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LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
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| Denise Foland, Portland development manager for Cedar Grove Composting, addressed a sometimes hostile gathering at the Wilkes Community Group meeting held in June. Cedar Grove recently abandoned plans to develop a 19-acre composting site at Northeast Marine Drive and 169th Avenue. |
| MEMO PHOTO: TIM CURRAN |
Last month the company sent an e-mail to Wilkes Community Group Chairman Ross Monn that they were no longer looking at the 19-acre tract as a location for the recycling and composting of Portland’s food wastes. Denise Foland of Cedar Grove confirmed this for the Memo.
Cedar Grove has a contract with Metro to take food wastes from participating restaurants, hotels and hospitals and convert it into compost. Metro hopes in this way to divert 40,000 tons of waste a year from landfills, where it goes now, into productive re-use. Currently the waste is taken to an existing Cedar Grove Composting plant near Everett, Wash. However, the contract calls for Cedar Grove to establish facilities in the Portland area. The Marine Drive site met their specifications because it is within the city limits, is sufficiently large, is zoned for industrial activity but is not a brownfield site.
At a Wilkes meeting in June more than 100 people showed up, many of them from McGuire Point. They complained that such an operation would generate unacceptable levels of noise, smells and rodents close to residences, and that it would interfere with what is now a natural area. They were unimpressed when Cedar Grove representatives said that the wastes would be kept covered until all smell was gone, that the operation would meet city noise standards for residential areas, and that they would enhance public trails and wildlife habitat.
Foland says the decision to abandon the site was due to “a combination of factors, not just the houseboat people or the public process.” She says Cedar Grove will continue to seek sites for their operation (they planned to operate at three small sites), and that it is even conceivable that they would select one in Wilkes.
The company has already looked at “many other sites,” she says, but they’ve “never gone as far down the road with any other piece of property” as they did with the Marine Drive site. In general, they have found the Portland siting process to be more difficult than they anticipated. “We hoped to be breaking ground by now,” Foland says.
Monn, who conducted the July meeting, showed anger at the McGuire Point reaction and sometimes clashed with speakers. Regarding Cedar Grove’s withdrawal he says, “It’s unfortunate for the Wilkes Community Group. This would have been good for Portland. It’s a shame that a few high-powered people can ruin something good.”
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