Board of County Commissioners - public_hearing

All right. There we go. I will now call to order the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners land use hearing on August 4th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the poll for us?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Commissioner Schroeder is out of the office. Commissioner West? Here. Commissioner Helm? Here. Commissioner Savas? Present. Mr. Chair?

Here.

A quorum is present, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Clerk, will you introduce the item under consideration today and explain this hearing order for us?

Yes, Mr. Chair. Today, the board will consider file numbers Z0437-25 and Z0438-25. The board will consider an application for a comprehensive plan map amendment to change the land use plan designation for property located at 33532 South Croft Road, Malala. from agriculture to rural industrial with a corresponding zone change from exclusive farm use to rural industrial as an abandoned or diminished mill site pursuant to Oregon Revised Statute 197.719. No development is proposed with this application. Today's hearing will proceed in three main steps, presentation, testimony, and finally deliberation. First, a presentation from staff about the application will explain the details of the application. Second, the chair will open a public hearing for testimony. The chair has established the order for testimony as follows. First, the applicant or their representative will have the opportunity to speak first, up to 15 minutes. Next, a representative of the planning commission, if any are present, will have three minutes. Next, any public officials who are present will have three minutes each. Next, representatives from a recognized community planning organization or agency will have three minutes. Lastly, all other members of the public wishing to testify will have three minutes each. the board will deliberate and either render a decision today or set a later date to make a decision. Now if you are ready Mr. Chair, assistant county counsel caleb hugel will make a required legal statement after his statement principal planner martha fritzie will begin the staff presentation.

This is a quasi-judicial land use hearing, which means several important things for those participating. First, the applicable substantive criteria are listed in the staff report. Testimony, arguments, and evidence must be directed toward either those criteria or other criteria the person believes apply to the decision. Second, failure to raise an issue accompanied by statements or evidence sufficient to afford the county and other parties an opportunity to respond precludes appeal to the Land Use Board of Appeals based on that issue. In addition, the failure of the applicant to raise constitutional or other issues relating to proposed conditions of approval with sufficient specificity to allow the county to respond precludes inaction for damages in circuit court on those issues. Once final, the decision on this application may be appealed to the Land Use Board of Appeals. At this time, I will ask the commissioners to disclose any ex parte contacts, bias, or conflicts of interest. Please indicate the nature and extent of the ex parte contact, bias, or conflict of interest, and indicate whether you intend to participate in or abstain from the hearing. Commissioners? OK. If anyone wishes to challenge the impartiality of any commissioner, please clearly indicate your intention to do so in any testimony you provide.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm Martha Fritze with the Planning and Zoning Division. I am here to give you a brief overview of what is under consideration today. As was noted, this is a proposed comprehensive plan map amendment and zone change found in files Z043725 and Z043825. Go ahead. Specifically, the proposal is to change the comprehensive plan and zoning from an agricultural designation and EFU zoning district to rural industrial. This is being proposed under a specific statute that's listed here specifically for abandoned and diminished mill sites. Importantly, the implication of doing it under the statute is that this does not require an exception to statewide planning goal three, which most other changes like this would require. And we've reviewed some of those in the past. This does not require it provided that you meet all of the standards under ORS 197-719. And as was noted, no new development is proposed or would be approved Specifically with this, any development or redevelopment that would happen under the new rural industrial zone would need to go through the regular process with planning and zoning, including potentially design review and some other land use reviews. The subject site itself is on South Croft Road. It is the site that's highlighted here. Well, it's part of the site. The entire site has a little over 20 acres. Only the portion that is developed is proposed for redesignation to rural industrial, which is roughly seven and a half acres. This developed area is relatively flat. You'll notice there is a pond. There is a stream. There are some steep slopes. There are definitely some protected areas on part of this property, but those parts of the property would not be redesignated. Those would stay in the EFU zone. The site itself is about four miles southeast of the city of Malala. It is right smack dab in the middle of a whole lot of other farmland. And it is completely surrounded by land zoned EFU. There's active farms, a few houses, This is, the site itself is actually considered high value farmland based on the map soils. However, it has, as we will discuss, it's been developed for a mighty, mighty long time and it's not likely that any of these class two and three soils that were mapped on the property even exist there anymore. This is a zoom in of the portion of the site that's proposed for redesignation It's a little bit hard to see the pink line is is the roughly seven and a half acres that would be Redesignated you can see there's a lot of development on this property already This is an old mill site a lot of these buildings have been here for a long time based on The applicant's calculations, there is right around 95,000 square feet of building space across about 13 buildings on this property. And that area is what is proposed for redesignation, and it would be pretty narrowly drawn around these buildings on purpose. We'll talk about that in just a little minute, just a minute. So this property has a lot of land use history. Fortunately, we had a lot of evidence to rely on. Based on the evidence we have in the record, a mill was established here in 1941. That was before the first zoning. The EFU zoning was first established here in 1976, and although it has changed over time, it's a little bit different than it was in 1976, nowhere along the way was this use allowed in EFU zoning, so it has been considered a legally established non-conforming use for Nearly 80 years. Well, I guess not that many but over 50 years And so we know this partially because of a history of the land use history We have approved we the county has approved a number of alterations over the years Related to the mill to add buildings to change uses and things like that. We have very good record of from 1993 to 2013. However, it is important to note what the current usage is right now. A lot of these buildings are actually vacant. Some are being used for warehousing, farm store supply, retail store. And there's a few Structures that are you being used for a it's called precision redrying. It's Essentially my understanding is it's a business that takes previously dried lumber Uses the kilns that exist on the property to redry it I don't 100% know why but it's it's very clear that it's not really a primary processing It's sort of sort of reprocessing other lumber materials and then a very small building is being used for pocket door fabrication which is essentially a excuse me, assembling the pocket door assemblies. So regarding this particular application, notice was sent out as is required under state law and all of our county codes. In June, we have received no public comments, not a one. The local community planning organization is South Cambie and they are not active right now. The only comments, the only exhibits in the record are related to transportation and the traffic study and so we always ask the county traffic engineer to review the traffic study and They did and we found some discrepancies just in the square footage that had been modeled Asked that that be remedied before this particular hearing and that was and so some additional information was provided by The applicant and the engineer reviewed that again and found it to be compliant and took care of the issue Go on. Per usual, there are lots and lots of relevant policies and criteria, including statewide planning goals, the specific ORS that was mentioned, county comp plan goals and policies, and, of course, zoning development goals, excuse me, provisions, particularly for zone changes. Those are all discussed in detail in the Planning Commission staff report that was in your packet. Happy to answer questions about any of the findings in there, but I'm really just going to focus on this first one that's highlighted here and talk a little bit more about the abandoned diminished mill site. Go ahead. So very generally, ORAS 197-719 says that if a site meets the statutory definition of an abandoned or diminished mill site, it can be rezoned to industrial, does not need the exception to Goal 3. However, there are certain conditions that need to be put on it. And one of them is that it can only be used for industrial uses. You can't allow retail or commercial. Even if it would be allowed in the underlying zoning, you can only allow industrial uses. state law. You cannot rezone the property to allow non-industrial uses without going through the regular process. And then importantly, only the area of the mill site can be redesignated. And I think that's one of the reasons the line is drawn so narrowly around the structures that exist there right now. So go ahead. So without getting too far down in the weeds because we all know I can talk for an hour This idea of does this property meet the definition of an abandoned or diminished mill site becomes very important because as we know there is some activity going on in the property right now but Importantly, the state law does not require the whole site to be abandoned. It's really just if what is going on in the property right now still meets this definition of a mill site or not. And so an abandoned or diminished mill site, the definition is listed here. I won't read the whole thing to you, but there's a couple of important pieces. It needs to meet this definition, and then it needs to meet these three criteria on the bottom. And so the first one's really easy. Is it located outside of an urban growth boundary? Yes. That's pretty easy to check off. The third one's pretty easy. Does it contain or did it contain permanent buildings used in the production of manufacturing wood products? Yes, that's pretty clear from the record and all of the non-conforming use verifications and alterations. So then we get to, was it closed after January 1, 1980, or has it been operating at less than 25% of capacity? So again, this gets back to the definition, if you do one more, thank you. If this gets back to the definition of what makes it a mill site, and a mill site is, facility engaged in the processing or manufacturing of wood products including sawmills and facilities for the production of those listed items and so to the extent that we can determine what is going on there is not any of those things then we can consider it an abandoned mill site because we look at these important dates and so January 1 1980 we know from the record it was operating we know that It has changed since then. January 1, 1983, we don't know, we know that the sawmill had stopped operating by 2000. But we don't really know what was going on in 2003, whether it was 25% of capacity, there was still a lumber company there. But that doesn't matter as long as we can show that it was closed, the mill portion. It is no longer considered a mill site under the statutory definition after 1980. It doesn't say when after 1980, it's just after 1980. And so when we look again at, can you do one more? Thank you. When we look again at what is on the site, it's pretty easy to determine that even though the site isn't actually vacant or abandoned totally as a site, what is happening on this property is not a sawmill. They're not facilities really for the primary production of wood products. They're sort of these either warehousing or these secondary wood products facilities. activities and so we can conclude that this does indeed, even though the site's not vacant, it does indeed meet the definition of this, the statutory definition of an abandoned mill site. So once we determine that, we go through the other criteria. As I said, only the developed area can be redesignated. Where the applicant had proposed the line narrowly around those buildings is appropriate based on our old land use files and old aerial photography. And the rest of the criteria can be taken care of through conditions by only allowing industrial uses and not allowing it to be rezoned without going through a different process. Planning Commission held a hearing on July 13th regarding this matter. There was no testimony, only the applicant. There was some discussion. The Planning Commission did discuss some environmental concerns, although really they were about the portion of the property that is not being proposed for redesignation. And ultimately, they did unanimously recommend approval. Really the only issue was the one that I touched on a little bit earlier is that there was a discrepancy on the total building square footage that had been modeled in the traffic study. And this was important because the applicant doesn't necessarily want, they stayed in their application and they don't necessarily want to more or do anything to the property right now. They just would like it real industrial so it's easier to lease up some of these buildings to industrial users without having to go through these alterations of non-conforming use all the time. But because the traffic study modeled less square footage than was on the site and we have to condition it based on what the traffic study modeled, it became this issue of we were potentially making them remove buildings from the site, which was not the intent at all. And so we reconciled those. They provided a new traffic study that incorporated the correct square footage. Our county engineer has taken a look at it and said that it still meets the standard that's required of having no significant effect on the transportation system and having no, on the adequacy or safety of the transportation system. And so staff is also recommending approval subject to the conditions of approval that were listed in your staff report. And that's it. Thank you.

Thank you. That was very informative. And I turn to my colleagues if they have any questions. Go ahead, Commissioner Hall.

Are there, if this were to go through, do they have to do any building code Changes, since it's changing the use to industrial because some of these buildings are so old, is there another process they have to go through to meet new codes?

So changing the zoning doesn't trigger them to do anything to the buildings. If they were to put a use in there that needed some upgrades, then the building department would look at it and decide what needs to be done to meet current building codes. Okay, thank you.

Any other questions? Not seeing any other questions. We'll move to the public testimony portion. So I will now open the meeting for public testimony and I'll ask our clerk to moderate that in-person virtual testimony for us. Clerk?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll begin with in-person. Does the applicant wish to testify? Please come forward. Remember to introduce yourself. You'll have up to 15 minutes.

Good morning, members of the board. My name's Andrew Stamp. I'm a land use attorney at VF Law, and I'm here with my client, Mr. Magenheimer, who's going to give about a three-minute presentation, and that's all we really have prepared in the interest of time.

Great. Thank you.

Hello. Thanks for having us here today. I'm here with my wife, Sarah. She's in the back there. Both longtime Clackamas County residents, born and raised about two miles from the mill site. So grew up in the community out there. About 11 years ago, we purchased the property. It was just a rental property, but been around it our whole lives. Hold on one second.

Hold on, we've got a technical problem we'll solve here. We want to make sure we hear everything.

All right, good to go? All right. So anyways, we've used it just as a rental property out there. We're small business owners. We have a small farm just outside of Canby. Very involved in the community, but over the last 10 years, We've run into some struggles trying to get the property released for job creation ground in South Clackamas County Every time I talk to a potential tenant. It's like technically you got to go through the county get a conditional use Approval it could take six months could take eight months. I don't know might have some cost involved and then they're like well Let's go somewhere else so this is purely just to simplify the process so that we can come in and say these are the uses that can be done here and It's been going on for about 85 years out there, uses like that. We know all the neighbors, very engaged with them. They know what's going on. And to this point, nobody's objected. We've talked with them, like I said, and really the whole goal is create job lands, South Clackamas County. The wood products industry is slowly fading away. Unfortunately, there's fewer and fewer sawmills, fewer and fewer... value-added industries out there looking for places to be. But yet when I hear stuff from other people, hey, can I move this business out there? I'm like, maybe. So that's really our whole intent. We're not redeveloping it, not redoing anything out there other than just trying to get more jobs available out there in South Clackamas County.

Great. Thank you. I had one question. This kiln-dried process that they have out there, obviously I know freshly cut wood, they want to dry it like that. Could you just talk about what they're using that for? Do you know much about that?

Yeah, so Precision Drying is the company. Mike Von, excuse me, Von Pannon, he's got a mill site up actually in Rainier. But that site, they actually run the dry kilns to heat treat mostly things so they can be exported out of Oregon. One of the projects that they're doing, they do about six kilns. large ocean going vessels a year they export out power poles because to Ireland they don't have trees, we have lots of trees, they can't get them out of Oregon until they've been heat treated so there's no bugs and other things in the wood so then they can be cleared for treat pressure treating and then export. So some really cool things that go on out there but

Just, yeah, a little different. Yeah, it looks like a fantastic piece of property. So any other questions? Did you have one? No. No.

You don't need to hear me opine.

All right. I think that's all we have unless you have any other comments.

No, just thank you for considering it. And, yeah, thanks for having us. Great. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Next, I'll ask if there's a representative from the Planning Commission that wishes to testify, either in person or virtually. So, remembering the Planning Commission attending virtually and wishes to speak, this is your opportunity to please raise your hand. seeing none i'll now move to any public officials who wish to testify either in person or virtually if you are a public official who wishes to speak this is your opportunity to please either come forward or if you're attending virtually please raise your hand Seeing none, I'll now move to community planning organizations or agencies. If there are any representatives who wish to speak either in person or online, this is your opportunity to please come forward or raise your hand. And finally, this is a call for any other members of the public who wish to speak either in person or virtually, this is your opportunity. I see no members of the public, either physically or virtually present, who wish to comment, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. I will now close the public testimony and we'll proceed to our deliberations. Are there any, first of all, any comments from our commissioners?

No, Chair. I'm ready to make a motion.

Go ahead.

Chair, I move we approve file number Z0437-25 and Z0438-25 as recommended by staff and the Planning Commission.

Second.

All right. Commissioner Savas has moved to approve file number Z0437-25 and Z0438-25 as recommended by staff and the Planning Commission. Commissioner Helmes seconded that motion. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk, will you please call the poll?

Commissioner West. Aye. Commissioner Helm.

Aye.

Commissioner Savas. Aye. Mr. Chair. Aye. Motion passes four to zero, Mr. Chair.

All right, thank you. I'll now direct staff to draft in order reflecting the decision and include it on the agenda for the board's adoption at our upcoming business meeting. And Council, do you need anything else from the board on this matter at this time? No, Chair. All right. Well, that concludes our land use hearing. Congratulations on all your hard work, and we definitely support small business, and we hope things improve for you in that area. So thank you very much. And let's see what we have next. Gary's back in here.

Hi, commissioners. We're back to issues now. The last item is commissioner communications that you can do now or you can reconvene at 1.30 p.m. We've noticed it both times. Comments?

Can I just do a real quick update? Yes, you may. Because I just got a text from someone in the Mount Hood area that said just an update, the Level 1 EVAC is now from Lolo Pass Road, which is where the U.S. Forest Service building is, to government camp. So just an update.

Thank you.

It's probably changing.

So I think unless there's any other comments, we'll go ahead and take a recess.

We'll do them later at 1.30? Yeah, we can. We've noticed it twice, so if you want to come back at 1.30, we can finish issues then.

Want to come back at 1.30? Sure. Set the nod? Yeah. All right. So we'll recess until 1.30, and thank you all for joining us.

All right.