PAGE 3
BLUES
BEACHFRONT
BY DR. JOHN CAMPICHE
Like the nearby communities on Oregon's northwest
coast, Seaview, Washington, is an old community by northwest
standards, considering that no towns or anything of European
culture were here 150 years ago.
In the last century and the early part of this, Seaview
could be reached only by packet steamer down the Columbia
River to Knappton where a vintage narrow-gauge railroad of
variable schedule carried summer folk to the village and on up
to similar summer towns northward on the Long Beach Penin­
sula. Mothers and children were deposited to fine old homes
in Seaview (and to more utility shelters on up northward) wrfrile
their working husbands limited visits to weekends using the
"Daddy Train".
In time, boat and train fell prey to the automobile as
mainland corduroy logging roads were paved. The year-round
economy was the late Paleozoic archetype of hunter/gatherer
extraction of resource timber and fish; pigeons and buffalo had
already been shot into extinction. The 35,000 year sustainable
culture of the native Indians had been successfully banished
to poverty reservations on unusable land, leaving to the area
Caucasians an unfettered economy for which they were so
culturally dedicated; plunder if not by war then by polity.
Washington territory became a state and required a
constitution, and like the other states, needed laws to fill the
empty shelves in the elegant State Capitol building. These were
crafted to provide the least interference vwth plunder by allowing
counties to rewrite their own versions of weak environmental
laws and create enforcement agencies crippled vwth language
that allowed profitable options to all whose main interest was
cash. The system worked wonderfully well, so well in fact that in
the 1860s around southwest Washington the ex-buffalo hunters
of Pacific County were astonished to find that trees and fish, like
the buffalo, were vanishing. They were rescued from futile blam­
ing of everyone else by the rise of the automobile coinciding
vwth an emerging Eastern geriatric retirement population, well
heeled with retirement funds from the good years and the profit­
able sale of the family farm to developers.
These mobile middle westerners wanted ocean front
real estate to fulfill new dreams. But the old habits of hard times
persisted so that, newly rich or not, they wanted cheap lots, low
cost homes and small taxes to insure they wouldn't run out of
money now that human longevity had lengthened. Real estate
became the last target of the hunter/gatherers. The Long Beach
Peninsula was loaded with cheap, low lying land and beautiful if
vwld beaches. Surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean,
Willapa Bay and the Columbia River estuary, averaging only 12
feet elevation, it was bit soggy in winter — but the new arrivals
viewing it in summer didn't have to know it was afloat in vwnter.
The County Commissioners, the only real power in
Pacific County, have always seen themselves as the facilitators
of commerce. The County had always been poor by state stan­
dards so that the gamering of money took strong precedence
over prudence and conservation (whatever that might mean).
They believed firmly that the Bible clearly gave the bounty of the
Earth to 'People of the Book' to use at their pleasure. Ecology
and conservation weren't included in the bright lexicon of these
disciples of Genesis. So the boys in the Courthouse basement
facilitated, the realtors sold, the developers filled swamps with
sand and developed. There was a wonderful spurt of building
from 1988 to 1994 wrien a six year drought falsely made the
Peninsula appear as dry as California. This was especially
persuasive in the Seaview accretion dune system that was
usually flooded all vwnter. Also, in a bright moment, Seaview
had bought sewer and water systems that meant to realtors
small building lots were possible.
Back in 1918 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers com­
pleted the two mile long jetties at the Columbia River mouth.
River borne sand drifted oceanward north around the North Jetty
and began to build up in the peninsula shore, especially in Sea­
view nearest the jetty. By 1988 it had reached a half mile farther
westward. This would have all belonged by constitutional law to
Washington State except for a Supreme Court decision in 1960
that said the original deeds were codified before Washington
became a state so that all this accretion land belonged to the
upland owners For good reason no one had built out in these
accretion dunes: flooded in the awesome vwnter rains and wind
driven storms, these dunes were considered adequate for water
fov4 and summer walking but not, God forbid, for building sites.
Realtors were not so fussy. Buildable land was defined as that
which could be sold.
A trio of conservationist County Commissioners were
elected for a brief period but quit in the face of anti-conservation
antagonism. During their short tenure they created a Dunes
Management Committee of mixed citizens, landuse devotees
and conservationists that unanimously decided, after three
turbulent years of public hearings, that the Seaview dunes
should be a conservation zone. After more public hearings the
Commissioners created an ordinance in 1992 making the dunes,
wetlands and foredune a conservation district. A lovely wide
open shoreline beach and grassy dunal space was dedicated to
esthetics and recreation. The good folk in Seaview were delight­
ed and there was much talk about democracy in action.
Shortly afterward, in November 1992, a political disaster
occurred. Two Commissioners were elected to support an exist­
ing third, all dedicated to the cash flow of real estate and result­
ant political harmony.None of the three had a chip in their heads
for beauty or nature. For them there was no value in beaches,
dunes, headlands, open spaces, acquifer, vwldlife, wetlands or
foodchains unless such could be converted quickly to money.
The most avaricious of the three, representing the Peninsula,
abolished the Seaview Community Council, and vwth his two
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cronies fired all county planners and replaced them with a
'puppet' planner wth no credentials and a lawyer to confer an
air of legitimacy to their actions.
The Commissioners held a rump meeting of selected
realtors and developers in the Courthouse basement and issued
an ordinance changing Seaview's conservation zone to resident­
ial, R-1.Outraged residents reorganized as the Seaview Coastal
Conservation Coalition. We raised money and beat back an
opportunistic attempt by the Long Beach City Council to annex
Seaview's beachfront, took the Commissioners to Superior
Court and won a decision that the R-1 ordinance was illegal.
The bandit trio however reinstituted the ordinance before we
were out of court. We even tried to compromise with the most
honest looking of the three but he ratted on the agreement. We
were advised by our attorney to put this before the Growth
Management Hearings Board.
Back in 1990, in a rash moment when the business
dominated Washington State Legislature wasn't thinking quite
straight, they passed the Growth Management Act which put
population-driven growth under laws and regulations to preserve
as much as possible the state's nonrenewable resources. Hear­
ings Boards were created to enforce GMA’s provisions. Each
county that had signed on to the GMA was obligated to create
a trio of ordinances to match the State version so that local role
would be guided by law. One of these ordinances was to be the
Critical Areas Ordinance to deal with wetlands, beaches, acqui-
fiers, bays and estuaries, wildlife habitat, no-point pollution, and
the growing problem of urban sprawl in critical areas.
Our trio of Commissioners were openly antagonistic to
the GMA and responded by doing nothing. They knew that the
State Department of Ecology, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
and enforcement agencies of the GMA and federal Clean Water
Act had never seen a development they couldn't approve. So
the Commissioners, who now had their own planning department
and law (to avoid problems vwth the elected County Attorney),
went on cheerfully giving away the store to the realtors — most
favored was the mother of one of the Commissioners. Six years
passed with Pacific County having no effective landuse law; all
land decisions were made ad hoc in the Courthouse basement.
They were all about to lay waste to the Seaview dune
system in 1994 when the rains came back — Big time! There
was water up to our backsides everywhere. Septic systems all
over the Peninsula failed, especially on the swamp lots that had
been filled wth sand to facilitate sales. This created a health
hazard that the Commissioners and their henchmen denied,
their opportunism seldom bothered by such problems. The
hazard wasn't denied by the State Board of Health, however,
nor by an angry throng of new land owners. In a raucous public
meeting the Planning Commission was forced to realize that
landuse planning consisted of more than granting variances to
existing weak ordinances. In Seaview we are protected for
awhile by a moratorium on new sewer hookups because the
treatment plant in Ilwaco was overloaded and the DOE shut
down more connections.
The Seaview Coastal Conservation Coalition petitioned
the Growth Management Hearings Board on two occasions
mainly to challenge the County vwth failing to provide any
ordinance protection to wetlands and acquifer recharge areas
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and secondly for failing to comply with state law regarding the
Growth Management Act. The Hearings Board agreed with us
and declared an 'order of invalidity', first for any building in the
dunes and secondly, as Pacific County had not yet created the
required ordinances, for any building permits in the county. This
raised a firestorm of protest among the builders, sand dredgers,
realtors and developers. By this time the appeal of easy permits
and landrush sales had attracted a huge number of contractors,
about 135 by last count Naturally all of this competition from the
nouveau land grabbers cut into the easy profits of the older ones
vtfio howled loudly that the Seaview Coastal Conservation Coali­
tion had destroyed their business. Their County henchmen scur­
ried madly and produced a Critical Areas Ordinance, the first of
three required, and appealed to the Hearings Board to have the
invalidation moratorium lifted. The ordinance created wasn't
really up to snuff, being worded in a way that said that rules
about protecting wetlands, habitat, acquifer and all that strange
stuff could be avoided by "mitigation" — meaning build your own
swamp somewhere cheap and trade it for real wetland in the
way of a proposed development. But the Hearings Board lifted
the moratorium anyway, stating that by law the reason for
imposing it in the first place was the absence of any Growth
Management Act ordinances and since the County had now
fabricated one, however flawed, they had no choice. The Sea­
view Coastal Conservation Coalition had another appeal before
the Hearings Board last June but decided to put it off in favor of
an agreement by the County to declare a building moratorium in
Seaview until they got around to writing a required Comprehen­
sive Plan.
The issue here concerns whether a community has the
right to decide for itself wrfiat kind of community it wants to be.
Secondly, does a community have the right to expect its elected
representatives respect that decision by adhering to greater
laws, state and federal, that were enacted to protect our health
and environment? A third issue may be the age old argument as
to whether elected representatives have been given the license
to act out their personal biases and ambitions or whether they
must present to any minorities, however powerful, the will of the
majority.
When the Legislature, led by our own Representatives
and State Senator, tried to scuttle the Growth Management Act
in 1996 the initiative was voted down by the population of Wash­
ington by 60%. The Legislature tried it again in 1997 and was
frustrated only by the veto pen of Governor Gary Locke. The
Legislature and our County Commissioners lobbied Governor
Locke hard to nullify the GMA in spite of the voters.
Adding to the sense of isolation we in Seaview feel is
the persistent experience that the state agency organized to
protect the environment, the Department of Ecology, consistent­
ly grants permission to destroy it piecemeal. The federal agency
selected by a cynical Congress to protect wetlands, the Army
Corps of Engineers, has ignored the Clean Wafer Act and con­
sistently grants permission to fill the wetlands Only the GMA
Hearings Board has protected us in Seaview, and by association
the oyster and cranberry producers who must have clean water
protection to exist
To say we in Seaview are confused by this misuse of
county and legislative power is understatement. Why must these
authorities destroy something that can never be rebuilt to cater
to a prurient opportunistic desire on the part of a small minority?
Is the flow of cash the only value left in a society whose greater
population is well aware of the old maxim: Don't shit where you
eat? As a country doctor of long experience, my axiom is that
the most serious mistakes are those that can never be correct­
ed.
Dr. John Campiche lives in Seaview and is a member
of the Seaview Coastal Conservation Coalition He wrote this
article about "chicanery behind checkered flannel shirts" as
a counterweight to the usual NCTE "essays dedicated to the
exposure of evils lying behind starched white shirt fronts
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