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135 Chapter 9 Land Rush For more than a decade after passage of the Scenic Area Act, money flowed steadily from Congress to the Forest Service, allowing managers to buy gorge property from willing sellers who could not develop their property under the new management plan. By 1999, the Forest Service had acquired about 30,000 acres, much of it through land trades with timber companies. Nearly two-thirds of the new public land was in Skamania County. But the breakneck pace of land purchases began to slow. By mid-1999, the Forest Service had spent just $3 million of its most recent $10 million appropriation , though there was no shortage of willing sellers. The Forest Service’s Washington, D.C. office dispatched a review team to the Northwest to identify the cause of the logjam. Senator Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican who chaired the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Forest Service budget, had delivered the $10 million. Now he and other members of the delegation were calling for arbitration if necessary to get the process off center. “Senator Gorton’s only goal is to break this logjam and try to facilitate a solution between the landowners and the Forest Service,” said Cynthia Bergman, Gorton’s press secretary. “He looks at the Interior budget every year, and when he sees money just sitting there, he wants to know why.” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Portland Democrat, grilled Northwest Regional Forester Robert Williams about why the National Scenic Area office had yet to spend the appropriated funds. “I am concerned this ‘logjam’ in spending the appropriated funds will hinder our efforts to protect critical lands in the National Scenic Area,” he said. “The program has been a shining example of the foresight and vision of the act.” In fact, the stall was due to a complicated impasse over property appraisals . The impasse, rooted in language in the Scenic Area Act, was delaying a backlog of proposed land purchases in the Special Management 136 THE LAUNCH Areas. Willing sellers were running out of patience. Under the “hardship clause” in the act, the Forest Service was authorized to offer a price equal to the property’s market value before passage of the law, at a time when development in the gorge was largely unrestricted. For instance, if a property had been zoned for one-acre lots before 1987, the owner could sell it at the price it would have commanded if subdivided into one-acre lots back then, even though the law no longer allowed that. To arrive at a fair price under the law, the Forest Service had to complete two appraisals: one to establish the property’s current market value in view of its limited potential for development; the other to set a price for the land pre-Scenic Area Act. The difference was the value of its development rights. Once a property owner offered to sell, the Forest Service had three years to conduct its appraisals and decide whether to buy the property. If it chose to take a pass, there were consequences. The property would be reclassified as part of the General Management Area and far less restrictive rules on lot divisions would apply. The hardship rule opened a deep rift between gorge property owners and Forest Service land appraisers over how to actually arrive at a preNational Scenic Area appraisal value for individual properties under the law. Portland attorney Mike Neff represented several Skamania County landowners who were trying to sell. Their effort was further hampered, Neff said, by a 1970 county real estate law requiring that when the government buys private property, “it has to ignore the prospective value,” whether as a freeway or as a garbage dump. “It cuts both ways. The problem in Skamania County is there is a disagreement over what is the fair market value if the act had not been passed,” Neff said. “We have proposed a system of arbitration, but the Forest Service doesn’t want that, they aren’t interested in it at all.” In 2000, Senator Gorton broke the impasse—and effectively ended the Forest Service land acquisition program—when he won passage of a bill that required landowners to offer their gorge properties for sale by March 2001 and set a deadline for the Forest Service to make decisions on the purchase of those properties within three years after that. The bill put pressure on both landowners and the Forest Service. If landowners failed to make their offers by...

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