Land owner in fight for trees in the way of Silverton Road bridge replacement

When Carey Vanderbeck was a child, he loved family visits to his uncle Bob’s 8-acre farm along Silverton Road in rural Marion County where he and his sisters would climb the trees planted decades earlier and play in the wide-open pastures.

When he moved to the property between Salem and Silverton as an adult in 1981, he reconnected with his childhood, started his business, Vanderbeck Race Cars, and made a life.

The trees serve a different purpose for Venderbeck now: They block noise from busy Silverton Road. 

As part of a planned reconstruction of the bridge on Silverton Road over the Little Pudding River, Marion County is proposing to acquire a slice of Vanderbeck’s property and knock down some of those trees.

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They might seem like a few trees to some, but they mean more to Vanderbeck.

He says he’s been fighting the right-of-way acquisition, but his proposals for replacing the trees have been rejected.

“The bottom line, I just want the trees to go back in there,” Vanderbeck said. “I don’t want to get rich off of it. I don’t want to better myself. I just want trees put back in that buffer. That’s it. How hard can that be?”

Silverton Road to be closed for six months

The bridge over the Little Pudding River on the main road between Salem and Silverton was built in 1922 and expanded to its current width in 1947.

It’s been a weak point for a long time: the Oregon Department of Transportation has placed a weight limit of 20 tons for vehicles crossing the bridge due to the design and age.

“Given the age, both bridges were originally designed for truck loads significantly smaller than modern trucks,” Marion County Public Works Director Brian Nicholas said. “The existing bridge has fairly large cracks in the main load-carrying girders.”

Marion County batted around a few options for replacing the bridge over the past few years, including one that would have replaced it in sections and kept the road open during construction, but it would have cost approximately $1.5 million more and taken much longer.

The version Marion County has chosen will require Silverton Road to be closed between May 2020 and November 2020, if everything goes as planned, to replace the entire bridge all at once at an estimated cost of $6.4 million.

Marion County will contribute 10 percent with the majority of funds coming from the Federal Highway Bridge Program through the ODOT Local Bridge Program.

The plans call for widening the bridge to accommodate a center turn lane to extend to the east to 64th Place, a frequent site of traffic accidents, and lengthening the bridge to 133 feet from 105 feet.

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Nicholas points out there have been major accidents at two of the 10 driveways in the past two months.

“I think it’s important to point out that everyone that has a driveway within the project limits will end up with a driveway that is significantly safer than it is today because the road shoulders will be widened to a standard shoulder width of six feet, which dramatically improves line-of-sight so drivers on the road and drivers in their driveways can see each other much better,” Nicholas said.

With Silverton Road closed, traffic will be detoured around along Hazelgreen Road to the north and Sunnyview Road to the south with detours off Cordon Road, and temporary signals will be installed to ease congestion.

But the right-of-way process has to be completed first.

Building an elite hot rod business

If you’ve been to a drag race at Woodburn Dragstrip or a high-end hot rod car show around Salem in the past few decades, chances are you’ve seen one of Vanderbeck’s creations.

In 1979, Vanderbeck worked for a gravel dredge company and had a 1955 Chevrolet he wanted a roll cage installed in. He took it to a builder in Molalla, paid $900 and was upset with the results.

“It was a mess,” he said.

Vanderbeck purchased equipment like a wire welder and built other equipment like a tubing bender, tore the roll cage out of the Chevrolet and built his own.

A friend saw what he had done and asked if he would build a roll cage for him.

Fabricating race cars was a side business when he moved into the Silverton Road property that was in his family since the 1950s in 1981, and over the years he converted buildings on the property for fabrication.

In 1988, he turned Vanderbeck Race Cars into his full-time job and car-by-car built it over the years into one of the premier automotive fabrication businesses in the Willamette Valley.

He bought the property from his father, Wilbur, in 2000.

Most of Vanderbeck’s land is used for farming. He leases that out and earns a few hundred dollars a year.

“But with that, that puts me into farm deferral on taxes,” he said.

Marion County right of way

To expand the bridge over the Little Pudding River, Marion County must acquire land on both sides of the road from landowners around the project.

“There are 10 properties where the County is asking to purchase either a temporary construction easement and/or permanent right-of-way easement,” Nicholas said.

“We’ve tried to design the project to minimize the extent of necessary easements while still meeting minimum highway design standards.”

As the project is being done with federal funds, the county must comply with the Uniform Act and the ODOT Right-of-Way Manual and has hired consultants to ensure it does that.

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Those manuals provide a formula for how much landowners are paid; for the 1,244 square feet of Vanderbeck’s property the county needs to acquire along the Silverton Road border, Vanderbeck was given a valuation of $900.

There are six trees on his property that would be cut down, according to the proposals he received, and those trees serve to block noise coming from the heavy traffic along Silverton Road.

Vanderbeck wants those 40-foot-tall trees replaced with 20-foot-tall trees along his new property line.

That, he said, would require a root block to keep those from growing into his septic system.

The proposal he came up with would cost $10,400 – including $4,800 for eight new 20-foot trees – though he has offered to pay the $2,500 out of pocket for the root barrier. 

But when he brought that proposal to the county’s consultants, they rejected it.

For the bridge project to remain on schedule, so it can put the construction project out for bid in February, the right-of-way acquisition must be completed by the end of the year.

“We anticipate having all of the right-of-way acquisitions completed by the end of this year,” Nicholas said. “If we can achieve this objective then the project can go to bid as scheduled.”

Nicholas said the county has options to address the concerns of landowners including Vanderbeck.

“When an existing improvement serves a certain function, such as providing a visual screen between the road and a home, we usually offer to install a new feature that restores that function, like a fence, in addition to compensating the property owner for the value of the easement,” Nicholas said.

“Once the project is complete, we don't want anyone to be dissatisfied with the results, including folks that live on the road.”

But Vanderbeck describes his situation as being at a standstill.

“We could make this go away really easy,” Vanderbeck said. “Put in writing that you’ll put trees back in there.”

bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com or Twitter.com/bpoehler