents Urban Renewal Area, which was created by the City Council in 1998 to revitalize the long-neglected stretch of outer Southeast Portland.

A March 2008 study commissioned by the PDC identified the site as “an excellent industrial location in the metro area and an opportunity site for creating a large concentration of jobs.”

The problem: Sargent and a number of other nearby business owners and residents believe much of the site should be excavated into catch basins, wetlands and diversionary channels to absorb and divert future floodwaters. The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services also has considered such projects in the past. But those efforts will reduce the potential amount of land available for industrial jobs — undermining the PDC’s goal for the site.

“There has to be a meeting of the minds between the property owners, the policy makers and the members of the community,” said Kevin Cronin, a PDC senior project coordinator familiar with the property.

Development changes landscape

The Freeway Land property is named after its previous owner, the Freeway Land Co. The site consists of an approximately 100-acre tract along a vacated portion of Southeast 100th Avenue that runs south from Foster to Southeast Knapp Road at the northern base of Mount Scott. Approximately 30 acres are in environmental protection zones, leaving about 70 acres for industrial uses. The land currently accommodates more than 45 businesses that employ around 150 people. Activities range from construction demolition recycling to cement mixing.

There is no doubt the property has changed dramatically over the years. Aerial photographs taken in 1939 and 2007 show the elevated portion of the site more than doubled in that time. The city approved most of that growth by allowing both current and previous owners to fill in portions of the Johnson Creek floodplain with dirt to create new land for buildings and elevated work areas. Some of the fills were within a few dozen feet of the creek.

But the photos also show a lot of other work in and around the Johnson Creek watershed, including many commercial and housing developments built on and near Mount Scott. Large swaths of trees were removed for the projects and replaced with such impervious surfaces as streets, sidewalks, parking lots and rooftops, changing the historic drainage patterns surrounding the creek.

Much more development also has occurred upstream from Lents, where the Johnson Creek Watershed borders such growing population centers as Happy Valley on the south and Gresham on the north.

“We know a lot more now about the problems caused by filling in flood plains,” said Marie Johnson, a Johnson Creek Watershed program coordinator for the Portland Bureau of Environmental Quality. “In the past, when someone wanted to fill part of a floodplain, they had no trouble getting approval.”

That changed in 1996, when heavy snow and rains caused massive flooding throughout the Portland area, including along Johnson Creek. The widespread destruction prompted the city to adopt a so-called “balance fill and dig rule.” Now anyone wanting to fill part of a flood plain must excavate an equal amount of land to maintain the same absorption area.

TriMet followed this rule recently as part of its coming MAX light-rail line along I-205, which runs just west of the Freeway Land property. When it built a bridge over Johnson Creek near Southeast Flavel Street, the regional transit agency wanted to fill in a large ditch that historically caught and held floodwater. Before it did the work, TriMet had to obtain numerous permits to replace the ditch with a larger and more sophisticated bioswale, according to Jeff Goodling, TriMet construction project manager.

The Freeway Land Co. did not follow that rule, however, when it filled over 2.6 acres of wetlands in the property between 1993 and 2003.

In fact, the company did not apply for any permits at all for that fill. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spotted the illegal work in 2003, however. It notified the Oregon Division of State Lands and both agencies initiated legal actions to require the fill to be mitigated.

Company agrees to fixes

In 2005 the company signed a consent order to resolve the violation. It agreed to pay a $60,000 fine and file a mitigation plan the next year. Before doing so, however, the Freeway Land Co. sold the property to Jameson Partners. The new owners include developer Tom Walsh and Warren Rosenfeld, president of the Calbag Metals recycling company.

The enforcement action continued after the sale. In early 2008, the Freeway Land Co. signed a consent decree to mitigate the illegal fill by restoring and creating a greater amount of wetland. The work was performed by the new owners later in the year.

According to Loftus, Jameson Partners has done other environmental work on the property, too. Much of it is intended to retain and treat stormwater generated by rain and runoff from nearby Mount Scott. Altogether, Loftus estimates, the company has spent more than $2 million on environmental improvements on the property during the past two years.

Even before the 1996 flood, the city launched several efforts to reduce flooding along Johnson Creek. They include several projects to create new catch basins and restore wetlands along the creek to absorb floodwaters. More than $24.5 million has already been spent on the projects over the past 14 years, including the Brookside Wetlands just south of Foster at 111th Avenue. It was completed in 1997 and can hold up to 35-acre feet of floodwater. A larger project, called the East Lents Floodplain Restoration Project, is planned just east of the Freeway Land property.

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