The back room at Golden Star was filled to capacity Wednesday evening as people gathered to take in Clatsop County Commissioner Richard Lee’s “town hall” style meeting, held to answer questions regarding accusations of permit violations on his development voiced by a committee formed to recall commissioners and perpetuated in a multitude of the Daily Astorian’s articles. While the tone of the meeting was relaxed and informal, with Lee going through a litany of the permits the Clatsop County Planning Division has at one time or another accused him of not having, there were times when the discussions got heated as the diverse crowd side barred with a few intense debates that Lee wasn’t even involved in.
The interaction of the crowd represented people clearly there to both support the County Commissioner as well as those who were determined to show his faults and a smattering of people intent on getting answers to their concerns. Frequently throughout the evening people called out to Daily Astorian reporter Joe Gamm, “Did you get that answer, Joe?” and “You going to quote the whole sentence, Joe?” Good naturedly Joe Gamm chuckled and nodded ascent. Although Lee was good natured through much of the exchange, he did drive home the point that the Daily Astorian had lied in many of its articles in regards to his permits, about having a vendetta against District Attorney Josh Marquis, about being the “leader” of the drive to take away the stipend and various other allegations that the paper as published.
“I did not vote to take away the District Attorney’s stipend,” stated Lee, “and I admit that was politically motivated. I knew if I did the paper would say I did that because of his wife running against me. I voted against removing the stipend. When the District Attorney’s budget came before the Board, I voted to approve it as recommended by the Budget Committee. The recommended budget did not include a stipend for the District Attorney. I did not vote against the stipend, ever.”
When someone from the crowd pressed Lee about why the stipend had been removed Lee responded that the District Attorney had three years to come up with performance measures and had refused to comply with the request to do them. At the end of the three year deadline the Budget Committee and the majority of the Board felt that if he didn’t want to do as asked for the county there was no reason for the county to pay him. “And here is another example of what the paper does, of what you, Joe Gamm, do. You misquote me. In this instance you say I said,” and at this point Lee read from an article in the Daily Astorian, “I don’t know, after you asked me what performance measures we were looking for from the District Attorney, and you ended my quote there, ‘I don’t know.’ You then go on to say that if the commissioners don’t know what to look for in the performance measures how can the District Attorney know. Now, that wasn’t my whole quote, and it was at that point I told you I wasn’t going to talk to you or the Daily Astorian anymore. I said I didn’t know right then, I didn’t have the paperwork with me right there. The Board knows what it wants and it had been conveyed to the District Attorney.”
Lee then added, “People want to know why I hired a PR firm to handle some of the campaign, this is the reason why, here. The saying goes, ‘You can’t fight a man who buys his ink by the barrell,’ so I needed professionals who knew how to combat this,” Lee held up a Daily Astorian paper folded back to an article, “to handle these lies here and because of Joe Gamm right there,” Lee finished, pointing to the Daily Astorian reporter, “Joe, you’re the reason I had to hire a PR firm.”
Commissioner Patricia Roberts spoke from the audience and said, “I would like to say here that we now understand that the public hadn’t been informed that we had been working on these performance measures for three years, for three years Mr. Marquis had been asked to do them, had been told the kinds of things we were looking for to be on them and for three years he fought doing them. When the deadline was up we were through waiting. We, along with the Budget Committee, said, ‘We’ve had enough of this.’ What we didn’t really realize was that the public wasn’t getting this information, this paper,” and Roberts paused to point at Joe Gamm, “wasn’t informing the public of what was going on, of the performance measures everyone else was doing, and we didn’t realize you didn’t know our frustration with waiting for the district attorney to get on board.”
Roberts also detail the things that the public hadn’t been told about Richard Lee by the newspaper, “Richard was part of the Board that implemented a long term financial plan for the county, the first one we have had, and Richard was instrumental in getting that done. There was no stability in funding; there was no facility to use to lead us into the future. We used timber revenue to acquire land, we renovated the health building to use to house elections material and use for meetings, we’ve brought all the buildings up to code, we’ve used this timber revenue in a responsible manner. We completed a 4.8 million dollar project without coming back to the community for any additional funding, we built a transition center without coming back to the community for additional funding, we moved offices out of a nationally registered historic building while it was being renovated, without asking for additional funding, without raising taxes. We are the envy of other counties, and you don’t know any of this because the paper never tells it!”
Lee explained in great detail the permits that he allegedly hadn’t completed or was operating without were indeed in possession. “I have not done anything illegal!” he stated, punctuating each word with a whack on the table with a rolled up map. “I have submitted the same type of plans, the same type of maps, that every other developer has submitted. When things change, ideas change about how we are going to do something, we submit new plans, new maps. Each requirement they ask me to do, I will do it if it is reasonable, if it doesn’t seem reasonable I call Salem and ask them if that’s the way its supposed to be done. Joe Gamm calls it, ‘Doing an end run,’ I do it because the local office doesn’t always know what its talking about.”
Lee then when on to a subject which has caused some uneasiness at County, the discussion of Ed Wegner being the director of the Planning Division. “I think Ed is a great administrator, he does a good job at it, but he isn’t a planner, he doesn’t know that field. When he has a question or has to make a decision he asks the planning staff how to rule. When the problem is a decision the planning staff has made he can’t make the ruling on his own he asks the staff. He doesn’t know planning.”
From the floor someone asked Lee if he felt, given the fact that gas prices keep soaring, it made good economic sense to have an RV park at this time? Lee responded it was a very good time to, because people were still traveling and the Astoria area was designated as an area people were travelling to. His RV park contributed to that in that helping to keep people here more people were shopping locally and going to local restaurants.
Another person asked if Lee’s golf course was meeting the requirements set forth on it. Lee said, again, yes he was. Dave Ambrose stated that he had worked a lot with the planning division and he never had a problem with them in regards to the permit process and he did many development projects in flood plain areas, where there are more stringent rules than normally zoned areas. Lee agreed that there were more stringent rules however the rules should be applied even handedly, in Lee’s view.
Lee’s step-daughter, Jennifer Moore, stepped into the answer questions as to what was happening on the golf course. Moore said that golf courses were the number one pollutants to the waterways because of all the chemicals used to treat the lawns yet, because what was mowed was used to feed their cows, the Lees went all organic, and even used artificial greens so that they weren’t using chemicals to keep the lawn artificially short.
A number of people stood up to speak out against recalls in general, unless the person being recalled had done something that was proved to be illegal. Ambrose said he would like to give some perspective to the ideas of those who were for the recall as many of those people were his friends and they were a minority who felt as if they weren’t being heard and who were not a part of the community. “These kinds of things happen [recalls] when you have a group of people who feel like they aren’t being hear.” Shouts from the audience erupted and a woman sprang to heer feet. “I would like to answer that one,” Zorich continued, “this recall has nothing to do about not being heard it is politically motivated by a group of people who aren’t getting their way on two subjects, the DA’s stipend and LNG. Will, it went against their wishes this time. You don’t recall when something goes against your wishes, that isn’t what the recall is for. This is politically motivated action and these people are using Richard’s private life to exploit the situation for themselves.” Zorich went on to detail a personal account of problems she had with the planning division.
After Ambrose shared a quote from Madison’s federalist papers, regarding what would happen without the power to recall another speaker from the floor said he felt that the new way democracy was run was that any time the minority wanted something the majority had to cave in to it.
The discussion and questions rocked back and forth between questions on the permitting process and questions concerning the District Attorney’s office. Although the session was scheduled for one hour people stayed until after 9 pm, a full hour later than scheduled, to ask questions and receive answers. Although it appeared as if many were satisfied with answers given, others were still asking questions between one another as they left the building. Commissioner Ann Samuelson added comments throughout the evening regarding open permits on Lee’s property that the plumbing firm she recently sold had completed or was in the process of completing as well as her beliefs that the recall was politically motivated.
A member of the audience bound to his feet and proclaimed, “Its blackmail, that’s what it is. These people have said since the ballot measure that they were going to take down the commissioners for not voting the “right” way. They used Richard Lee’s personal life and if this recall goes through and the remaining commissioners don’t vote for the person this group wants them to, they’ve already said they’re going after Ann Samuelson. That’s blackmail and it isn’t right!”
Lee said that during the last year the commissioners had asked the county manager to arrange for these types of town hall meetings in each of the districts throughout the year, with the commissioner of that district, the county manager, the road master and maybe one other commissioner to help field questions and answer concerns that the community members may have. A suggestion from the floor was that with only three minutes on the agenda per speaker many people felt as if they were not getting an opportunity to speak to the Commissioners in a public format and they felt left out or just plain not heard before important votes were taken.
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