HERMISTON — Umatilla County is pushing forward with legal action against the Columbia Development Authority for its vote in March to keep the county from having certain property.

The CDA Board went into executive session during its June 25 meeting for just under an hour to discuss real estate. Umatilla County Commissioner John Shafer said he was not allowed to attend due to the possibility of the county suing the CDA Board.

“I understand the reasoning behind it,” Shafer said of being excluded from the executive session, which is allowed under Oregon’s public meetings law for certain topics, including real estate negotiations. “If the CDA is going to be in a lawsuit against any entity, they don’t want that other entity to be hearing the conversation.”

And legal action is coming.

Shafer said on June 26 that he called Best Best & Krieger LLP, the Bend law firm the county retained in this matter, to report the stalled progress.

“I told them to move forward with legal action to stop all transactions moving forward,” Shafer said.

Shafer said Umatilla County will continue not contributing to CDA’s bills.

“The two ports right now are the ones responsible for paying the bills of the entity,” he said. “There was some discussion with a little bit of confusion, but it was clarified that the five members are still five partners. We just have two partners paying the bills right now.”

The CDA partners are Umatilla and Morrow counties, the ports of Umatilla and Morrow and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The representatives for the ports and Morrow County at the CDA meeting in March voted to take control of industrial properties of the former Umatilla Army Chemical Depot lands, and Shafer and the CTUIR representative, J.D. Tovey, now the interim executive director of the tribes, voted against.

Shafer said that vote was illegal and the CDA should rescind it.

“I do know that when they came out of executive session, I was really hoping they would vote to rescind the motion,” Shafer said. “That never happened.”

Tovey was not excluded from the executive session as CTUIR has not laid any groundwork indicating a potential lawsuit, as has Umatilla County.

Shafer repeated his earlier recollections that CDA went through a similar process four years ago, but at that time the CDA did rescind a disenfranchising vote.

“But now they’re not going to come to the same conclusion,” he said. “I’ve said many times, I agree with Kim Puzey, when he said four years ago, ‘We need to do what’s best for this region, rescind the vote.’ He was right then and those words are as right today as they were four years ago. Absolutely.”

Puzey is the general manager of the Port of Umatilla and chair of the CDA Board and has declined to reconsider the March 26 vote.

Shafer said the board did agree to continue its funding for some of the operational costs from the U.S. Army for another year. He said that funding diminishes each year by a set formula.

The board members did not agree to sell a 100-acre plot of land to support operational and some development costs. Shafer said the board has yet to show him a map where the plot of land is on the property.

“My impression from the meeting is that they would send it out,” he said. “So I’m hoping to see that relatively soon.”