By Ryan Teague Beckwith - Daily World Writer, The Aberdeen Daily World April 8, 1999
SATSOP - Concerned about protection of wildlife habitat at the Satsop Development Park, a just-formed Grays Harbor environmental group filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Washington Public Power Supply System and the Satsop Redevelopment Project.
The suit, filed in Thurston County, also names the Port of Grays Harbor, the Grays Harbor PUD and Grays Harbor County, which are affiliated with the Satsop Redevelopment Project.
In court documents, lawyers for Wildlife Forever of Grays Harbor charge that the transfer of 1,200 acres of mitigation lands to local control was "arbitrary, capricious and/or illegal and contrary to public policy."
Dean Schwickerath, head of the nonprofit group, said the intent of the lawsuit is to ensure that current plans for the wildlife habitats remain in place even after the former nuclear plant is turned into a business park.
"We're not seeking any money," he said. "We're just trying to maintain what's been going on."
WPPSS General Counsel Al Muncier said it would be premature for him to comment on the lawsuit but indicated that the agency will likely fight it, based on previous contact with environmentalists on the issue.
"We will be defending this thing to the fullest extent," he said Wednesday.
"We feel strongly that we have the authority to transfer that site and that the local group down there has the authority to assume the obligations."
Representatives of the Port, PUD and county government had no comment.
Because the county is named in the lawsuit, the case will be tried in Thurston County Superior Court before Judge Gary Tabor.
The lawsuit is not the first time that mitigation lands at Satsop have been a cause for concern among area environmentalists. In February, the Grays Harbor Audubon Society sent a letter to a state agency that oversees nuclear power plant sites asking that more be done about wildlife habitat before it allows the transfer.
The Harbor's two other major environmental groups, the Friends of Grays Harbor and the Chehalis River Council, have expressed similar concerns but are keeping a distance from the lawsuit. Schwickerath, who is president of the Audubon Society, said that organization has not taken any sort of official stance on it.
"There are some members who don't want to do something like this and I can't blame them for that," he said.
Schwickerath, 49, works in data processing for the Department of Licensing in Olympia. He lives outside of McCleary.
So far, he is the only publicly identified member of Wildlife Forever, a nonprofit organization that incorporated with the state on Wednesday. He would not say how many members the group has, saying that the organization is trying to remain "low key" and confidential.
The lawsuit, however, is anything but low key. Wildlife Forever has hired Seattle attorney Knoll Lowney. He represented the Friends of Grays Harbor in a nine-month Clean Water Act lawsuit over the Stafford Creek Corrections Center that was settled out of court last year.
This lawsuit will likely center on the 1996 legislation that allowed WPPSS, a consortium of rural electrical utilities, to transfer ownership of the $3.8 billion power plant site to local hands.
Lowney charged that WPPSS gave no public notice of the transfer of mitigation lands and failed to ensure that the Satsop Redevelopment Project has sufficient expertise and resources to maintain them. He also said that the transfer unlawfully reduces the responsibility to maintain wildlife habitat at the site from a legal responsibility to a contractual arrangement.
"In our minds, it's not a contract," he said.
He and Schwickerath stressed that the lawsuit is not intended to stunt growth or prevent the 400 acres of developed land at the Satsop site from being turned into a business park. If anything, Schwickerath said he was excited to see the once-deserted power plant being put to good use.
But he is concerned that the mitigation lands not get lost in the shuffle.
The area includes 22 identifiable types of wildlife habitat, including mature Douglas fir forests, grasslands and barren undeveloped land, and as many 200 different species of wild animals.
Environmentalists are concerned that some of the wild area may be put to industrial use or even be thinned, based on remarks made by members of the public development authority that will eventually take control of the site.
They also cite a rezoning by the county that included 300 to 400 acres of mitigation land. A lawyer for the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority has said that the rezoning was a mistake due to inaccurate maps.
After several meetings with representatives from WPPSS on the issue, Schwickerath said he didn't feel there was any other way to resolve it.
"At some point, we knew that you have to fight City Hall, I guess," he said.
"This kind of came to that point."
Jack Durney, an at-large member of the public development authority that will eventually take control of the Satsop site but was not named in the suit, said he was disappointed that the issue had resulted in a lawsuit.
"If somebody has questions, they ought to be sitting down and talking to us about their concerns instead of throwing a bunch of legal weight around," he said.
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