Landowner caught between city and county over development
by Virginia Bruce

Richard Meyers has owned the property at the southwest corner of Murray and Cornell for years. He's worked with the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to clean up contamination from the former gas station, and he donated a big chunk of land to Washington County for the Murray/Cornell road project.

He's been looking for a tenant for the property ever since the DEQ signed off on it. It wasn't easy, because the county limited access to the property to the existing driveway that it will share with Plaid Pantry. Banks and restaurants turned it down because of those access problems, but Washington County prefers to limit driveways because they present hazards and slow down traffic.

So finally the national chain company Auto Zone agreed to put in a store at the corner. They're required to build a two-story-height building by the Town Center ordinance, which aims for "mixed use" buildings in the Town Center area. Meyer would be leasing the land and Auto Zone would build the building.

This corner lot and the shopping center to the west became an island when the county stopped Beaverton's annexation push earlier this decade.

Sounds good, right? Well, it's not that simple. Murray and Cornell were both annexed by Beaverton back when they were in cherry-stemming* mode in 1999. They annexed Sunset High School and Home Depot at the same time (Ordinance 4042), but the commercial property at the corner was never "islanded" in.

The county became alarmed at the prospect of Beaverton snapping up revenue-rich commercial areas without taking on the revenue-draining residential areas along with them. In December 2004, an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) was signed between Washington County and the City of Beaverton stipulating that the county would not object to annexations south of Highway 26 (called Area A), and that the city would not attempt to annex areas north of 26 (Area B) without the county's explicit approval, even if the landowner was volunteering to annex in.

Once the city owned the roads, they also owned the storm sewers underneath. City policy is to not extend services into areas outside city boundaries, so when Meyers and his potential tenant asked for a provider letter for storm sewers, the city refused. Everything else in Meyers' development application passed muster, but without that letter, he couldn't proceed.

In June, Meyers' engineering firm received a letter from Don Mazziotti, Beaverton's Community Development Director, reiterating that Beaverton could not provide the storm sewer service. He suggested that Meyers might be able to hook into storm sewers through the property to the west, which was developed before Beaverton annexed Cornell. But that property owner was not interested in cooperating, so Meyers was stuck.

Entrance to the store will be at the northwest corner, with doors on Cornell and into the parking lot on the west side of the building.

After quite a bit of bureaucratic runaround, it appears that things will be resolved, however. Meyers has written a letter to the city requesting the annexation. Beaverton will then write to the county requesting that they release that property from the terms of the IGA. The county is prepared to respond favorably. "We all want that corner to be developed," says Anne Madden, spokesperson for Washington County Land Use and Transportation.

But she points out that there are still some details to be worked out. "Mr. Meyers doesn't want to start again at square one with a whole new development application to the city. We're going to see if the city will accept the work that our planners have done on the application."

Meyers knows that an annexation can take quite a long time, so he's hopeful that the county will go ahead and accept the application based on an agreement between the city and county to proceed with the annexation, assuming that the city will ultimately be able to provide storm sewer service. When the county did the Murray/Cornell roadwork, they "stubbed out" the storm sewer to the property in anticipation of future development, so it's ready to go when these intergovernmental tangles are resolved. Meyers says that Auto Zone corporate is frustrated with the situation and will pull out if no resolution has been reached in October.

This is somewhat of a worst-case example of why some resolution needs to be worked out for the long-term governance of Cedar Mill and the other urbanized unincorporated areas of the county. See the Area 93 article in this issue for another one!

"Cherry stem" is the term for a road that is annexed to get at a property or area. Island is the resulting area that is surrounded by annexed roads. See December 2004 CM News for more background. http://www.cedarmill.org/news/archive/1204/beaverton-annexation.htm

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