The U.S. Forest Service has been quietly working on a large Sand Lake Restoration Project for more than five years now, led by its Hebo Ranger District. The project includes quite a few different items, several of which are beneficial for the landscape, including increasing development of late-successional forest, restoring parabolic dunes, and improving the quality and diversity of various wildlife habitats.

But the project also includes a proposal that has so far received little attention: a new mountain bike trail system. Currently there is no such trail network in the Sand Lake area. This proposal – the Forest Service’s preferred alternative – will lead to building about thirty (30) miles of trails, eight miles of which would come from decommissioned roads. There would be two and a half acres of new parking built.

The question is: how large an effect will such a proposal have on the local environment and the communities in the Sand Lake area? The Forest Service, in its March 2024 environmental assessment, glosses over such questions with statements like, “The increase in trails and associated recreation infrastructure would bring an increase in users to the planning area.” The Forest Service analyzed three other trail systems for comparison, especially the Whiskey Run trail system in Bandon. Whiskey Run recorded 12,570 trail check-ins in 2020, with peak use occurring in summer, especially August. The Forest Service expects some 16,000 visitors per year to the new Sand Lake system, with some 5,330 vehicles per year – three trail users per vehicle.

The Forest Service assures reader that “In general the mountain biking community, which is the main user group expected to visit the proposed trail, is mindful of surrounding communities and values conservation.” The local user group, Tillamook Off Road Trail Alliance (TORTA), is in favor of the project, working closely with the Forest Service and Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Is the project as benign as the agencies and user groups portray it? Will it have just local users and be an integrated, non-harmful part of the community, engaging families and bringing in important tourist revenue? So far the Forest Service does not seem to have taken a hard look at the trends in other places that, in all fairness to the community, need to be openly discussed. Whiskey Run has outgrown itself in just a few years, and county plans are under discussion for additional parking, a new 30-place campground and additional trails. Other mountain bike trail systems in Oregon near large population centers, as Sand Lake is, see much higher user numbers than a quiet 16,000 as proposed by the Forest Service.

Currently the Environmental Assessment is back in Forest Service hands for another look at the amount of projected use of the mountain biking trail system, with a decision to be issued within a couple of months. It seems the trail promoters all present the plan as having minimum impacts and maximum local benefit. But a few concerned locals have looked at the explosive growth of other recent trail systems, the interest and influence of national mountain biking associations, and researched the hidden costs of a large influx of new visitors, such as the strain on local communities, and the county, whose infrastructure is often insufficient to handle so many tourists in a concentrated time period. This includes inadequate roads, emergency services, hotels, or water supply. ORCA suggests a transparent agency investigation, and a larger community conversation, about this project and its local costs, before issuing a final decision.

Incredibly, Port Orford City Council granted another time extension for the effluent pipeline to Elk River Property Development, the group working towards development of the Knapp Ranch golf course. The pipeline would be used to take city effluent to the (unbuilt) golf course for irrigation. Though the developer’s attorney specifically requested in January that the city not begin the process needed for the 2024 time extension, which was due in April 2024, the city took ERPD’s resulting failure to file in a timely manner on itself. 

The City Council hearing was a shameless exposé of how far the city is willing to go to keep this moribund project alive. Though a time extension does not obligate the city to participate financially in, or take over the maintenance of, the effluent pipeline, it does send a loud signal to all and sundry that the city is quite committed to the pipeline and the golf course. Will that still be true when the city has to sign an agreement with a hefty price tag for maintenance and ownership of the pipeline? That day of reckoning is coming. Port Orford is a small town with a slender budget to grapple with its major infrastructure problems, and this pipeline would be an unwelcome and unnecessary burden.

The initial hearing before Coos County Planning Commission on Michael Keiser’s New River Golf Course focused on a few key issues, especially the question of High Value Farmland and – as expected – water supply. The developer’s consultants made it clear that in addition to seeking water transfers to the golf course from other water rights already helped by Keiser’s Bandon Biota, they plan to pursue an application for a new water right. There is already a dearth of water in this Twomile Creek area, so there will be many questions when the application, still being researched, is open to public comment via the Water Resources Department public process. 

Nevertheless, the planning commission approved the project after a quick work session on August 1st. Water supply was again a topic of concern. But the commission decided essentially not to exercise its discretion to deny a project both questionable and incomplete; instead, they simply hoped aloud that WRD would do its job in determining whether there was adequate water for the project. This kind of approval is not discretionary decision-making, it is mere passing the buck. The only commission member to vote against the golf course was, as in 2023, local farmer Charlie Waterman, who represents the Twomile area that would be most impacted by this development.