threats to PCEI stream project

["bill london" <bill_london@hotmail.com>]

The front-page story in the Lewiston Morning Tribune today (Tuesday, 
7/21) is an incredible story of a developer's greed and duplicity 
threatening a wonderful community resource.

Writer Rebecca Huntington did a great job describing the situation.  The 
Paradise Creek reclamation project at Joseph and Mountain View streets 
in Moscow (now called Carol Ryrie Brink Park, I believe) returned the 
creek from a straight channel into a meandering stream with plantings 
and flood plain water storage capabilities.  Pullman developer and WSU 
professor Rafik Itani owns the property that adjoins the school district 
land that forms the bulk of the land in the project. 

According to PCEI, Itani promised to include about 5 acres of his land 
in the project.  Besides the benefit to the project and the community,  
his future subdivision there would increase in value since it would be 
bounded by this beautiful park.  His in-kind donation was assumedly 
included in the grant that funded the restoration project--as was the 
gift from the school district.

Last year, however, in violation of any agreement that had occurred 
(Itani now claims he made no such deal), Itani built a road and cut 
house pads on the erosive hillside above the park, sending silt into the 
stream.

Worse than that however, Itani is now planning on building homes on the 
acreage inside the reclamation project.  And as part of a 
culvert-burying project, he dug into the reclaimed stream channel and 
ripped out some channel-holding logs.  In the next big flood, that bank 
will likely give way, threatening the entire project.

That project was supported by the community and by the school district 
as an on-going outdoor classroom setting for the district's children and 
as a wonderful creekside trail and as a reminder of what was the 
beautiful, pre-channelled meanderings of Paradise Creek.  To have the 
integrity of that project--as well as the thousands of volunteer hours 
donated to making this restoration project work--put at-risk to put a 
few extra bucks in somebody's pockets in Pullman is incredibly 
disgusting.

BL




















______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com