Effort to save Siuslaw homes being stymied.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Arnold Buchman For The Register-Guard

As reported in the Sept. 15 Register-Guard, the state Land Use Board of Appeals remanded to Lane County a zone change that is a prerequisite to solving the accelerating erosion eating away at 1,600 feet of riverbank in Florence's Shelter Cove subdivision.

Current zoning prohibits any land use at the Siuslaw River's edge. The proposed new zoning would allow for erosion control.

Four homes and several adjacent parcels sit on the deteriorating bank, a bluff rising 60 feet above the water's edge. According to LUBA, the county erred in not considering the cumulative impacts on the river environment of efforts to keep erosion from lethally undermining this stretch of bank.

When the homes were built, in accordance with all pertinent codes, they were 100 feet or more from the precipice. Now, erosion at the bluff's toe, exacerbated by last year's wet winter, is bringing the brink dangerously close to two of the homes, and it is inexorably advancing toward the other two.

All of Florence is built on sand, and erosion is a fact of nature. Shelter Cove, one of several subdivisions built along the east bank of the Siuslaw between Old Town and the river's mouth, is particularly susceptible - not because of nature, but because of man.

The erosion, in great part, results from a half-century of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects that prevented the river from draining into the Pacific south of its jetty-protected mouth. These projects successfully redirected the river's natural tendency to cut through the quarter-mile-wide line of sand dunes at a northerly river bend upstream of Shelter Cove.

Instead, corps-installed structures deflected the river currents away from the dunes and toward the opposite bank upon which the Shelter Cove homes sit.

These redirecting structures are part of 17,000 feet of riprap along these banks. A geological evaluation shows that eventually - three years, five years, 10 years - this erosion in Shelter Cove, unless controlled, will threaten other homes in the subdivision and neighboring roadways and municipal infrastructure beyond.

State statutes may have left LUBA no choice but to act as it did. But here's a mystery: How could Shelter Cove homeowners, by protecting their 1,600 feet of riverbank left unprotected by the corps, create "cumulative impacts" on a no-longer-natural river environment long altered by 17,000 feet of riprap?

Unhappily for the threatened homeowners, the burden of planning and implementing an erosion-control solution is left to them - at their cost. They need approval from half a dozen state and federal agencies. The zone change is only the first step.

Lane County understood the homeowners' predicament when it granted the necessary zone change. But according to The Register-Guard report, `Sylvia Shaw, conservation director for the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, said her group filed the appeal to keep the county in line with state land use laws.'

Remember, these homeowners broke no law and have no control over county procedures. Shaw did not explain how sacrificing their homes `will keep the county in line.'

Without the zone change, the agencies that safeguard waterways, protect salmon and ensure consistency with land use goals will not issue permits for erosion controls. Thus, Oregon Shores' appeal has effectively barred a solution that will save homes and infrastructure from ruin and, paradoxically, will be environmentally restorative.

It is Kafkaesque.

Environmental rules restrict erosion-control work to between the beginning of November and mid-February. Oregon Shores knew this when it started its delay of the application processes. It is aware that delay over the winter can bring calamitous results to one or more homes.

Nevertheless, Oregon Shores, refusing an invitation to work with the homeowners, instead took these innocent homeowners hostage to advance its narrow agenda.

There is no expedited procedure allowing these endangered citizens to cut through multi-agency red tape. They are not asking that any legitimate public concerns be compromised.

In fact, their proposed solution would restore native vegetation to a bank denuded by erosion and revitalize a mollusk habitat smothered at the bluff's toe by sloughed sand. It's ironic that self-proclaimed protectors of the natural environment can and would stymie these efforts of people put in jeopardy by a man-made environment for which they had no responsibility.

In the rush `to keep the county in line,' one question has been ignored: Who will be responsible for the environmental impact on the river when it is polluted with the bits and pieces of houses that have fallen in?

Arnold Buchman of Florence is president of the Shelter Cove Homeowners Association.