Assessing the environmental legacy of a bad idea

The 17-acre site was purchased from the city in 1965 and called for 175 homes with streets, sewers and underground wiring on a sand spit above the Necanicum estuary over Gearhart. Lots ranged from a minimum of 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.

The project had some influential proponents, including William Holmstrom of Gearhart, president of the Sunset Cove Inc. and a member of the Oregon State Senate.

Despite objections from neighbors, environmentalists and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a Clatsop County Circuit Court judge OK’d a mining permit to move sand from the estuary and replace it with rock.

There was a different mindset back then, Maine said: “If it makes another buck, then do it.”

Construction crews went to work bringing in rock and fill as Sunset Cove excavated the channel and built a rock retaining wall along a sand spit at the mouth of the Necanicum River. An island of rock and sand was created between November 1967 and January 1968.

“They got a mining permit to scrape the sand off the beach, to keep filling, filling, filling,” Maine said. “People were outraged by it. It was totally bogus.

“Then they started armoring the rock,” he added. “They brought in enough rock to raise a wall 25-feet deep.”

Ultimately, the developers piled up 370,000 cubic yards of sand on the 17-acre site to build it up from the beach.

When a storm washed some of that away, the builders put more riprap on the ocean side to prevent further erosion.

A group of clam diggers was able to accomplish what opponents weren’t: stop the ’dozers in their tracks. Oregon Attorney General Robert Thornton charged seven heavy equipment operators and the project superintendent with “wanton waste of razor clams.”

“Some old codger remembered somewhere in the fish and game laws that it was against the law to drive on clam beds,” Maine said. “The fish and game wardens wrote the driver up.”

Neighbors and clam diggers demanded that the fill be removed and the firm forced to pay a penalty of $500,000.

In 1975, a district court demanded the removal of the construction rock; however, a federal appeals judge modified the decision to “require the removal of as much of the riprap as will permit nature … to take its course.”

By 1978, nature had already taken its course. Eight property owners in north Seaside faced losing their homes after the estuary’s diverted waters began eating away at their homes. The homeowners were required to add additional rock retaining walls to protect their properties.

Despite the rulings and damage to the nearby homes, the developer returned to the planning table, this time with an 80-home plan for the estuary.

The Corps of Engineers was joined by 1,000 Friends of Oregon, the Necanicum River Protective Association and members of the Seaside Planning Commission, all of whom opposed the developer’s plan to build homes on an active foredune in violation of state land use guidelines. Maine, in opposing the project at the time, told Clatsop County planning commissioners in 1977 the proposal was still “basically bad.”

By that time, land use rules were in effect and there was greater ecological awareness. Maine and others recognized the value of the estuaries to man and wildlife, and natural beauty of the land.

Sunset Cove Inc. brought their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which demanded an after-the-fact permit from the builders for unauthorized fill.

The next spring, the appeals court affirmed that the Sunset Cove area was protected as “navigable waters” and the project stalled after the U.S. Supreme Court failed to hear the developers’ appeal.

As a berm created by fill from the ’60s crumbles in the estuary’s waters, we are watching “the last little pieces of this history,” Maine said.

“I’m not interested in reliving it,” Maine said this month. “I think the story is how important the decision-making process is because there are legacies that are unforeseen. You have to have a process.”

Yet he mourns the ineradicable changes to the inlet, where rock will remain and channels were changed forever. “This covered over tidelands, which are the most productive in the world,” Maine said.

If the developers had never started the process, Maine said, “It would have been the estuary that it has been for the past 10,000 years. It would have just done its thing every year. The fish would have come in and gone out.

“The estuary is one of only 17 on the Oregon Coast,” he continued. “It’s a gateway to hundreds of thousands acres of watershed.”

Maine makes a connection between then and now, and issues a call to action.

“I hear the natural gas discussion in Warrenton, but I don’t really hear the Warrenton people talking about a review process,” he said. “You have to guarantee to the next two or three generations that these resources are going to be there. There has to be an identifiable review process, so 30 years later we don’t say, ‘My, God what did we do?’

“I don’t think this would happen today, but other things could,” he added. “Now, Oregon has a very specific guidelines for estuaries. The land use planning process was just getting started then. But here we are getting involved with the Columbia River estuary with LNG.”

R.J. Marx is The Daily Astorian’s South County reporter and editor of the Seaside Signal and Cannon Beach Gazette.