This is an excellent summary of a very convoluted history. Quickly, a further update and a question:

-- The old guy at King County DDES who buried the POI paper in a desk drawer is still there. He has become a pariah within the Department but his seniority protects him against being laid off. His historic indifference to his work recently has been augmented by a regime of meds that make him groggy; he has been known to fall asleep in public hearings where he is the assigned staff representative. But he is a zealous hockey fan and reliably shows signs of life during the NHL playoffs.

-- Can anyone give me a good reason why the Shorelines Hearings Board specifically and the state Environmental Hearings Office generally should be retained? Back in the early days of statutory land use controls the idea was that these novel regulatory concepts required the specialized expertise of a board appointed to deal with them exclusively. But now membership on these boards has predictably become a political plum to be awarded to career political hacks trying to sweeten their state retirement accounts and various types of worthy senior lobbyists and marginal attorneys. As one can see from the discussion in the article, the Board decisions increasingly reflect the mediocrity of these appointments. A SHB decision is as likely to be a kiss blown to a favored interest as a rigorous defense of the public good.

Land use regulation has now become part of the legal mainstream and thus falls well within the competence of superior court judges. In this era of forced streamlining of government due to budget cuts, axing the Environmental Hearings Office as at best an unnecessary specialized redundancy is an idea whose time has come. It is an agency that has outlived its usefulness. Judicial review of local shoreline permits, like other land use decisions, should go directly to superior court.

Crosscut writer Dan Chasen  reduced this complex conservation story to a simple lesson: never give up. The Maury Island site and it's mile of Puget Sound waterfront is now safely owned by the citizens of Washington  because of the steadfast commitment of State and King County elected officials and agency staff, environmental advocates and Maury Island residents. The property owner CalPortland, a formidable mining proponent, also was a reasonable and willing seller. Executive Dow Constantine's lead negotiator, Sung Yang, was superb and resolute in his work to achieve this victory. Thank you all.

Gene Duvernoy, Cascade Land Conservancy

Woofer:
By way of introduction and establishing my bona fides, I work as the lightly paid litigation coordinator for a small enviro NGO. I'm what I call a "barnyard lawyer." I've been arguing environmental appeals at the administrative level since 1989 and have a win-loss record much better than most of the professional attorneys I've been up against. I've argued and won numerous appeals in front of county hearing examiners and state level boards. Most of the state cases were before a Growth Management Hearings Board, but I also had a water rights case before the Pollution Control Hearings Board. In that case, we were intervenors because we succeeded in getting DOE to do the right thing and deny the water right. The farmer who wanted to suck the creek dry rather stupidly appealed. We intervened in support of DOE and provided the expert testimony that nailed the case.

Bringing a large Growth Management appeal that I plan and argue might cost the organization less than $2000 by the time all the copies are made, plus the pittance I get paid. That's all the legal work up through the administrative appeal (Growth Management Hearings Board) level. But I'm not allowed to argue a civil case in Superior Court. And unless an attorney is working pro bono, there is simply no way that any contested land use appeal is going to cost less than $15,000 in attorney's fees and that's on the very low end. One of our major growth management cases cost us over $60,000 for Superior Court and the Court of Appeals. And that's with the local organization doing all the footwork. A local one-issue group without experience that has not strategized about the appeal from when the application was first submitted and just dumps boxes of documents on the attorney's desk will end up paying a lot more, of course.

So if the state administrative level environmental appeal boards are abolished the effect will be to effectively prevent appeal of a lot of truly awful proposals, simply because the local groups can't afford the additional $15,000 on up that it costs to go directly to superior court.

As for whether these appeal boards have specialized expertise in their particular subjects, my experience is that they do. And unless you get extremely lucky, you are very unlikely to get a Superior Court judge who knows a riparian zone from an urban density. We had one judge who made his decision before he had received the record (i.e. the evidence), as we found out afterwards from a memo from the prosecutor regarding transmission of the record.

So, I have to disagree with you. In fact, we recently hosted some Indonesian environmental lawyers. It seems that as part of an anti-corruption strategy judges there are being trained and certified to have special expertise to hear environmental cases. I'd say that its past time for that to happen here.

I am very pleased things worked out so well and I admire the perseverance of the appellants. I have argued against development also but it would be interesting to know just where we will get our gravel now to replace this loss. My guess is that at least some of it will be hauled down Interstate 90 from the pits about 25 miles east of Seattle. Barging gravel is very efficient and that fact deserves at least a mention along with the celebration.

Nice, informative story, I too am glad to see something appear to be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. However, as Kieth pointed out, where is the replacement aggregate going to be transported from? At a current cost of around a million dollars a mile to repair I90, and having just paid CalPort the sum of 36 million, where is the money going to come from to repair I90 from additional truck traffic? Some barge loading can equal 2000 truckloads, in better times; a barge load equals around two week of supply for a concrete plant. My other concern is what happens in 10 years when all the players age retired? We, (the state in response to voters,) have a propensity to revisit earlier permitting in order to retract or change substantially the earlier approved permit. I have a friend with a much smaller gravel pit (100 acres) that was issued a 20-year permit. Three years later, he is now being subjected to a permit review in regards to retracting his permit due to new housing sprouting up immediately next-door and the associated complaints. I hope that these decisions will hold together the full length of the agreement. But, with the attitude of people in this state, I have my doubts.

Steve E.: I appreciate your thoughtful comments, and congratulations on your record of success. I certainly agree that one of the main attractions of the administrative adjudication process is that it provides non-attorney citizens a chance to participate effectively in a way that would be far more difficult to do in a more formal court setting. Maybe the answer is to insist that appointment to one of these specialty boards actually be based on relevant qualifications rather than political connections.

The problem with decision-making in the bureaucratic setting is that over time the initial zeal for substantive reform that was present at the beginning is replaced inexorably by a more conservative focus driven by the organizational agenda of the participants. And over time the economic interests of the big players who work the system on a daily basis push out the institutional capacity to respond with openness to citizen groups who tend to come and go depending on the issues. So the Growth Management Hearings Boards, which are still a relatively recent innovation, continue to draw upon a well of idealism. But this well has largely dried up with some of the older boards that are further along the road to atrophy and toadyism.

Priorities on this island are baffling at best. Schools don't have enough money for paper. Drugs are rampant - especially with children and teens. Our delicate power grid shuts down if winds venture north of 20 mph. Yet, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been pumped into this mine due to all the NIMBY's complaining about noise - or God forbid an orca gets disturbed by the sound of gravel going into a barge. Stop the presses - let's funnel every available penny into this park so the orcas can swim in peace and the folks on Maury can focus their complaining on something even more mundane like air traffic going into SeaTac for example. Meanwhile our kids are getting high on weed (on a lovely spot overlooking the mine, ironically), ferries are getting cut back, and other far more important issues are falling by the wayside. What's more important? An orca's attention span or our children???

What will be the big issue in ten years? Do you people realize that creating a park may mean a dumptruck or two will rumble down 75th Avenue and make some noise? Is that where these islanders will focus their lunacy next? Maybe we should stop the ferries, ban all fossil fueled engines and walk around on the island so we can save a spotted owl?

For the record, I reside on Maury Island in Gold Beach, and I am disgusted with the epic effort to blow all available funds on this mine / park. We have much bigger needs out there people. Get a grip, and come back to reality before things REALLY get bad on Vashon.

- Smitty

Floating on the water makes a lot more sense than driving a rig up and down the interstates. Seems like the NIMBY's forgot to account for economics. I appreciate the comments about the teens doing drugs, and the loss of opportunities four our youth in exchange for NIMBY housing.

My life experience and my study of history have taught me two things that I know for sure:

1) When people's supply of drinking water is threatened, they will fight to preserve it.

2) Other people, whose supply of drinking water is not threatened, will call them NIMBYs for doing so.

NIMBY -- the new "N word," with the same source -- ignorance.

When gas hits $5...then $8...then $10/gallon over the next 10-15 years, we won't need so much gravel for all those freeways. In the meantime, if it costs more to mine gravel from somewhere else, then so be it - that is a more accurate reflection of the true economic and environmental cost of America's oil addiction anyway.