MICHAEL BURNHAM / METRO NEWS
Metro real estate negotiator Leif Anderson stands atop a levee at the southern end of the Peninsula Canal and shows a potential westbound route of the Columbia Slough Trail.
The Columbia Slough Trail winds past warehouses, wetlands, freeways and fairways amid 19 miles of the Columbia River's once-wild southern floodplain. Look at the barren levees and lots, and there's no mistaking it's a highly managed, urban waterway. But in some spots, a thin thicket of trees and shrubs separates the working world from the wild one, providing just enough green to enable cyclists, pedestrians and paddlers to forget about the grey.
"The green isn't very deep, but it gives you a real nature experience — especially if you're on the water," said Columbia Slough Watershed Council Executive Director Jane Van Dyke, who rattled off a long list of feathered or furry critters that populate the slough.
This winter, Metro passed the two-mile mark for closing gaps in the Columbia Slough Trail and its northern neighbor, the Marine Drive Trail. Two miles may seem unremarkable, but it represents almost 20 land transactions and helps close four major gaps in the more than 30-mile trail network that stretches eastward from Portland's Smith Lake to Fairview's Blue Lake.
Metro brokered the real estate deals with money from its Natural Areas Program, which uses money from a 2006 bond measure to buy wildlife habitat and close trail gaps across the region.
MICHAEL BURNHAM / METRO NEWS
Where the Vancouver Street sidewalk ends today, the Columbia Slough Trail will continue tomorrow. Last year, Metro secured easement rights from Beall Corp. for a westbound trail along the slough.
Transforming a line on paper into an asphalt trail on the ground is no easy feat. Some gaps are blocked by fences or overgrown by blackberries. Other gaps are merely unpaved but well-used paths atop the levees.
"A lot of areas already have 'demand trails,'" Metro real estate negotiator Leif Anderson said of such informal but illegal trails. "They're being trespassed on already."
To close the legal and physical gaps, Anderson works to buy land outright or easement rights from dozens of private property owners. Most folks get a modest sum for granting a right-of-way; Metro paid about $35 per linear foot amid 17 recent Columbia Slough Trail easements, most of which crossed industrial land, according to agency data.
In other words, a property owner granting an easement allowing 500 feet of trail to be built along her property could expect to get about $17,500.
Some folks are still a hard sell, Anderson conceded, so he appeals to their practical nature. The new, legal trail would be professionally constructed and managed by the Portland Parks Bureau or another local government agency, he notes. The trail could also raise property values and provide recreational opportunities for employees and the broader public, he adds.
But here's the rub: a debate among trail neighbors about its effect on crime.
Columbia Corridor Association executive director Corky Collier said he hears both sides from his nonprofit business association's members, which range from waste haulers and warehouse operators to metal recyclers and paint producers. Some business owners and operators are wary that increasing public access along the back of commercial and industrial sites would increase vandalism, theft and other crime. Other folks counter that more eyes on the trail would decrease crime.
"Clearly, there's room to maneuver here," Collier underscored. Businesses that provide trail access across their property can encourage people to hit the trails and discourage other folks from engaging in hidden, illegal activities, he suggested. Local governments can do their part by designing trails with good surfaces and connections.
"The best thing they can do is to design a trail well to make sure it's one people actually use," he added. "Those gaps in the trail are what prevent people from using it."
The Columbia Slough Watershed Council's Van Dyke said that trail connections help build personal connections, including a sense of ownership and desire to protect natural areas. "The longer the trail and the more it connects to other trails, the more people are attracted to it and use it," Van Dyke said.
Portlanders haven't always viewed the slough as a place worth protecting. Put frankly, it was Portland's toilet.
In the 1920s, the City of Portland and local landowners began diking and dredging under the auspices of the Multnomah County Drainage District, according to an online exhibit by the Center for Columbia River History. The highly managed network of levees and canals provided officials a way to dispose of urban sewage, control flooding and reclaim land for development.
A 1999 Radical History Review article, "Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon," described a dystopian place of murky water and barbed-wire fences. "The slough water is toxic and poses a severe risk to members of the North Portland communities who, despite warnings, fish here for food," wrote author Ellen Stroud, a professor of urban and environmental history at Bryn Mawr College. "Millions of gallons of Portland's raw sewage are dumped into this slow-moving waterway each month, and more than two hundred industries along the slough have contributed to its contamination."
MICHAEL BURNHAM / METRO NEWS
A chain-link fence closes off the so-called Peninsula Canal gap. Four Metro land transactions, spanning 5,300 feet of trail along the canal will create a north-south connection between the Columbia Slough Trail and Marine Drive trail.
The elimination of combined sewer overflows into the slough in 2000 has helped make the waterway cleaner today than it has been in a century, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council says.
The herons, beavers, raccoons and other wildlife hiding among native plants show that nature finds a way back, even in the unlikeliest of places. And so, in stops and starts, a trail snakes past homes, highways, gravel yards, golf courses and racetracks.
"Because the urban form is filled out, you work with what you've got," said Metro's Anderson.
Metro is taking the same approach regionally. Using money from its 2006 natural areas bond measure, the regional government has spent almost $2 million on 23 transactions geared toward trails.
Outside of the Columbia Slough-Marine Drive network, Metro's major transactions include: buying land for a southern trailhead for the developing Cazadero Trail, which will eventually stretch about 12 miles from Boring to Estacada; securing 3,200 feet of right-of-way in Southeast Portland to close more than half of the Springwater Corridor's so-called Sellwood gap; and, filling more than half of a one-third-mile gap along the Fanno Creek Greenway, between downtown Tigard and Woodard Park. Metro has used the 2006 bond measure to open a combined 11 miles of trails at three new nature parks – Mount Talbert, in Clackamas; Cooper Mountain, near Beaverton; and, Graham Oaks, in Wilsonville.
The regional government will use the bond measure to pursue additional acquisitions along the Westside Trail, Gresham-Fairview Trail, Tryon Creek Linkages, Abernathy & Newell Creeks and Tonquin Geologic Area.
"We're trying to finalize a network all over he region," Anderson said.