KELSO – Frank Ruth was in his late 40s when he first complained to the city about the tire pile near his house on the outskirts of Kelso.
He’s 80 now, and the tires – more than a thousand of them – are still heaped along the banks of the Coweeman River 100 yards away, collecting rainwater and breeding mosquitoes.
Ruth and his wife worry about the mosquito-borne West Nile virus. They also believe the former dumping ground pollutes the environment and devalues their home overlooking the wetlands along the river’s edge.
Removing the tires is the city’s responsibility, Ruth said.
“They didn’t do their job. They turned their back on it,” said Ruth, who in 1972 began asking city officials why they had allowed demolition and tire dumping on the property adjoining his.
As recently as two years ago, he sent city officials letters and photographs documenting the problem, he said.
City officials say they, too, are frustrated. Over the years, the city has sought the help of state and local agencies to force successive owners to haul away the tires, said Don Harris, the city’s nuisance abatement officer.
Despite negotiations with the property owners, warnings and deadline extensions, only a couple of hundred tires have been removed from the 1.35-acre parcel in the last 30 years, Harris said.
“We have cited them, they change ownership, and we start again,” he said. “This thing’s been going on way too long, and I wish we had the money in our budget to take care of it. But we don’t.”
In the early 1970s, Kelso businessman Clarence Rhinehart decided he wanted to build a marina on the river.
Rhinehart, now 77, said he worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Ecology to obtain shoreline permits and develop blueprints. A key component of the plan, he said, involved dumping tires on the riverbanks and filling them with dirt as a means of preventing erosion.
“Ecology actually came down from Olympia and looked the thing over and agreed it would be the ideal thing to beef up the river and protect that bank. They gave me a permit,” Rhinehart said.
Department of Ecology spokeswoman Sandy Howard said she would be surprised to learn that the agency recommended doing that, but she agreed to search agency records to determine whether Rhinehart’s statements were true.
According to Rhinehart, the city of Kelso gave him permission to begin the project after he gave them copies of plans to reinforce the shoreline with tires.
“There was trucks coming in from all over the place to put them in,” Rhinehart said. Then, “at the last minute,” then-city manager Marshall Bingham denied him the shoreline permit needed to build the marina, he said. He had already paid for several permits, he said.
The city never told him to remove the tires, said Rhinehart, who sold the property in the early 1980s.
“As far as I know, it was all legit,” he said.
However, city records tell a different story. Documents from spring 1974 indicate that the city, county and state agreed to file a joint lawsuit against Rhinehart over the dumping on his property. At a city council meeting later that spring, Rhinehart agreed to remove “all the accessible tires” within 30 days if the city refrained from filing any action against him in court.
The issue seems to have disappeared from the city’s radar for the next 20 years, until flooding in 1995 and 1996 washed away dirt that had partially concealed the tires. Frank Ruth again complained to the city about the tires.
Over the next eight years, county health officials and the city ordered the property owners to clean up the site and demanded receipts to prove the tires had been deposited in the county landfill. Fewer than 300 tires were removed, according to city documents. Meanwhile, studies showed the area did not seem to be significantly contaminated, according to city documents.
The current property owner, Seattle businessman Lewis Ong, 33, said he didn’t know about the tires when he bought the land in 2004, though city officials say they told Ong about the tires.
Most of the tires aren’t even on his land, Ong said. But because he wants to be a good neighbor and cares about the environment, he’s willing to chip in several thousand dollars toward the total cost of the tire removal, he said.
However, he doesn’t feel responsible for paying the entire bill, which one company estimated at $24,000, said Ong, adding that the city should absorb some of the cost.
Shelly DeVries, who lives in Ong’s rental house on the property, said mosquito control workers inspected the area recently and found mosquito larvae. Regardless of who removes the tires, she hopes they’re gone soon.
“I just figured, God, 30 years, that’s a long time for these to be sitting here,” she said.
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