An abandoned barge, formerly the Vancouver Yacht Club, has been moored to the dock at Metro's M. James Gleason Memorial Boat Ramp since March. A dozen government agencies haven't been able to decide what to do with the barge, which could damage the dock.
Take a creaky barge in Camas, a $10 bill, a maelstrom of red tape and a Metro-owned boat dock near Portland Airport, and what do you get?
It's starting to look like a hefty cleanup tab for the Portland region's taxpayers.
That's the fear of a frustrated Paul Slyman, director of Metro's parks department, after the March arrival of an unexpected guest at the M. James Gleason Memorial Boat Ramp off Marine Drive.
The new arrival at the boat ramp is the Vancouver Yacht Club, an asbestos-laden ramshackle of structures, possibly coated in lead paint, on top of a listing 60-year-old barge that is damaging the dock at Gleason.
Somebody will have to pay to clean it up; if you live in the Portland region, it might end up being you.
Adrift in the night
It's late at night on March 22, and the Tidewater Barge Lines tug Sundial has spotted something large adrift in the Columbia River off the shore of Ackerman Island, just west of Camas.
A Tidewater tugboat towed the barge to the Gleason boat ramp after spotting it adrift in the Columbia River.
When they call it in to the U.S. Coast Guard's Columbia River offices in Warrenton, the Sundial is ordered to tie the barge to Metro's M. James Gleason Memorial Boat Ramp, about five miles downstream.
The next morning, Metro employees were surprised to find the barge – essentially one single-wide and one double-wide mobile home cobbled together – attached to the dock at Gleason.
What they didn't know is that a minor nuisance was about to become a major headache.
If someone abandons a car on your driveway, you call a tow truck company and have it hauled away. Someone, somewhere, will find some value in the vehicle, even if it's just for the scrap metal in its frame.
The way things work on the water sounds like a Yakov Smirnoff joke. On the road, a scrapper pays you to remove an unwanted vessel. On a navigable waterway, you pay a scrapper.
And even that's not so simple. The Coast Guard must approve any plans to move the barge off Gleason, meaning Metro, if it wanted to dispose of the barge, would have to have somewhere to take it to. Even then, Metro doesn't have the legal right to move an abandoned boat – only the Port of Portland or a couple of law enforcement agencies, under state law, can get rid of it.
Metro's tried to get rid of the barge. It's even been put on Craigslist. But nobody's been willing to buy it from Metro – instead, companies have called and offered to take it off the regional government's hands for as little as $30,000.
Slyman, who has a background in environmental science and was a commander in the Coast Guard, doubts that those bidders can responsibly take apart the vessel – he thinks a reasonable cleanup bill will be close to $100,000. He worries that Metro would just be paying a company money to dump the barge off somewhere else on the Columbia River – to make the toxic barge someone else's problem for another day.
The former Vancouver Yacht Club is blocking 65 feet of dock at the Gleason boat ramp, and is impeding access to the boaters' waste station.
In the way on sunny days
Boating season is about to get underway. A string of sunny, warm days is forecast for next week. The Gleason boat ramp should be packed with people.
But the dock at Gleason, used for loading and unloading, and for pumping out sewage from boats, has been commandeered. More than 65 feet of the dock is blocked by the barge.
The barge has so much draft – the part of the barge underwater, that catches the current of the river – that it's tugging away at the pilings that hold the dock in place. Those pilings were part of a $2.2 million renovation of the boat ramp in the late 2000s. State engineers have looked at the pilings, and think they're stable for the short term.
Long-term? "The vessel far exceeds the engineered load limits of the Metro facility and thus continues to jeopardize its integrity," Slyman wrote in an April 26 letter to the Coast Guard.
It's already started to damage the dock itself. Chain-link fencing that served as a railing on the barge has chewed away at parts of the dock.
And the barge is a safety hazard – Slyman worries that the yacht club, which is easily accessible from the dock, could end up as an unauthorized host of a late-night boat party.
The barge is about 70 years old, and parts of its deck are bowing and listing.
Abandonment, and the bureaucratic hand-off
Who, exactly owns the Vancouver Yacht Club barge?
Not the Vancouver Yacht Club.
In 2009, the club sold the barge – which had once been the Anchorage restaurant on the Willamette River near the Sellwood Bridge – to Richard Dulas, for $10. Dulas then allegedly tied the barge up on the Washington shore of the Columbia without permission from the owner of that property.
According to a Coast Guard report, Dulas was given an eviction notice on March 22 to move the barge from the property within six days. Dulas told the Coast Guard he hired a fisherman to take the barge somewhere downriver.
That night, the Sundial found the barge adrift.
Attempts by Metro News to reach Dulas were unsuccessful; several phone numbers listed under his name in Oregon and Washington had been disconnected.
Theoretically, the barge should be Washington's problem. After all, it was moored there for years, right?
But when the Coast Guard ordered it moored to Gleason, it became Oregon's problem.
Oregon has $150,000 in its biennial budget for vessel removal and has caps on how much it'll spend on any one vessel. Metro might be able to get some of its costs recouped from the state.
But Oregon State Marine Board director Scott Brewen said that's not necessarily fair to Oregon's recreational boaters, who pay the fees that cover the derelict vessel fund's costs.
"It's intended for recreational boats, smaller fiberglass boats that can be pulled out, chopped up and taken to the dump," Brewen said. That usually costs less than $5,000 per boat.
Meanwhile, there are 40 abandoned barges wallowing in the Columbia River, he said.
Coast Guard won't help
In his letter, Slyman asks the Coast Guard to explain how it plans to remove the derelict vessel immediately to avoid damaging the boat ramp, which would cost the region's taxpayers even more to fix.
Metro posted a trespass notice on the front door of the barge.
Meanwhile, Slyman, who has also worked at the Portland Development Commission and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, is trying to find an inexpensive, responsible way out of what he called the biggest bureaucratic mess he's ever experienced.
A dozen government bodies, ranging from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Clark County Sheriff's Office, have been on conference calls on how to deal with the barge.
"It's a United Nations of agencies, and nobody's doing anything real," Slyman said. "Everyone is nervous that the minute you touch it, you bought it."
Ideally, Slyman said, the Coast Guard would deal with the mess it helped to create; Washington would assist with the cleanup costs for a vessel that sat in its waters for years.
Repeated phone messages from Metro News to the Coast Guard's press offices in Warrenton and Seattle were not returned. But on May 2, the captain of the Coast Guard's Columbia River region wrote back to Slyman.
The Coast Guard says it can't touch the thing anymore.
"The derelict structure poses no immediate threat to navigation or the environment in its current location," wrote Capt. B.C. Jones. "Accordingly, the Coast Guard has no authority to move it."