By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
Lincoln County has been trying to give Ocean View Drive to the city of Yachats for years.
But its latest effort hit a speed bump Wednesday during a public hearing before county commissioners when an Oregon state parks official showed up to object to the county claiming a short section of the road through Yachats State Park.
Commissioners quickly retreated and continued the hearing for another two months so staff could talk to park officials and work through their issues.
It all may have been the result of a failure to communicate, county and state folks said Thursday.
“I think there was a communication breakdown and we just haven’t had time to do the research,” state parks real estate manager Alan Freudenthal said Thursday.
Freudenthal said the state is not opposed to turning over the road through the park to the county (and then to the city) “but we want to make sure that we’re comfortable with it so that in 10-20 years someone says “Oh, you can’t do that’.”
The issue is a technical step in getting the road transferred to the city of Yachats, a process that officially got underway in 2017. But the issue has been discussed for decades as part of the county’s vacating of County Road 804, which is now a beloved trail stretching from the beach north of Yachats through the city along Ocean View Drive and then connecting to U.S. Highway 101.
Yachats has more recently been pressing the county to complete the turnover because it needs to own the road in order to build a boardwalk overlooking the Yachats estuary. It also wants access to $308,000 in 804 Trail mitigation funds that the county controls to help purchase the former Landmark restaurant site at the corner of Ocean View Drive and Highway 101.
The county spent $250,000 in repairs and upgrades to the road in 2020-21 that winds along the oceanside bluff from Marine Drive in the north to Highway 101 in the south. But turning over the street to the city has been stymied by staffing changes at both Yachats city hall and county offices and ironing out differences in the road’s old surveys, legal descriptions and years of paving that encroached on a handful of properties – including the state park.
Wednesday’s hearing concerned a very technical issue – a new survey and legal description for the section of Ocean View Drive from West Third Street through Yachats State Park and ending at Pontiac Street. County public works director Mikel Diwan said the county had finally been able to get new easement agreements from four homeowners along the road.
The county sent hearing notices to 12 property owners along that stretch – including four to state parks’ headquarters in Salem. The county owns three parcels along that section as well.
But state parks right-of-way manager Ladd Whitcomb showed up at Wednesday’s hearing – and given just 3 minutes to speak – to say he had been unable to get ahold of or a response from the county to his emails and phone calls. Pointing to a four-inch stack of paperwork, he said he had not had time to go through all of the documents since getting the hearing notice in July.
But through his preliminary work, Whitcomb said “we believe that your assumption that you have any legal rights to the road through OPRD property is mistaken.”
Whitcomb warned commissioners that if they proceeded with the hearing and a new legal description for the road without consulting state parks, the agency could seek to condemn the stretch through Yachats State Park to get it back.
That prompted county counsel Kristin Yuille to quickly suggest pausing the hearing until October so that county and state parks officials could work out any concerns.
Despite the bump in the road Wednesday, both Diwan and Freudenthal said Thursday they should be able to work out any issues now that they have each others’ attention.
“There’s a lot of history with this project … and you want to do it right,” Diwan told YachatsNews.
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
