A continuing delay for relocating Costco in Clatsop County’s North Coast Business Park has been gaining easy access to the site.

But that may recently have changed.

Clatsop County and the Oregon Department of Transportation have come to an agreement.

“We did find resolution,” Ed Wegner, Clatsop County director of community development, told the Board of Commissioners during its Wednesday meeting. “We agreed to a plan to obtain a Grant of Access.”

A GOA allows access to a highway where property doesn’t have the right of access.

Oregon’s application for a GOA explains that ODOT is agreeable to a GOA when “existing rights of access can be relocated, controlled and/or combined; or where operations could be improved through off-system connectivity, traffic diversions or other traffic engineering techniques.”

“To obtain the grant we have to make improvements to the transportation system,” Wegner said.

He said there were problems with original plans to access parts of the business park. Those plans involved closing Dolphin Road.

Wegner said the current plan reflects a plan developed two or three years ago that incorporates a parkway.

Barry Sims, a forester from Trout Mountain Forestry, told the Board that he’s completed estimates for blown-down timber in county parks and the fairgrounds property. He said bids from harvesters are due next week.

But bald eagle nests in two sites have complicated the process.

The “Radio Tower Site” – a 61-acre site the county owns just outside Astoria – may have its harvest delayed until late in the summer, Sims said.

The “Transfer Station Site” – a complex, intertwined series of properties with some owned by Clatsop County and some by Astoria – also ran into a bald eagle nest snag.

“That sale was going to proceed, but we found another eagle nest,” Sims said. He said a biologist is going to make a determination about harvesting the site Monday.

Sims said that because so many eagle nests were blown down during winter storms, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is “just now establishing where they are.”

The bid award for the Clatsop County Fairgrounds is set for the Board’s May 28 meeting, with the harvest deadline of July 15. Commissioner Ann Samuelson expressed her concern for the safety of loggers harvesting the fairgrounds, saying it was a jumble of timber.

“Safety’s always the primary concern,” replied Sims. “The fairgrounds site for a salvage is relatively attractive – accessible.”

He said the goal is to retain some older forests.

And he said that under the Forest Practices Act, the county will be required to plant trees to replace the ones removed, even though they were blown down.

Flood maps

Patrick Wingard, Clatsop County’s community development supervisor, discussed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood map revisions in a work session before the meeting.

FEMA has undertaken a nationwide effort to update its Floodplain Insurance Rate Maps and proposed new floodplain elevations. The maps determine the rates people pay for federally subsidized flood insurance. But combined with the decertification of existing dikes, they also may result in different designs for construction.

The new maps raise the elevations of flood plains – sometimes by as much as 3 feet.

“Clatsop County is more fortunate that a lot of these areas behind dikes are pasture lands. The number of homes is in the 10s – not the hundreds, like Warrenton,” Wingard said.

Wingard said in places where homebuilders are now required to raise their houses a foot or 2 above floodplains, with the new maps they might have to raise their houses 4 or 5 feet.

He said a major concern for the county is in the Miles Crossing/Jeffers Garden area – where the floodplain will increase 3 1/2 feet. He said that means people building houses there will have to raise them up that much more.

“Something that the state is encouraging in Clatsop County is people who aren’t in the floodplain today – but will be tomorrow when the new maps are adopted – they get flood insurance. They will get the lowest rate,” Wingard said. The new floodplain maps won’t take effect until after FEMA considers protests and appeals.

Wingard said Clatsop County would be submitting multiple appeals of the proposed maps “on several fronts” during an open house held April 29.

He said, among other things, the county intends to appeal the manner the floodplain elevations were established and how they’re shown on the maps.