NEWS
BY CARL SEGERSTROM
TROUBLE ON WATER LANE
Will Alpine residents run out of water with new development?
• The combination of Jane VanBoskirk, Eleanor
Roosevelt and Planned Parenthood of Southwestern
Oregon filled every seat in the Wildish Theater on April 20.
In a performance sponsored by Eugene Weekly,
VanBoskirk did her amazing one-woman hour as Eleanor
Roosevelt, and Planned Parenthood received about
$4,800 to put toward their important work. A former
resident of Eugene now living in Portland, VanBoskirk is
playing Eleanor all over the country. She and the Wildish
are planning a June 4 reprise for all those fans who were
turned away.
• This week in kudos: Local writer Eliot Treichel won
the Oregon Book Awards readers’ choice award for his A
Series of Small Maneuvers (Ooligan Press). And Tracy
Daugherty of Corvallis won the Frances Fuller victor award
for general nonfiction for The Last Love Song: A Biography
of Joan Didion (St. Martin’s Press). You can read our
reviews of both in our Winter Reading issue online.
Meanwhile, here at EW, owner and publisher Anita
Johnson will receive one of the City Club of Eugene’s 2017
Turtle Awards to Outstanding Citizens on April 28 for
“sticking one’s neck out for the good of the community.”
We’re honored, but believe we can always do more.
Readers, what else should we stick our necks out for in our
solutions journalism? Contact editor@eugeneweekly.
com.
• Where do you want your taxes to go? A coalition of
activists From Taxes for Peace Not War, CALC, WAND,
ESSN, Indivisible Eugene and Take Action Eugene gathered
April 18 at the federal building to “challenge militarism and
oppose Donald Trump’s egregious policies,” Michael
Carrigan of CALC tells EW. Participants in a penny poll were
handed 10 pennies, which they deposited in jars
representing a six-category breakdown of the federal
budget. The categories and how people voted were:
human services 43.3 percent; environmental
services 33 percent; general government 7.8 percent,
military (present and past wars) 3 percent; Veteran’s
Services 8.6 percent; and paying down the national debt
4.3 percent.
• Resistance is not futile. Remember the pink
pussyhats and the huge Women’s Marches across
America the day after Trump’s inauguration? The smaller
gatherings and action that stopped his Obamacare repeal,
fought his Muslim ban and turned out Democrats in red
districts in Kansas and Georgia? Last week the March for
Science, including 2,000 protesters in Eugene, caught the
world’s attention. Next is the Climate March, Saturday,
April 29. See our What’s Happening Calendar for details.
• “Our Representative Democracy — Can It Survive?”
was Congressman Peter DeFazio’s topic April 21 when he
spoke on the University of Oregon campus sponsored by the
City Club of Eugene and the Morse Center. His answer: “I
haven’t given up and neither should you.” That was powerful
advice from a congressman first elected in 1986, now the
ranking member of the transportation committee. DeFazio
laid out a long list of profound problems from Citizens United
to dark money to gerrymandered districts, superpacs, the
electoral college and on and on. But the good news is that the
“American people are awakened from their slumber,” and
newcomers are taking political action, DeFazio said. We’re
with Pete. We haven’t given up either.
CORRECTIONS/
C L A R I F I CAT I O N S
Due to older, incorrect info on their website that was
later fixed, EW ran the wrong dates for the upcoming
Friends of Buford Park and Mount Pisgah Native Plant
Sale in last week’s gardening column. The event is 9 am to
1 pm, Saturday, May 6, not April 29, at Howard Buford
Recreation Area (aka Mount Pisgah). If you don’t see this
in time and accidentally head there this Saturday, we
regret the error and hope you have a nice time at the park.
10
A pril 27, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
F
or Southern Benton County resident Garrick
Balsly, concern about his water supply and the
health of his land started nearly five years ago
when his widowed neighbor received a postcard
in the mail.
The postcard offered timber-cutting services from the
Veneta-based Oregon Land Company and bore the seal
of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative — a seal that Or-
egon Land Company did not have permission to use, as
EW reported in 2013.
Helen Davidson responded to the postcard because
she was worried about the trees on her 40-acre property
becoming a fire hazard. After a timber cruise of the prop-
erty, the buyers convinced her to sell them the land.
According to Davidson’s daughter, Carmen Keyser,
“they weren’t as above-board as they could have been,
but they didn’t break any rules.”
Within months of the sale, the large timber that blan-
keted the property was nearly all razed. A freshly paved
road, handful of spindly oaks, large brush pile and an
oil drum are pretty much all that remains on the once
forested property.
The land is set to be developed as five residential
lots after plans to create seven lots on the property were
withdrawn following backlash from neighboring prop-
erty owners.
New developments like these are raising concern
among rural communities about how their land may look
in the future and how new development will affect their
access to water. In order to address these issues, rural
residents in southern Benton County are organizing to
have a bigger voice in county land-use decisions.
Even with the abundant rainfall on the Coast Range
foothill community, Alpine residents are seeing their
wells go dry in summer. Alpine is just a few minutes
west of Monroe and about 20 miles south of Corvallis.
People in the area depend on wells, and having a well
go dry can mean spending thousands of dollars to drill
a new well that may or may not provide for the future
needs of their land and property.
Todd Jarvis, director of the federally designated Insti-
tute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State Univer-
sity, says groundwater problems in the Alpine area are
not a new concern. Because of the geology of the area,
“it has been known to have low availability for years,”
he says. “Water levels will decline when you start to
pump.”
The spotty reputation of the buyers and developers
— the McDougal Brothers Co., who are long associated
with the Oregon Land Company — adds to the concerns
of community members.
Collectively the McDougal brothers, Norman and
Melvin, along with their frequent business partner Greg
Demers, have a well-documented history of question-
able business tactics and contested developments, in-
cluding the clearcut and mining of Parvin Butte; fires
at the Pilot Rock lumber dump (which earned Demers
a nearly $800,000 fine from a state environmental agen-
cy); and an attempted water speculation scheme on the
McKenzie River.
The brothers’ history of buying property from senior
citizens through proxies and then doing clearcuts on
their land was documented in an InvestigateWest article
published by EW last April.
Since the purchase of the land by the McDougal
Brothers and subsequent clearcut, Balsly has challenged
a series of proposed developments on the property, with
the support of LandWatch Lane County and the Goal
One Coalition of Eugene. The state Land Use Board of
Appeals has twice sided with Balsly and remanded the
case back to the Benton County Supervisors for further
consideration.
While the clearcut and the process of fighting devel-
opment proposals have caused a great deal of frustration
for Balsly and other neighbors, there has been a silver
lining to the situation.
“It was the Davidson Hill case that sparked us to or-
ganize,” says George Wisner, an Alpine resident.
Pushed forward by Wisner and Balsly, Alpine acti-
vated the previously defunct Southern Benton County
Citizen Advisory Committee. According to a county
press release, the committee gives rural residents the
ability “… to improve communications between county
officials and those living in that part of the county, as
well as create greater opportunities for input into Plan-
ning Commission and Board of Commissioners actions
that impact them.”
Of the six Citizen Advisory Committees for rural ar-
eas of Benton County, only three are currently active.
Wisner says the committee gives Alpine residents “a
forum to bring issues to.”
“We get notifications for everything,” Wisner says.
“Issues come up that we would never have known about
without this system. A lot of county matters don’t require
public participation.”
Because the CAC can raise awareness about planned
developments and other county projects, it gives Alpine
the ability to settle disputes as a community without hav-
ing to go to court, according to Wisner.
“Because the platform is legally recognized by the
county, when we make recommendations the county
commissioners take them seriously,” Wisner says.
While the details of land use planning and zoning ap-
plications vary from dull to downright boring, they are
important to people relying on wells for water in an area
with well-known water issues.
One of the original complaints Balsly brought to the
planning commission regarded the failure of the county
to require the developers to do a dry-season well test.
The commissioners found that the county planning of-
fice had indeed failed to follow county rules requiring
wells to be tested in dry months.
Benton County code requires dry-season well tests
for new developments to show they have sufficient water
access during summer and early fall.
While a hydrologist hired by the McDougal brothers
dismissed groundwater concerns in front of the commis-
sion, citing the annual rainfall in the area, residents in
the area have noticed a trend of wells running dry during
the summer.
During public testimony before the Benton County
commissioners in September 2015, multiple residents
voiced their concerns.
Richard Saylor, who lives less than half a mile from
the proposed development and recently had to drill a
second well, says, “people in the area are scared about
their water supply.” Saylor told commissioners that he
has been studying well logs in the area for 20 years and
that wells on slopes like the Davidson property are “sea-
sonally challenged.”
Jarvis, of the Institute for Water and Watersheds, says
the geology of the area makes it such that the aquifer
does not store much water despite heavy rainfall. Be-
cause of the fractured rock formations, which he com-
pared to broken glass, two wells within 20 feet of each
other could have totally different water availability.
This creates a tough situation for well owners who
are out to prove that their neighbors have negatively af-
fected their groundwater, according to Jarvis. “When it
comes to well level monitoring,” he says, “the burden is