On March 19, the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners voted to remove from county transportation plans a rail-to-trail corridor stretching 17 miles near Highway 47 from McMinnville to Gaston.
What comes next could be worthy of note.
But the backdrop of this decision also makes a telling story about the how and why of a political battle. This local conflict over creating a pedestrian and biking trail, a central flashpoint in local county elections this year, may have emerged from an entirely different kind of decision: To grow hazelnuts.
Rail travel from the St. Joe area on the northeast side of McMinnville north to the Forest Grove area dates from 1872, when tracks were laid and Westside system trains began running. Cities including Carlton and Gaston were founded as farm service stops along the way and named for people associated with those stops. After a brief go at passenger trolley service, the line was taken over by Union Pacific Railroad, which decades later, now decades ago, abandoned it. The tracks are long gone, the land mostly weed infested and barely passable if at all.
In 2017, Yamhill County bought the portion of the rail right of way from Union Pacific, the plan being to clear it and turn it into a rail-to-trail project similar to the Banks-Vernonia State Trail a few miles north. The idea had broad support in the area, and the county commission, dominated then as now by a two to one conservative majority, enthusiastically moved the project along.
Public support for it has persisted. A 2021 survey, taken after political pushback began, still found 64% of area respondents in favor of the trail, the number rising to 70% after more information was provided to those surveyed.
Yamhill County at one point received $1.7 million from the Oregon Department of Transportation toward trail development. (That money now has to be repaid to the state.)
In this decade, the project has sunk into quagmire. Opposition developed primarily among farmers operating near the trail, some of whom were closely allied with the commission majority. They challenged the county’s move for trail development to the Land Use Board of Appeals, from where it was returned to the county for action. The commission’s new majority turned sharply against trail development, and currently the property sits mostly neglected as the new commission struggles with dueling use suggestions.
Pieces of the old rail right of way may be sold mainly to adjacent landowners. Once that happens, prospects for a public walking or biking trail in the area probably will vanish forever.
Why the change in official attitude?
No one answer probably accounts for everything, but the key seems to be hazelnuts.
Tristin Shell Spurling, a longtime resident of the Cove Orchard area near the old rail line and a trail advocate, observed changes in farming activity near the rail line that matched with changes from support toward opposition to it. He wrote local government officials last fall with a detailed report.
Spurling noted that until about 2015, many of the farmers and conservative members of the county commission were either neutral or supportive of the trail proposal. At that time, most farmers in the adjacent areas were growing grass seed, a low-impact crop with low costs.
Hazelnut development, a higher cost (and higher risk and reward) crop became a larger factor in the area around 2016 and 2017, which is when opposition to the trail began to materialize, though commissioners remained at first largely supportive.
In the years since, the hazelnut developments expanded and some of the earlier planted orchards began to mature. As those became a larger component of the farm picture, the trail opposition began to coalesce along with it, taking legal action and pressing politically at the commission level to reject the plan altogether.
“The hazelnut conversion boom is well documented in Yamhill County during these years. This aligns with the sudden shift in hostility toward the trail,” Spurling wrote. “It often starts with one or two high-value agricultural conversions that change the perceived risk environment.”
Spurling’s wife and fellow trail supporter, Neyssa Hays, is this year a candidate for the Yamhill County Commission, for one of the seats now held by a trail opponent. (The lone commissioner who supported the public trail in the 2-1 vote is not up for election this year.)
Little of this was mentioned by the commission. Commissioner Mary Starrett said, “The county tried for many years to get this project done. The Land Use Board of Appeals said it’s not passing muster and it just kept costing us more and more money and more and more people filling these rooms and being angry and blaming commissioners.”
The battle may continue. A group called Trails PAC has filed petitions seeking a public vote before disposal of trail land. A referendum petition seeking to overturn the commission decision also is possible.
Politics grows out of many things. Sometimes political battles come out of unexpected places, like that hazelnut orchard you drive past on your next trip into the wine country.
This column originally appeared in Oregon Capital Chronicle.
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