CATHLAMET — Oregon state officials, relenting in a fee dispute over the last ferry crossing on the lower Columbia River, have returned a $750 check to Washington’s Wahkiakum County.
Public Works Director Pete Ringen told The Daily News of Longview that the money Wahkiakum County paid under protest was returned following intervention by Oregon state Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose.
“Frankly, I think that’s just embarrassing that Oregon was involved in doing that,” Johnson said Friday.
“It was just one of those times when you say, ‘Yes! Thank you!’Â ” Ringen said. “People still do have sense.”
Julie Curtis, a spokeswoman for the Oregon state agency, said she was unsure why the money was refunded.
“I know it’s just been very difficult to get to the bottom of it,” she said.
The dispute arose last year when the Oregon Department of State Lands began demanding that the county pay for the right for the ferry, which runs between Puget Island, south of Cathlamet, and Westport, Ore., to pass over the Oregon part of the river bed.
Faced with the agency’s demand for a $750 easement application fee, county commissioners complained that the tiny, financially strapped county was being nickel-and-dimed by a big government agency from a neighboring state.
They paid in March but included a letter registering their gripe.
The county-run ferry service has operated for decades, but it was Oregon’s first request for compensation, Ringen and other officials said.
They noted that plenty of Oregon drivers use the ferry, especially when slides close U.S. 30 on the Oregon side of the river as happened in December, and the operation has received practically no government support from that side of the river.
“In my opinion, it is a sad state of affairs when one of the states in the United States of America preys upon a small local government agency in a bordering state to line its coffers,” Wahkiakum County Commissioner George Trott wrote.
The ferry Wahkiakum makes at least 18 runs a day, every day of the year. The open-air vessel can accommodate as many as a dozen cars and the crossing takes about 10 minutes.
Curtis said that in the 1990s, the Oregon land board, which oversees the agency and consists of the governor, secretary of state and treasurer, directed that management of all submerged territory be brought into compliance with state laws — including collection of fees for easements to ply the affected waters.
In “systematically going waterway by waterway,” Curtis explained, officials “noticed that this (ferry) use was not under authorization,” she said.
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