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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 16, 1999

Evergreen given a building break

By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register

Evergreen Aviation's Spruce Goose museum, under construction on Three Mile Lane, is in the wrong spot.

It turns out a corner of the 121,000-square-foot museum's foundation extends over a swale where the soil is too soft to build on, so the museum must be moved about 80 feet to the west and 50 feet to the south. However, that means pushing it partly onto property that not only lies outside McMinnville's city limits, but also outside its urban growth boundary.

The company learned of the problem about two months ago, and quietly began setting the wheels in motion with city and county officials to clear the necessary hurdles.

In addition to eventual annexation approval at the polls, not likely to come until construction is well along, Evergreen needs a zone change, a comprehensive plan amendment and, most complicated of all, an urban growth boundary adjustment.

Since the company learned of the problem before taking out its city building permit in November, it has not put anything in that will have to be ripped out or torn down, according to Museum Director Gary Thompson. It is simply proceeding with portions of the project that fit the new siting plan, he said.

To accommodate the shift, McMinnville's urban growth boundary needs to be adjusted, bringing in about 3.6 acres and removing about 4.7 acres. "The net effect is that the urban growth boundary would actually shrink by one acre," according to city Planning Director Doug Montgomery.

Company officials said about 3.4 acres of the land slated to come in is high-value farmland, compared with 3.6 acres of that slated to move out. They said that would produce "a small net gain in Yamhill County's agricultural land base."

In May 1999, voters approved annexation of property for the museum to the city.

City Planning Director Montgomery said some of the land slated to move back outside the boundary now lies inside city limits, thanks to the May annexation vote. The piece slated to move inside the boundary would eventually have to brought into the city as well, with voter approval at the polls.

"It's not uncommon to have buildings that are split by a city-county line," said City Engineer Don Schut. "The bigger issue in this case is the UGB line."

Montgomery said Evergreen was currently in the rare position of erecting a building straddling the urban growth boundary, using a city building permit technically good only for the portion inside the line.

The McMinnville Urban Area Management Commission, which has been wrestling with the issue of how the city's growth boundary will expand in 2000, approved the proposed boundary adjustment Wednesday night.

The committee approval is, however, only one of several bureaucratic hoops Evergreen must still jump through.

And it did not come without opposition. Land-use activists fought the move, saying Evergreen was getting preferential treatment.

The next step comes tonight, when the planning commission is scheduled to consider Evergreen's applications for a zone change and comprehensive plan amendment during its regularly scheduled 7:30 p.m. session. Once cleared by the planning commission, the two applications go to the city council and county board of commissioners for their consideration.

Montgomery said city planners will advise the council to attach a condition to its approval requiring Evergreen to apply for annexation at the earliest opportunity.

That would be the November general election. By then, however, company officials plan to have the Spruce Goose already moved inside the structure.

To facilitate completion of the project, Yamhill County has agreed to delegate its building inspection authority to the city for the small portion that will initially lie outside city limits. County Counsel John Gray said it wouldn't make sense to have inspectors from two different jurisdictions responsible for the same structure.

Officials said they expect construction to continue as the hearings process goes forward, though Gray noted Evergreen is assuming some liability in doing that. "If a decision-maker of last resort decides it's not appropriate," he said, "the company would have some risk."

While acknowledging that the situation is "strange," Montgomery said the hearings process has not been accelerated to accommodate Evergreen. "It's very much the same schedule we'd have for any zone change," he said.

Museum Director Gary Thompson said the company had no choice but to shift the site after discovering the swale, which lies on the extreme east site of the building site.

"It's quite deep," he said. "It was just something nobody caught when we had surveyors out there."

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