Chevron near Bethany Lake: Public Comment Deadline for Staff Report and Economic Cleanup

Hello Everyone-

Staff public comment deadline!

In a few more days the Washington County Land Use Staff report will be released. If you want to have the Staff reply to your comment you should try and get your comment in by end of day Monday November 8th. Make a comment now! While writing your comment please be polite to the County Land Use and Transportation staff reviewing the messages. And feel free to use primary source references, data, and perspectives from our site.

Write a Letter to the Editor

Getting a letter published in a local newspaper is a great way to help raise awareness. We posted links and requirements on the website for letters to the Oregonian, Beaverton Times, Willamette Week, and others. Below is a letter that a community member wrote about cleanup programs from the Federal EPA and Oregon DEQ.

Every level of government including County, State, and Federal is developing plans to cut gasoline consumption for passenger vehicles. Further, citizens are taking action too: Oregon DMV records show the Bethany area of Washington County (97229/97006) registered 3,134 electric vehicles up to 2019. That is a significant 3% of all vehicle registrations in that area are now electric! For comparison, Oregon as a whole has an electric vehicle registration rate of about 1%.

But, despite these public policy and market forces we are letting gas/service station operators install new stations with very few zoning restrictions. What happens when these gas stations go out of business and the land needs to be cleaned up?

Well, chances are tax payers will cover part of the bill! The federal government has the EPA Brownfield grants to cleanup old stations and the Oregon DEQ has as Prospective Purchaser Agreement program to foot some of the bill too. But, you know what I want to see? County and City zoning proactively choosing low risk areas to put their businesses and tanks so we don’t pay for it later.

A particularly egregious example of this lack of policy is a proposed Chevron station at the corner of 185th and West Union in the growing Bethany area of unincorporated Washington County. The small triangular property is adjacent to the wetlands of the Rock Creek Greenway that also feed into recreation areas of Bethany Lake where people fish and water fowl regularly swim. As they say water and oil shouldn’t mix.

To learn more about this Chevron see https://nabgas.com.

Thank you,

Sarah Orem

Thank You,

Brandon