Proposed Dee Tour Amphitheater and Hotel
Since it reared its head in 2013, the mega-development proposed by Apollo Land Holdings LLC at the site of the old Dee mill has
sparked controversy. Located on the banks of the East Fork of the Hood River at the junction of the Dee Highway and Lost Lake Road, the developer first proposed a massive concert venue with more than 3,000 parking places. They later scaled down to a smaller parking lot but refused to limit the size or frequency of events. In 2015, they applied for permission to add a hotel to the mix. With plans for a food cart court, meeting space, event and wedding facilities and attractions like Santaland, the project seemed like a destination resort by piecemeal land use permit applications.
Landowners in Dee are nearly universally opposed to the hotel and concert venue complex as they fear it will utterly transform this quiet rural corner of the county and undermine the ag industry on Dee Flat. The developer has tried to argue that the hotel is not an urban use and that it won’t have much impact on the surrounding farm, forest and residential uses in the area. The neighbors feel differently. A 4-story hotel, concert amphitheater and 437 space parking lot? Sure seems like urban intensity to us. And so out of place in this very rural location surrounded by 50,000 acres of land zoned and used for farming and forestry. Parkdale, the nearest community, is 5 miles away.
Along with many locals, Thrive fought the project from the beginning. We all wondered how the developer’s grand scheme could mesh with Oregon’s land-use laws designed to put urban uses in urban areas and to protect working farms and forestlands from conflicts with holidaymakers.
Thrive Challenges 4th and 5th Extension of Concert Venue Permit
Thrive has appealed Hood River County’s decisions to grant additional one-year extensions – the fourth and fifth extensions – of Apollo Land Holdings land use permit to develop “Deetour”, a large concert venue project at the site of the old Dee Mill on the Dee Highway. Our appeal of the fourth extension is currently at Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals. Our appeal of the fifth extension was denied by Hood River County’s Board of Commissioners by a 3-1 vote in December 2020 and Thrive’s Board of Directors will soon decide whether to appeal the decision to LUBA as well.
For these appeals, the legal issue is really simple – permits don’t last forever. Hood River County approved the land use permit for the project way back in 2014 but in the intervening six years Apollo Land Holdings LLC has done no construction on the project at all. Their initial permit was for two years. They have gotten multiple one year extensions to their permit. They are now on their fifth extension. With their previous extensions, the developer was put on notice that they needed to make progress on their project with this warning from the County: “Please note that no guarantees of a future extension or subsequent approval can be made by Hood River County so please take care in implementing your proposal in a timely manner.”
The Deetour project was first approved in 2014 and if you live along Dee Highway. you know how much has changed since then. According to ODOT, daily traffic on Dee Highway increased by 79% from 2014 to 2019 and in fact, traffic on Lost Lake Road is now higher than traffic was on Dee Highway when the concert venue was approved. Unfortunately the County decided not to take these kind of real world changes into consideration.
Permit extensions should be the exception not the rule. The developer has sat on their hands too long and this fourth extension should be denied. Read our previous testimony here, here and here.
On a high note, the Board of Commissioners agreed that permits shouldn’t go on forever. The current code does not put limits on the number of extensions a project can get. The Commissioners felt this should be changed and asked the County Planning Department to start work on amending the permit extension code.
Hotel Application Withdrawn
In June 2017 Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) ruled in our favor concluding that the rural, industrial exception taken
for the Dee mill property in 1984 was just that — an exception for the mill or a similar industrial use — not a blanket exception for any and every thing such as the proposed destination hotel/resort. LUBA remanded the application back to the county with instructions that the developer would need a new “reasons exception” to Goal 4 Forestlands in order to allow commercial uses; and possibly a Goal 14 exception Urbanization since the hotel was likely an “urban” rather than “rural” use.
There was a packed room on April 2, 2018 when the Board of Commissioners held a hearing on LUBA’s remand issues. The Board tied 2-2 with Rich McBride and Ron Rivers voting to deny the permit and Les Perkins and Karen Joplin voting to approve it. The fifth commissioner, Bob Benton, recused himself from voting since he is one of the developers of the project. Hood River’s County Charter requires 3 affirmative votes for the board to take action. As the project failed to get three votes, the application was denied. But before the denial could be formalized, the developer withdrew the application. We assume this is because they want to reapply for the hotel at some stage.
Concert Venue Permit Extended Again
The concert venue was approved back in 2014 but the developer has struggled to meet the conditions of approval for the project and no actual construction work has begun. In the meantime, they’ve obtained three one-year extensions of their land use permit.
We decided to challenge one of these permit extensions after LUBA’s ruling on the hotel which found that the County had misinterpreted their code by granting a land use permit for a commercial, urban use on land zoned for industrial, rural uses only. We took the position that the county should not grant an extension for a project that the underlying code would not currently allow.
The Board of Commissioners voted 3-1 to deny our appeal and allow the project to move forward (Commissioners Les Perkins, Karen Joplin and Ron Rivers voted to deny the appeal and Rich McBride voted to affirm it).
In December 2018, LUBA affirmed the County’s denial of our appeal. We knew this appeal would be a heavy lift because LUBA must approach local government decisions using a very deferential standard of review. LUBA will affirm a local government interpretation of ambiguous regulations as long as it is “plausible” and not inconsistent with the express language of the code. The County’s interpretation didn’t have to be the best explanation or the most sensible one or the best public policy, it only had to clear the low bar of being “plausible”. Equally, LUBA would have affirmed the County if the commissioners had voted instead to deny the project. We are disappointed that the majority of commissioners voted to allow this project to go forward.
We will continue to monitor this project and to oppose it.