A former industrial site in North Portland inches closer to becoming a nature park

Nearly 30 years ago, Metro purchased a 27-acre property located on the east side of the Willamette River near the St. John’s neighborhood in North Portland. Before it can become a nature park with trails and beach access, Willamette Cove first needs to be cleaned up to remove toxic metals, dioxins and other pollutants lingering in the soil and water after decades of heavy industrial activity at the site. As planning for the cleanup gets underway, Metro recently asked residents for their opinions on what features and amenities they want included in the nature park. Joining us to talk about the outreach efforts ramping up and the vision for Willamette Cove is Cory Eldridge, a communications specialist at Metro and the community engagement lead on the project.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Nearly 30 years ago, the Metro regional government purchased a 27-acre property along the Willamette River south of the St. John’s Bridge in North Portland. It’s called Willamette Cove. The promise is for the site to become a nature park with trails and beach access. But before that can happen, the toxic metals, dioxins, and other pollutants lingering in the soil and the water need to be cleaned up. As planning for the cleanup gets underway, Metro recently asked residents to weigh in on what the future park should be like. Cory Eldridge is a communications specialist at Metro and the community engagement lead on this project. He joins us with an update on this decades-old dream. Cory, welcome.

Cory Eldridge: Thank you so much.

Miller: This site was among the very first ones that Metro bought in 1996 after voters said, “Yes, we’ll give you some money. Then you can make some green spaces with this bond.” Why was this heavily polluted area such a high priority?

Eldridge: Willamette Cove is a really special spot, in that in North Portland there are like two places where you can actually reach the Willamette River. If you go from the Steel Bridge all the way up to the Columbia, there’s basically two spots. And Willamette Cove has the chance to be another one of those points where people can actually reach the river, touch the water.

It’s also one of those places that, across Portland in this region, we have these areas where you can just walk into the forest and disappear into nature. And it was like that already by the 90′s. Community members saw it as a potential space to reach the river, as a potential place to escape the city, even though you’re in the middle of the city. So there was a lot of interest in making it into a park. So when Metro was going out for its initial greenspaces bond, this was one of the sites that was the epitome of what we could do with money to protect nature in the region.

Miller: That was before your time there ...

Eldridge: I was 12 when that happened. [Laughter]

Miller: I didn’t live here then, either. I wasn’t 12. I was older than that, but I wasn’t here then. But from the people you’ve talked to, the documents you’ve read, do you think Metro knew how big a challenge this was going to be? That was almost 30 years ago … we’ll talk about where we are, but just in the big picture, do you think the folks at this regional government knew what they were trying to do?

Eldridge: They knew what they were trying to do, because what we’ve been trying to do is pretty simple, which is build a trail, a regional trail through the property, and then have a park. At that time, the idea was that the city of Portland would build a park there.

Miller: My question was not as good as it could have been. Do you think they understood how challenging it would be?

Eldridge: Yeah, they didn’t. There was an understanding that there was some contamination at the site, but it was based on some real estate transactions, where people are doing due diligence and they’re like, “oh, there’s some contamination here.” There was not a good understanding of how bad it was, how widespread it was. So, yeah, folks bought it. They thought, “Yeah, there’s a little bit of contamination. We can take care of that. It’s no big deal.” And that was incorrect.

Miller: All right, so let’s talk about what has been found in the decades that have followed. First of all, what kind of industry was happening in this part of Portland Harbor?

Eldridge: Industry started at Willamette Cove right at the turn of the 20th century, and it went all the way up through the ‘70′s. Most of the time, there were three different spaces, three different parcels on the site. A couple of them made wood products like plywood, they made barrels, and wood mills. And then the central parcel was a dry dock that the Port of Portland ran, and that was where they repaired ships, did some shipbuilding. And so it was shipbuilding and wood products for almost the entire time.

Miller: And the Port of Portland was one of the main, I was gonna say “culprits” and I stopped myself, and I guess I will go back to it – one of the main industrial users and dumpers of what? I mean, what was found in terms of the toxins lingering in the soil or in the muck?

Eldridge:  One of the things to use for dumping, and that isn’t quite what was happening there. When people think about a contaminated site, they think of something out of “The Simpsons,” where there’s green ooze and it’s glowing and it’s really horrible, and somebody has like maliciously decided to dispose of something nasty.

What happened at Willamette Cove, for the most part, was just day-to-day business of making plywood. You know, glues being mixed up on site, people grinding blades for wood production, and that collectively, over the decades, getting onto the ground, getting buried, getting covered up by more of that contamination.

We did find some oil tanks that were used to run machinery on the site, those sorts of things. But as far as we can tell, this wasn’t the case of somebody producing something really nasty and then dumping it intentionally to get rid of it in a malicious way. But there was negligence. I think that’s the whole story of industry before the 1970′s.

Miller: And what are we talking about, in particular? I mean, what are the more dangerous substances that have been found there that still have to be cleaned up?

Eldridge: Yeah, you mentioned dioxins. That’s the number one thing for people that we’re worried about. Dioxins are produced any time like metals or other materials get burned. So they’re a part of many, many different industrial processes. And those were created and then landed, for lack of a better word, on the site. That’s the main stuff that we’re worried about, for people.

We’ve done two cleanups on the site already that addressed the really bad spots that we had found. Over 20 years – since Metro agreed to do a cleanup with the Department of Environmental Quality – we’ve done a lot of studies, and we’ve done three cleanups, two of them focused on really, really bad dioxins.

Miller: So in terms of the upland area, as opposed to, from the water line down further into the river, where does the plan stand right now for cleanup? What is left to do?

Eldridge: There’s still a lot left to do. The way that I like to think about it is the three cleanups that we’ve already done were like triage. They were the really bad wounds to the land there that needed to be addressed right now, whether that was some kind of petroleum product that was leaking into the Willamette River – we have to take care of that now. Same thing with these two dioxin areas.

Where we’re at now is, the entire site needs reconstructive surgery. So over the next year and a half, we’ll be figuring out exactly how much ground, how much soil we need to take out of every square foot of that site, to get the contaminants, to get soil that’s dangerous to people, plants and animals.

Miller: So going in at some point with big diggers and removing feet of soil here and there?

Eldridge: Yeah, we are looking at the top three feet. It’ll really depend on the design itself. This is what we’re working on right now. But yeah, we’re scooping out two or three feet of soil.

Unfortunately, that means that the site, which right now is covered with trees that have grown up over the last 30 years, 40 years … and there are some beautiful madrones and oaks and cottonwoods, which are all plants that we want to be there when this is a nature park. That’s part of our conservation plan is to have those plants there. But the trees that are there right now are in soil that’s dangerous to people and animals.

And to get that soil out, we have to take most of the trees out. And it sucks, particularly for a department that does a parks and nature department, for an agency that promotes nature, taking out mature madrone and oak trees is rough to do. But to make the site safe for generations to come, that’s what we’re going to have to do.

Miller: And then you have to come back in and plant just thousands of cottonwoods and madrones?

Eldridge: We’re going to put in probably thousands of trees, tens of thousands of shrubs. Every year, Metro does this across the region. We have literal tons of seed that we will scatter on different sites. So once we get through the cleanup of the upland, then we’re into everyday work for Metro. This is the stuff we do, the parks and nature department does all the time, and it’s gonna be thousands of trees, tens of thousands of plants, actual tons of seed.

Miller: Everything we’ve been talking about so far is just for the upland part. What about the in-water part, or the near-water part, which is not overseen by Oregon’s DEQ – Department of Environmental Quality – but the federal EPA. What is the status of that cleanup?

Eldridge: That is a project that is deeply connected to ours, obviously, it’s the same piece of land. They need to be integrated with one another. Metro is not directly involved in that cleanup, for a number of reasons. That cleanup, right now, is also in the design process, but we don’t yet know who is going to do the actual cleanup. So, it’s a few years behind and this has been part of the …

Miller: You mean, you don’t know who the contractor is gonna be, or you don’t know who’s going to pay for it?

Eldridge: We don’t know which public agency would be paying for it. And that’s something between EPA and those agencies.

Miller: Why is it that a public agency has to pay for this work, as opposed to the responsible parties?

Eldridge: That is a fantastic question. And my pause is mostly because I don’t have a great answer, I think. The Willamette Cove is one project within the Superfund. It’s, again, from the Steel Bridge all the way out to the Columbia, the river needs to be cleaned up. You have a river. It’s been polluted by many different businesses, many different industries, many different processes, and there isn’t just one responsible party. So the government is the one that steps in to take care of it.

Miller: If you’ve already been having, at this point, seemingly never ending back-and-forth about who’s responsible, who’s going to pay, and if the Willamette Cove Nature Park, Metro’s project, is dependent on both of these – the upland part and the in-water part – being fixed before you can actually say, “The park is done, public, come and play,” what’s to prevent this from dragging on for decades?

Eldridge: Well, where things are at now with the in-water work, is that more of it is moving as it is ready to be done. So we aren’t, at this point, waiting for the entire Superfund area to be ready for its in-water work. Once the in-water planning is done for Willamette Cove, at that point, we hope that somebody’s gonna support the cleanup itself. And then it can happen, rather than waiting for each and every spot along the river to be ready to go. That’s the hope.

Miller: How much input are Indigenous Native tribes going to have in terms of the plans for this future park?

Eldridge: We’ve been working with the tribes for around five years, getting input on the cleanup. That was something that the Department of Environmental Quality got a lot of input from the tribes on what they’d like to see from the cleanup. We’ve worked directly with the tribes for our conservation plan. So, what happens to make this a natural area, that was worked on with the tribes. And really, the hope is that Willamette Cove can be a site where tribal priorities can be realized, to whatever degree that they can be on this small site.

A similar thing is true for the nature park. We are going to the tribes before we go to community members, to say, “Hey, does this match up, does this look like what we’ve talked about? Does this look like it’s going to meet the needs that you’ve identified? Great. Now, we’re going to go to community members to get their input on it.” So it’s quite a bit.

Miller: I did mention the online survey that happened recently of what community members say they’d like to see in terms of features at the park. What have you learned from it so far?

Eldridge: We haven’t been able to go through this survey quite yet, but we did have a couple of workshops with community members. And really, what we were looking for in those workshops and from the survey was, here is this site that has all these issues, it’s got restrictions on it. It’s being cleaned up to be a nature park. It’s not being cleaned up to be a soccer field. It’s down a bluff, so getting into it can be a little challenging. There’s only so many access points, and we want these things that you’d mentioned earlier, like the trail, beach access, launches for non-motorized boats. What else would you like to see there?

Community members really want a place where they can connect with nature. That’s what we were hearing over and over again, a lot of folks were saying, “We want it to be quiet, I want it to be somewhere restful.’’ We’ll see from the survey what we hear, but providing a chance to actually be in nature in North Portland is what people want.

Miller: How much beach access or water access are you planning to provide people, because, as you said, this is a nature park, not a soccer field. But it is a nature park right along the river and as you said at the beginning, that was one of the reasons that planners, almost 30 years ago, decided to buy the site in the first place, because it’s along this river. So will there be a sizable beach access or just a little bit of it?

Eldridge: I would say a little bit but enough to matter to the community. This is, just thinking about what the site looks like now, 100 yards of beach, which, on a river, is substantial I think. That, though, leaves a lot of room too, for river habitat. And we’re talking about the tribes, one of the key things that they would like to see is habitat for salmon and lamprey.

Miller: What does that mean in particular? When we’ve talked in the past, we’ve heard about the importance of shade, the importance of a re-braided river, as opposed to just a place with hard sides, with no inlets. But what are you actually going to be doing to help salmon? And it’s worth saying this is basically one of the last stretches of even semi-natural habitat before a miles-long stretch of concrete and pollutants before you get to the Columbia?

Eldridge: What I would expect us to have, and what the conservation plan lays out is, you would have water plants out into the river, a lot of willows are gonna be there. You’ve got cottonwoods right on the shore. So that’s gonna be the shade you talked about. We might be able to put large logs, which is something that we’ve done at a lot of other sites. How exactly that would work on the Willamette River, which, as you said, it’s a very industrial area,  but providing any of those little refuges for fish that are coming out of the river or going up the river, all of that is what we’d be looking at.

Miller: What’s the most likely scenario for when Oregonians can go to this park?

Eldridge: I’m hoping within five years but that’s a hope.

Miller:  OK. So back to … can you try to answer the actual question? What’s the most likely scenario here? Because, based on everything you’ve said, five years seems so hopeful as to be impossible.

Eldridge: [Laughter] That might be fair. If we can do the upland cleanup pretty quickly after the plants get finalized, then hopefully the in-water work can be done fairly quickly. Five years might be hopeful. Five to seven years could be when the park is a park. It is not going to be a lush forest in five to seven years.

Miller: You’ll have new plantings …

Eldridge: Brand new plantings. You know, I was looking at some photos of Laurelhurst Park, recently, from just a couple of years after it was made, and all those trees started out as puny little saplings. And one of the things that I’m actually really looking forward to is seeing this site grow up and seeing it become that natural area that folks have wanted it to be for so long. But it’s gonna take decades for that to happen.

Miller: Well, Cory Eldridge, thanks very much. We’ll talk to you in 2060 when these trees are of size.

Eldridge: Thank you so much.

Miller: That is Cory Eldridge, a communications specialist at Metro and the community engagement lead on this Willamette Cove Project.

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