State of Oregon lowers boom, again, on onetime Forbes 400 tycoon

In addition to a host of other legal challenges, Dr. Robert Pamplin Jr. now faces a demand from the Oregon Department of State Lands to pay $13.9 million for his neglect of one of Oregon’s iconic rivers.

The state notified Pamplin of that hefty tab in an 18-page letter on Feb. 19. It described a failure to make progress on the terms of a 2023 agreement Pamplin signed to mitigate damage from decades of mining the bottom of the Willamette River in the center of Portland.

“The Department has determined that you are out of compliance,” said the Feb. 19 letter from Oregon Department of State Lands Director Kaitlin Lovell obtained by Oregon Journalism Project. “The enclosed proposed/final Order serves as notice that the Department plans to assess a civil penalty and require corrective action.”

Once known for his place on the Forbes list of America’s 400 wealthiest citizens and philanthropic giving that put his family name on numerous buildings and institutions, Pamplin, 84, faces financial hardship in his golden years.

His giant ranch in Jefferson and Wasco counties is up for sale for $55 million. Parts of his Yamhill County agricultural properties, including wineries and prime farmland, are also on the block. Both are part of a forced liquidation of assets the U.S. Department of Labor ordered at the end of 2024 after a series of stories by this reporter.

Among other penalties the Department of Labor decreed — after determining Pamplin had systematically looted his company’s pension fund — was that he had to unwind the sale of Ross Island to that fund.

Ross Island Sand & Gravel, one of Pamplin’s companies, mined the Ross Island lagoon in the middle of Portland for sand and rock from 1926 to 2001. After the company ceased mining, it struck a 2002 agreement with the Oregon Department of State Lands, which regulates the state’s navigable waterways, to refill excavations more than 100 feet deep and to restore the upland portions of the island, where the company processed the materials it mined.

But Pamplin, CEO of the R.B. Pamplin Corp., whose holdings have also included at various times 24 Oregon newspapers, such as the Portland Tribune (since sold); Mt. Vernon Mills, a string of textile plants in the American South; Columbia Empire Farms in the Willamette Valley; Pamplin Vineyards LLC; Christian broadcasting and retail businesses; six radio stations; and much of the town of Shaniko in Wasco County, fell on hard times over the past decade.

Records show that in 2019, Pamplin began systematically exchanging unused or unwanted industrial properties for cash from the R.B. Pamplin Corp pension fund, which he also controlled.

“The properties were difficult to sell, often overvalued and frequently carried significant liabilities,” the Department of Labor said last year when it announced sanctions against Pamplin.

Among the properties Pamplin sold to the pension fund at what the feds determined to be highly inflated prices: a defunct Ross Island Sand & Gravel concrete plant on the east bank of the Willamette River in Portland, and Ross Island itself.

The feds found those two transactions so egregiously unfair to pensioners that they forced Ross Island Sand & Gravel to take them back and refund the sales prices ($15.4 million collectively) to the pension fund. (A court-appointed trustee is in the process of liquidating various Pamplin assets to make the pension fund whole.)

Before the feds swooped in, Pamplin and Ross Island were already in trouble with the Department of State Lands for failing to comply with the 2002 agreement to repair the damage done by decades of mining.

In 2023, the Department of State Lands and Ross Island agreed to a revised reclamation plan that reduced the amount of clean soil the company would need to bring in to fill the gaping hole in the river bottom, and included a schedule calling for completion of the reclamation by 2033.

But Ross Island quickly fell afoul of the new agreement. In 2024, the state announced its intention to fine the company $2.9 million for noncompliance. Pamplin appealed that penalty, but after a series of delays, the state withdrew its proposed order. The Department of State Lands’ penalty schedule charges violators for each day of noncompliance, which is what caused the initial proposed penalty of $2.9 million to balloon to the current $13.9 million.

Neither Ross Island nor the company’s attorney responded to a request for comment.

Mike Houck, director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute, recalls being part of the negotiations for refilling Ross Island’s excavations in 1979. Houck has long advocated for reclamation of the island, which has become a haven for river squatters and a source of toxic summer algal blooms in recent years.

“Here we are 47 years later,” Houck says. “I’m pleased to see the state is getting serious about enforcement — that amount of money [$13.9 million] ought to cause some action.”