Riverbend campaign faltering

By DAVID BATES

Of the News-Register

The clock is ticking on Ramsey McPhillips' effort to turn Riverbend Landfill's expansion plan into a referendum on the November ballot, and he acknowledged Monday that his prospects are fading as Wednesday's 5 p.m. deadline approaches.

"It's not going very well," he said. "We may not make it."

McPhillips and his petitioners, who fanned out across McMinnville this weekend, need to turn in nearly 2,000 valid signatures of registered voters by Wednesday afternoon. The signature-gathering campaign started late because of a series of ballot title challenges by Riverbend. By the time the clock expires, petitioners will have had exactly eight days to do their work.

The initiative seeks to prohibit the construction or expansion of landfills within 2,000 feet of a flood plain.

Riverbend, owned by Houston-based Waste Management Inc., plans an expansion onto 98 acres between Highway 18 and the South Yamhill River, in the direction of Mulkey RV Park a few miles west of McMinnville.

Company officials say the expansion is needed to accommodate local growth; McPhillips counters with the charge that the Portland metro area's waste, which is trucked to the McMinnville landfill, is doing more to fill the facility than locally generated trash.

McPhillips said efforts have been stymied on a couple of fronts. Petitioners, he said, were asked to leave the Yamhill County Fairgrounds last week by a manager who maintained that there was a blanket prohibition on signature-gathering for any cause.

Petitioners moved out to the parking lot. It wasn't clear who asked McPhillips and his crew to move outside the gates, but he said the man seemed sympathetic and loaned them a table to work from.

"He did everything to accommodate us and more," he said. "The table they set up in the parking lot was really nice. They probably didn't have to do that."

There are also "push-poll" charges being made. McPhillips said many voters - the News-Register heard from two Monday and today - are getting calls from a pollster asking questions clearly intended to leave them with a negative impression of the proposed initiative.

The questions, he said, went so far as to measure voters' impressions of Yamhill County Commissioner Leslie Lewis and her challenger in the November election, Kris Bledsoe. Others implied that if the measure were to pass, the landfill's costs would be passed on to customers.

Roger Dell, a retired Linfield College professor who taught mathematics, said he received the call over the weekend. He said today that he ordinarily doesn't mind being polled, but that he eventually hung up in anger because "they clearly were trying to push me to a position that I did not hold."

"By the time they got done, I thought they were going to ask, 'If you knew Jesus supported it, would I be in favor of it?'' he said.

McPhillips noted that during the ballot title negotiations, Yamhill County Circuit Judge John Collins declined to include in the measure the unambiguous statement that the county would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in franchise fees because that wasn't necessarily certain.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research calls push polling "an insidious form of negative campaigning" that amounts to persuade voters and affect election outcomes, rather than measure opinions.

Riverbend Manager George Duvendack said Monday that Riverbend had hired Nelson Research, which has been involved with various state and local measures in Oregon, to contact some voters "to better understand the voters' position regarding the proposed initiative."

"This is not a push poll," he emphasized.

Sitting at Cornerstone Coffee Roasters on Monday morning with a laptop and petitioners working out on the sidewalk, McPhillips said the chances of getting on the ballot are fading. A petitioner working at the McMinnville Town Center plaza in front of the Goodwill store on Highway 99W late in the afternoon said more petitioners had been added throughout the day, giving initiative backers a glimmer of hope.

If McPhillips' initiative doesn't make it to the ballot, the issue will be fought out exclusively in the land-use arena. Riverbend's expansion plans require county approval, so commissioners will be charged with that decision.

Riverbend's application has been ruled complete by county planners, but no hearing date has been set.