A request to rezone farmland to industrial land at the Maytown exit threatens Beaver Creek and rural County
What is the “Beaver Creek Rezone”?
In its latest iteration,
- This is a private landowner request to rezone 289 acres of land SW of exit 95 on I5 (Maytown interchange) adjacent to Beaver Creek.
- It is entitled the “Beaver Creek Land Use & Rezone Amendment” to Thurston County Comprehensive Plan – the applicant wants to ‘rezone’ their current RR1-5 (Rural Residential 1/5) land use designation to RRI (Rural Residential Industrial). RR1-5 does not allow industrial land use, RRI does.
- Why? – The landowners no longer want to operate the dairy farm on part of the largely undeveloped property, so they are asking to rezone it so they can sell it for development of a massive warehouse
- The acreage is home to lots of wetlands, critical area for the federally threatened Oregon Spotted Frog (OSF) and Beaver Creek – a Coho spawning stream in the Chehalis Basin.
- Originally proposed in 2021, this request has been updated slightly and resubmitted for consideration by the Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) for approval for the 2024/2025 docket cycle…
Proponent view:
- See the county’s website created for this request at Thurston County website for Beaver Creek Rezone.
BHAS view:
- We recommend the denial of the rezone for this acreage with high habitat value for the OSF and Coho, along with a myriad of other wildlife species.
- We value the land -as is- because it also serves important ecosystem functions of water quality filtering, flood control, aquifer recharge and carbon sequestration.
- We support the Thurston County commitment to protecting environmental quality and meeting Climate commitment goals of reducing our carbon footprint by 45% by 2050, goals which are not met by converting this rural area to a huge warehouse.
Why is the Conservation Committee concerned about putting a distribution center/huge warehouse there?
- The intrinsic value of this site as habitat for federally and state listed species and Coho would be at great risk of destruction if a large part of it is razed and paved over for warehouse(s), parking lots and voluminous semi truck traffic.
- The ecosystem functions served now, including carbon sequestration from the soil and vegetation, would be permanently destroyed.
- Warehousing would draw down already vulnerable groundwater levels, increasing the risk to the neighbors and streams of insufficient water.
- The onslaught of constant semi traffic on and around the property would significantly increase the probability of runoff polluting the aquatic environment with substances toxic to the OSF and the Coho (6-PPD Quinone-tire toxins).
- The large fleet of Semi’s emitting diesel fumes night and day year-round in this area would significantly increase carbon emissions for the county, contrary to the County’s climate commitment to reducing emissions by 45% by 2050.
- And finally, the project could become a multi-warehouse distribution center. The warehousing industry is increasingly automated, using robotics instead of people and using AI algorithms to manage the logistics of shipping to meet the 24- or 48-hour order turnaround consumers now expect. The assertion that this industry would generate a lot of new, good, jobs is simply not supported by the evidence.
What has BHAS done so far about this?
- In 2021, BHAS joined neighbors, friends, and advocates of rural lands and wildlife to urge the county to deny the first Beaver Creek Rezone application. One hundred and fifty comments, of 157, opposed the rezone. The application was put on the bottom of a long list of Comp Plan amendment requests.
- In November 2023 and close to the end of the 2023 docket cycle, Thurston County, announced an ‘open house’ for the Beaver Creek Rezone. And new to a County sponsored open house, the owner’s developer had his own station. And amazingly, there was no station displaying the environmental assets and sensitivity of the Beaver Creek area.
- This February, the BoCC will reconsider whether a slightly modified Beaver Creek Rezone application will be selected for the 2024/2025 docket cycle. If chosen, BHAS believes the staff review may be before the Planning Commission sometime in March.
- BHAS is also actively supporting Conservation Northwest’s vision of an overpass for wildlife across I-5. This overpass is part of a larger plan for connectivity between the Olympics and the Cascades. The preferred option for the overpass is north of Scatter creek between the Maytown (exit 95) and Grand Mound exits. Thurston County is key to a larger regional wildlife corridor’s success. In a feasibility study, now in draft, cougar, western gray squirrel, and recovering fisher are highlighted as animals to protect. WDFW, Washington DOT, DNR, the Chehalis and Cowlitz tribes, counties and others are part of the feasibility team. Connectivity between the Olympics and Cascades would protect the cherished biodiversity of the region for current and future generations.
- The link to this regional study is https://conservationnw.org/our-work/habitat/safe-passage-i5/.
- BHAS will most likely be putting an alert out on Facebook asking to send a comment to the County on the Beaver Creek Rezone docket in mid-February.
Photo credit: Oregon Spotted Frog (Rana pretiosa), by Kathleen Dobson, https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/154292080, distributed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
