State Board Rejects Plum Creek Resort Timber Company Not Ready To Give Up On Roslyn Plans

A logging company won’t drop its plans to build a destination resort near the tourist town of Roslyn, where the television show “Northern Exposure” is filmed, despite a hearing board’s ruling against it.

Plum Creek spokesman Bob Jirsa said the company was disappointed with the ruling by the Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board.

The board ruled Kittitas County commissioners made a mistake by not classifying vast tracts of forest land near Cle Elum and Roslyn as commercial forest land under the Growth Management Act. Commercial forest land is restricted to logging.

Kittitas County now faces state funding sanctions for not complying with the growth-management law, said board member Judy Wall. The county can appeal the ruling to Superior Court.

Jirsa said Plum Creek is not yet ready to give up its proposed master plan resort with up to 5,000 housing units and an 18-hole golf course.

Kittitas County Planning Director Debbie Randall said Plum Creek has asked the county to include a landuse designation for resorts in its final growth-management plan.

“The county can still approve the resort even if the land is designated, but it might be harder to do so,” Randall said.

RIDGE, a Roslyn-based environmentalist group, said its members would continue to fight any attempts to build the resort.

“Plum Creek will have to take its monster planned resort somewhere else, or maybe give up speculative development and return to the timber industry,” RIDGE spokeswoman Ellie Belew said Tuesday.

The planned resort would be built on a 7,500-acre site, which has been logged periodically over the past century, is wedged between Roslyn, Cle Elum, Interstate 90 and Lake Cle Elum, and is bisected by the Cle Elum River.

Plum Creek officials have said the land is no longer manageable because of population pressures.

Opponents say the resort would destroy the small-town charm of Roslyn and provide only low-wage service jobs for the locals.

Commissioner Mary Seubert said she received the board’s nine-page ruling late Monday and had not read it completely. The county will work to avoid funding sanctions, she said.

“I’m disappointed and surprised by this ruling,” Seubert said.