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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JANUARY 27, 2000

Council questions whether Evergreen got special treatment

By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register

Some McMinnville City Council members say that what's good for the goose isn't necessarily good for the city.

Later this year, the Spruce Goose is expected to be hauled from its temporary digs on the Evergreen International Aviation campus across Three Mile Lane and into a giant museum - a museum that builders have been allowed to continue working on even though the company still has legal obligations to meet.

Until this week, the question of whether the city was giving Evergreen preferential treatment had been raised publicly only by local activist Mark Davis.

The council voted 5-0 Tuesday to approve two ordinances and a resolution allowing the museum's repositioning, necessary to avoid a previously undetected swale. While Mayor Ed Gormley remained on the sidelines, because of a financial conflict of interest. Three councilors wondered if the city was setting a bad precedent. "They've started building it on the assumption that we're going to give them the OK," Councilor Tino Aleman said. "And we haven't given them the OK."

The company informed the city last fall that a surveying error had resulted in the museum being in the wrong spot, or at least an undesirable one. A corner of the 121,000-square-foot building's foundation extended over a swale, where the soil was too soft to build, officials were told.

The building had to be moved only a few feet on a large tract. Passers-by on Three Mile Lane, and even city planners, probably would have been oblivious to Evergreen fudging on land-use rules.

But the company admitted the error and began a complicated legal process, including a zone change and an urban growth boundary exchange to bring some land in while swapping out another strip of land to compensate.

The city and county agreed that Evergreen could locate a small part of the multimillion dollar facility on land being moved into the UGB but still lying outside city limits. The company has agreed to seek annexation approval from voters next fall, but the building will be nearly finished by then.

"I'm not real comfortable," Councilor Ernie Kirchner told city officials. "You're doing something for those guys that's probably not going to get done for anybody else."

City Manager Kent Taylor and Public Works Director Don Schut played down concerns about setting a precedent, citing the project's unique nature and the unusual scenario Evergreen's contractor encountered when the mistake was discovered.

"We would facilitate any other citizen in a similar manner, faced with the same circumstances," Taylor told the council.

Taylor said planners had struggled with the issue. He said they were trying to make the best of an "extraordinary" situation.

"Frankly, if we had done otherwise," he said, "we would have come out looking like schmucks." And Schut said there is little chance the city will find itself in the same situation with another builder.

Davis, meanwhile, tried a final time Tuesday to argue that approving a zone change before the land is actually annexed doesn't just bend the rules but actually breaks them.

The land-use activist's written testimony was rejected on the grounds that the record already had been closed, though Davis noted Wednesday that his concerns also were raised in December by attorney Daryl Garettson, a member of the McMinnville Urban Area Management Commission, who opposed the rezone for the same reason.

"I'm not pointing out anything that Daryl didn't point out," Davis said. "I know if I went to LUBA (the state Land Use Board of Appeals), I would win this. But I don't think it's worth fighting over."

City Attorney Candace Haines, weighing in on her first high-profile land-use case since being hired earlier this month, dismissed Davis' argument.

"I believe we're perfectly within our legal bounds," she said. "This shouldn't cause us any problems."

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