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"To protect the Oregon coast by working with coastal residents for sustainable communities; protection and restoration of coastal and marine natural resources; providing education and advocacy on land use development; and adaptation to climate change."

Oregon Coast Alliance is the coastal affiliate of 1000 Friends of Oregon

Oregon Coast Alliance Newsletter

The Bandon Marriott and Other News

The Bandon Mariott Hotel Proposal and the Parking Lot


The Huge Polystyrene Float at Lincoln City


Clatsop Housing Amendments Going to Court


The Bandon Mariott Hotel Proposal and the Parking Lot

Bandon Historic District. Courtesy Wikimedia

The proposed Marriott Hotel in Bandon Old Town is apparently off the table. According to Mayor Schamehorn’s Dec. 11, 2024 column the city has entered into a lease agreement for the "gravel parking lot" on First Street, owned by Bandon Old Town Hotel Partners, LLC (Marriott), represented by Barry Johnson. In exchange, the lot will be exempt from property taxes, and the city will keep the lot free of trash and weeds. 


The proposed Marriott was of great concern to the Coquille Tribe, as the property is a well-known and extensively investigated archaeological site. A Marriott in Old Town Bandon would also make the area highly congested, more than it already is, thus harming the area’s ambience. The lot’s use as a parking space, while inelegant, will do the archeological site no harm and will help alleviate the parking problems in Old Town, which are particularly acute in the summer months.


ORCA would prefer a long term solution to this site that would guarantee its protection as an important cultural resource, such as purchase by a land trust or the Tribe. We hope such a solution can be worked on by concerned parties, so that future crises like this one need not occur again.

The Huge Polystyrene Float at Lincoln City

Styrofoam float lodged on a beach at Lincoln City in early December 2024

The afternoon before Thanksgiving, ORCA received notice of a large concrete-coated polystyrene float lodged on Siletz Bay. Some of the concrete has already peeled off, and the float is in imminent danger of breaking up and spreading polystyrene pellets across the pebbled beach. It weighs hundreds of pounds. From the local Parks and Recreation Department Beach Ranger we learned that this float first washed up last winter on property belonging to to the Salishan Homeowners Association. They did not have it removed, and it next perched on the edge of Siletz Bay. In early December it floated again, with the assistance of king tides, to the beach in the Cutler City area of Lincoln City. It has gotten a little more banged up, and the concrete covering more fragile; but so far has not broken apart.


ORCA contacted the Department of State Lands, and they, in conjunction with Lincoln City officials, are making plans (as of this writing) to remove and dispose of it safely. Time is of the essence here. When these big floats break up, the resulting mess on the beach of polystyrene chunks and nodules is worse than a nightmare. Readers may remember the 2014 disaster at Lighthouse Beach near Charleston, in which pieces of a dock came ashore and broke apart, strewing the beach with polystyrene foam pellets. It took many hours of volunteer and agency time to clean the beach of all the debris, large and small. 


ORCA is staying in close touch with the DSL personnel involved in removing this float, in hopes of getting it off the beach before another ecological disaster occurs.

Clatsop Housing Amendments Going to Court

Clatsop County Waves and Trees. Courtesy ORCA

ORCA has decided to take Clatsop County to the Land Use Board of Appeals over the controversial housing amendments the county just finalized in December. Clatsop County officials said that these were merely “policy changes,” crafted to increase housing opportunities in the unincorporated communities of the county, and thus provided no factual basis at all for making such sweeping amendments. State law requires legislative changes like these to be underpinned by factual proof. But Clatsop County did not indicate, or even address, this requirement.


It is therefore unclear to anyone how shrinking lot sizes down to 5,000 square feet or increasing the kinds of housing decisions that can be made with no public notice, input or appeal rights will address the housing crisis effectively. After all, as ORCA pointed out in testimony, the county has not restricted short term rentals, which are known to reduce housing opportunities. Nor did it analyze the effects of so many more buildable lots on the local sanitary and water districts that serve the unincorporated communities and often have limited infrastructure.

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Contact Information
Contact Executive Director Cameron La Follette
by email or phone: 503-391-0210
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