Since 2017, Friends has zealously opposed illegal gravel mining on the Zimmerly property in southeast Clark County, just inside the gateway to the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. In 2020, Friends successfully got the mining activities stopped. Since then, Friends has had an unprecedented string of legal victories against the Zimmerly team and their affiliates in their seemingly never-ending efforts to mine the property, with or without permits. Friends’ string of victories continues into 2025.
In December 2024, the Clark County Council for the second time unanimously rejected a proposal by Zimmerly to convert the privately owned SE 356th Avenue from a quiet, rural residential road into a publicly owned industrial-scale mining haul road. The Council had previously unanimously rejected the same proposal in July 2024. Six months later, the Council reconsidered the proposal and ultimately stuck with its prior rejection.
Both times, Friends was joined by hundreds of concerned community members who spoke out against the proposed public road dedication, helping the Council realize that the road that was being offered to the County was a Trojan horse loaded with problems. By twice rejecting Zimmerly’s offers, Clark County has forcefully repudiated the untold hidden liabilities, risks, and costs that would have come with the road.
More recently, Friends and neighbors of the Zimmerly property prevailed in an important appeal decided by the Commissioners of the Columbia River Gorge Commission. Friends won on two major categories of issues, including the need for Zimmerly to obtain permits for the unpermitted drainage system on the property and to resolve important questions about whether the numerous seeps and springs on the property generate any water resources that deserve protection from mining.
When Zimmerly’s attorney, Jamie Howsley, filed a land use application with Clark County seeking mining permits on the property, he purposely excluded from the application the unpermitted drainage ditch and related improvements that his clients had constructed in the 1990s as part of their mining operations. Despite using this unpermitted drainage system to illegally discharge millions of gallons of sediment-laden mining runoff into Gibbons Creek and Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge in years past, and despite voluntarily signing a legally binding consent decree with the Gorge Commission agreeing to seek land use permits for the construction and use of the drainage ditch, Zimmerly never followed through on these commitments, leaving these serious violations unresolved for more than two decades.
The Gorge Commissioners have now formally agreed with Friends on these issues and decided that Zimmerly cannot seek land use approval for mining activities on the property without also seeking approval for the unpermitted drainage system.
In numerous places on the Zimmerly property, groundwater discharges to the surface through natural seeps and springs. Despite knowing about these seeps and springs for decades, Zimmerly has never disclosed whether they generate any water resources—such as wetlands, ponds, or streams—that must be protected under the National Scenic Area rules. In their appeal decision, the Gorge Commissioners agreed with Friends that any land use application for mining on the Zimmerly property will need to definitively resolve whether the property contains any such water resources.
Finally, in April 2025, the Clark County Council dashed Zimmerly’s hopes of obtaining a surface mining overlay zoning designation across all of Zimmerly’s property—including the proposed mining haul road—by voting to exclude all such site-specific requests for new mining designations from the County’s environmental review of its Comprehensive Plan in 2025.
Unfortunately, new violations on the property, including newly constructed roads and the disposal of unwanted fill material on the property, have continued even after the mining activities stopped. Those new violations are currently under investigation by Clark County and Gorge Commission staff. In addition, a new land use pre-application submitted by Howsley is pending before Clark County.
With the help of our members and supporters, Friends has prevailed against Zimmerly 20 out of 20 times in various court cases, appeals, contested motions, and government decisions since 2023. For the sake of the Gorge and its sensitive and unique resources, may this string of victories continue unbroken long into the future.
