Oregon Ping
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Posted on 01/04/2005 9:18:39 PM PST by B Knotts
CORBETT -- David Annus didn't think twice about size when he decided to build a two-story house in his Columbia River Gorge hometown.
After living in a tiny place on his parents' property with his wife and two children, he knew he wanted some breathing room when he designed a home more than eight times bigger at 5,700 square feet, including an attached three-car garage.
Looking around the neighborhood, the scale blended right in with the other homes.
"It's a four-bedroom house, but I don't think you could make a case for it being a McMansion," he said.
But size has definitely started to matter in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, the 85-mile stretch of river, cliffs, waterfalls and wooded hillsides along the Oregon-Washington border protected by federal law 18 years ago.
The issue has vaulted onto the agenda of gorge regulators who concede that they have virtually ignored the spread of large homes in the scenic area while concentrating on other potential complications, such as a home's visibility.
That changed this fall, when the staff of the Columbia River Gorge Commission -- for the first time in the agency's history -- filed appeals to reduce the size of Annus' house and two others.
"Politically we have heard from people that we were asleep at the wheel," said Martha Bennett, the commission's executive director. "I have been told by the Gorge Commission not to let developments go sliding through anymore."
(Excerpt) Read more at oregonlive.com ...
I don't think she's related. It says that she's in Columbia County, Ore., which is a bit of a distance from Skamania County, Wash.
Yup... there's a really easy way to control what happens on a particular piece of property:
Buy it.
Otherwise, STFU.
Here ya go - his official title...
COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE COMMISSION
ADMINISTRATIVE and FISCAL
Commissioner Walt Loerke
http://www.state.or.us/agencies.ns/35000/00010/
And he's a builder, too?
yep, protect the wilderness, the deer and the elk, and the rivers and the trees and the fish from everybody except for the one group where nobody has the guts to stop....the American Indian, who apparently, has carte blanc to develop anywhere, to hunt and fish without regulations, and in general, not adhere to American law.....JMHO.....
When you listen to his radio commentaries (well worth buying, BTW), you can only come to the conclusion that he was snookered into signing this.
Personally, I'll take the side of the Native American. We were once their illegal immigrants.
The proposed casino is within city limits, which is off limits to the Gorge Commission.
You may be entirely right - but it does merit a little further digging...
Ah, yes. Good old 'Beef' Loerke.
I can't claim to be from the gorge area, but I have been there a few times... One of the interesting aspects of the restrictive building laws is that about the time when it was passed is when all the windsurfers started moving in big time..I think the economies there tanked, and property become fairly cheap...lots of people discovered how good the winds were, and started buying property..driving up values, irking local residents ..when I was last there it was like a crazy summertime ski/windsurf community... Seems strange but it was sort of enviro vs. enviro. I even know a couple guys that bought some premium river frontage to build a resort, or camp, and they got stopped by the new law...
Oregon Ping
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Forget about the construction jobs these homes provide, huh? No wonder Oregon has one of the worst unemployment rates. These people are nuts.
BTT!!!!!!
Measure 37 applies to OR only, this guy is in WA state, right?
No, he's in Corbett.
I think the confusion is that the commissioner who made the "morally disgusting" remark is from Washington. But the property owner is in Corbett, Ore. There are 12 commissioners, from Oregon and Washington, appointed by the governors of the two states.
This remind me of what I went through a few years ago trying to build a radio site for a utility company on top of a remote mountaintop on BLM land. It took me three years to get the building permit. BLM held a town hall meeting in the area to get input from the public. When no one from the audience of about five objected, the BLM manager stood up and objected. Our attorney asked why the BLM manager objected and he replied, “Because someone has to object for the locals if they don’t know enough to object on their own.”
We routinely installed an 8’X10’ prefabricated fiberglass building in a standard light tan color to match the color of the terrain most of the year. The director of the BLM region told me he did not approve of the color and gave me five darker colors down to the percentages of color tints. I painted five full sheets of plywood and drove them to the site late one afternoon on his schedule. We held all of the sheets of plywood up and he used a spotting scope from his office window to pick out the color he preferred. He also required us to bury the power line so no one would see it from the town. He gave us the grass seed mixture to plant over the buried power line so it could not be seen. The building permit said if any rock was turned over during construction and it was a different color from being underground, we had to either rebury the rock to the original color line or paint it to match the other rocks in the area that had not been turned over.
We ordered the building at a substantial additional cost for the special color. The site was built during the fall and the darker color was much more visible with snow on the mountain than the lighter tan would have been. The next spring was extremely funny. If you looked northwest from the town, there was this light tan cone shaped mountain with a rosy protrusion on the very top making it look like a very large breast. The real topper was the long green grass arrow growing up the mountainside over the buried power line pointing at the rosy protrusion. The townspeople couldn’t stop laughing.
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