City, neighbors scrap over Tabor land

Neighborhood Beat • Activists allege ulterior motive in changing land-use designation

By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Dec 4, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / Portland Tribune

(From left) Lyle Vandestreek, Shannon Loch, Al Staehli, Mark Bartlett and Noah Gordon are some of the neighbors concerned about a possible shift in land-use designation for a maintenance complex in Mount Tabor Park.

You might call this story: Pesky Mount Tabor Park Neighbors vs. City Bureaucrats, Round III.

In recent years, neighborhood activists fended off a Portland Water Bureau plan to enclose Mount Tabor Park’s open-air reservoirs. Then they foiled a Portland Parks & Recreation deal — which parks officials initially denied existed — to sell off the dilapidated parks maintenance facility and nursery at Mount Tabor to Warner Pacific College.

Now, after a city-hired mediator helped mend fences with neighbors, a citizen planning group has blessed a $60 million-plus project to rebuild the park maintenance yard and nursery rather than relocate them. The consensus design heads for City Council approval Dec. 17.

But the same activists who sniffed out the Warner Pacific deal say they smell a rat.

Though those activists support the proposed new maintenance yard, they are raising a stink about the city’s change, in the midst of project planning, of its land-use designation for the maintenance yard, a complex of workshops, warehouse and other space.

They fear the city’s reclassification of the maintenance yard from a “nonconforming use” to an “accessory use” was designed to make it easier for the city to make future changes on the site — or other park sites in the future — without a citizen review.

“The park’s more threatened now than it was before this process,” said Shannon Loch, who lives across the street from the nursery.

“It has traditionally, for years and years, been considered nonconforming,” said neighbor Mark Bartlett, “but it’s politically convenient to consider it accessory because it allows anything to go on there.”

Use determines process

If the maintenance yard is a nonconforming use, major changes — including the proposed renovation and future renovations — must be vetted by citizens in a formal land-use process. Nighttime and early-morning use is restricted.

If it’s an accessory use, bureau managers can more easily make changes without that process. (The nursery’s designation is not an issue — it is an allowable use within the park.)

The city zoning code says to be an accessory use, a facility must be “incidental to the primary use,” which fits the maintenance yard, said Paul Scarlett, director of the city’s Bureau of Development Services.

The city’s use of the 13-acre nursery and maintenance yard site dates back a century, when Mount Tabor Park was created. City employees grow trees and plants at the nursery for replanting at other city parks.

At the adjacent maintenance complex at Southeast Division Street and 64th Avenue, workers do everything from carpentry to welding to pesticide application, and are dispatched to perform work at all city parks.

In a May 12 report commissioned by the city to analyze land-use issues for the project, consultant Tom McGuire wrote that the Bureau of Development Services “feels that they are not an accessory use,” because the nursery and maintenance facilities serve all city parks.

An hour after the report was released, Bureau of Development Services planner Kathleen Stokes circulated an e-mail saying she “just received word that the Commissioner’s office had decided that they wish to consider that the Mt. Tabor Yard maintenance facility IS an accessory use to the park.”

City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who oversees the development bureau where Stokes works, described a different scenario.

“The designation didn’t come from my office,” he said in an interview. “I assume it came from the Bureau of Development Services.”

Leonard noted that he’d championed the same neighbors’ concerns about selling the site to Warner Pacific for college ballfields.

“There has been a committee of neighborhood folks that has overseen this entire project,” Leonard said, so it’s “disingenuous” to say the city is trying to avoid public process. Some of the critics are being “somewhat conspiratorial,” he said.

Leonard, who also oversees the water bureau, noted there’s been a history of neighbor complaints every time the water bureau does anything at Mount Tabor, including a recent sewer upgrade on Southeast 60th Avenue. “Everything is a battle,” he said. “It tries one’s patience.”

Scarlett, the development bureau manager, said reclassifying the maintenance yard as an accessory use was suggested by his staff and OK’d by Leonard’s office.

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