Feud over junkyard leaves owner caught in the middle

WAPATO -- Quintin Douglas just wants to wreck cars; he never meant to get caught up in this fight over relocating his business.

His family has operated Douglas Auto Wrecking on an island in the Yakima River for more than 50 years, but the federal Bureau of Land Management wanted Douglas to move. So did the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Yakama Nation and Yakima County. Experts from those agencies pointed to contamination risks and the increased flood potential caused by having an auto wrecking operation in the middle of a river.

So Douglas, who was raised on the junkyard property and lives there today, figured he was being helpful when, in 2003, he volunteered for a government-funded relocation.

Since then, the relocation deal brokered by Yakima County has spurred a political and legal maelstrom with Douglas caught in the middle. Opponents of the move have sued him and the county and started a Web site saying among other things that the Douglas family ran the business for 50 years without paying a penny in property taxes.

Douglas doesn't deny that allegation, but it's more complicated than that. The matter is marked by a decades-long dispute involving Douglas, the federal Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Yakama Nation. All of the agencies want the wrecking yard off the island. Plus, the tribe and the BLM had argued for years that the land itself rightfully belonged to the tribe.

So Douglas agreed to move, making a deal with the county that would cover his relocation costs and buy a new site for Douglas Auto Wrecking. In time, the river would swallow up the 19-acre parcel of land and everyone would be happy.

"I don't want to fight anybody," Douglas says in the trailer office on his dusty island. "But I don't want to quit what I'm doing. This is what I'm good at."

Trouble arose with the county's choice of a relocation site at the convergence of the Yakima Valley Highway and Donald-Wapato Road. That land, situated at the beginning of Lower Valley wine country along one of the area's biggest tourism routes, just isn't suitable for such a business, opponents say. They began looking for ways to squelch the deal, which Douglas and the county finalized last year.

In April, using the name Citizens Protecting Resources, the opponents filed suit to stop the project. The lawsuit says the county's deal, which will pay Douglas up to $425,000 to move his business, constitutes illegal gifting of public funds.

The suit also tallies up other costs associated with the move and puts the total tab at about $800,000 -- compared with the maximum of about $650,000 county officials cite -- including the land purchase for the new site. What isn't mentioned in the lawsuit, but is featured on the group's Web site, citizensprotecting resources.org, is a claim that Douglas' family operated the business for 50 years without paying property taxes on the land until the county started charging them in 2006.

The county, they say, "created" the taxing parcel to facilitate the relocation. Yakima County Assessor Dave Cook strongly denied that, brushing aside what he considered implications of collusion between his office and the county commissioners, who brokered the relocation deal. Taxing parcel 191102-41008, as the island property is officially labeled, was first created in 2006 because that's when the county stopped considering the property tribal trust land, Cook said.

Craig Fisher, a vocal relocation opponent whose brother owns the old Grange hall overlooking the new site, however, believes the timing was suspicious.

"That is a real coincidence it happened in time for this project to be completed," he said.

Douglas and Cook acknowledge that no taxes were levied on the parcel, but they balk at the implication that the county's 2006 decision to start taxing the property had anything to do with the business relocation.

The Douglas family moved its auto wrecking business to the 19-acre island in the Yakima River back in the early 1950s when the land's owners, the McDonald family, stopped growing cottonwood there.

The McDonalds had used the wood to dry hops from the family farm, but by the 1950s coal becoming cheaper to use than wood. So they let Douglas' father, Robert, use the land for $100 a year. In 2001, Paul and Amy McDonald officially signed over the land to Douglas with a quit-claim deed.

The reason Douglas -- and the McDonalds before him -- never paid property taxes on the 19-acre parcel is that the county never asked them to.

In fact, Douglas says he went to the county assessor's office and asked to be taxed only to be told the land was in dispute.

While Cook can't vouch for that claim, he said that had Douglas asked to pay taxes the assessor's office indeed would have sent him away, thinking it had no jurisdiction over his property. It's not uncommon for someone to ask to be assessed property taxes as a way to legitimize their claim on a property, Cook said.

The river is the eastern boundary of the Yakama Reservation based on the 1855 Treaty between the Yakama Nation and the federal government. And the island on which the wrecking yard sits once was part of that "trust" land. At some point, before the Douglas or McDonald families claimed it, the land was cut off by a second channel of the river that created an island.

Under federal law, land severed by a river remains the property of the previous landowner if the severance is caused by a single event such as a flood or natural disaster. If it is caused by erosion or the natural meandering of the river over time, it would go to the landowner on the other side of the river.

The BLM, which is charged with overseeing the agreement between the United States and the Yakamas, has not been able to prove conclusively that the island belongs to the Nation. This despite several attempts over the years, including one in 1994 in which the federal agency sent Douglas a letter ordering him off the property.

Acey Oberly, then the superintendent of the BIA's Yakama Agency, addressed the dispute in a 2004 letter to the county supporting the business relocation. Oberly wrote that he supported the relocation "from both an environmental and trust asset protection perspective."

"The present junk yard location lends itself to environmental risks that neither the BIA nor the Yakama Nation are willing to accept," the letter says.

It also says, "Relinquishing all claimed interests on the part of Mr. Douglas will help to resolve, in a more amicable manner, his ownership issues which are currently before the Bureau of Land Management Board of Land Appeals."

While the dispute plodded on, with claims and counterclaims, the county Assessor's Office stayed on the sidelines. Lacking evidence of its own jurisdiction, the county categorized the land as trust land on the Yakama Reservation.

"We didn't get notification until tax year 2006 that it wasn't," Cook said.

That notification came in the form of an August 2005 decision from the U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Hearings and Appeals in Arlington, Va. The document, which reversed a previous decision by the Bureau of Land Management, essentially states that although the property may well be Yakama Nation trust land, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had failed to prove so conclusively.

While that decision does not end the dispute, it was enough for Cook to take action.

"If it's not trust land, then I've got to do something with it," he said.

Yakama tribal leaders did not return phone calls seeking comment on the Douglas Wrecking yard issue.

The county assessor taxed Douglas $374 for 2006, $362 for 2007 and $384 for 2008. He may also have legal authority to seek taxes for the three previous years, but he needs to seek a legal opinion before doing so. Of course, Cook noted, if the dispute over the land's ownership ever ended up being settled in the Yakamas' favor, Douglas could potentially have cause for action against the county for charging him taxes without jurisdiction.

Asked what the total might have been for all the years Douglas Auto Wrecking was on the land before that, Cook said such a calculation would be an "effort in futility."

"That's unfair," he said. "It was part of the Yakama Nation, so there was no tax on it."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 577-7693, or at pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

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