UMATILLA COUNTY — As the Columbia Development Authority continues to wait on the final approval needed for the Army to transfer the former Umatilla Chemical Depot to local control, CDA director Greg Smith worries about what might slow the transfer down.

He told the board during their June 4 meeting that many of the key players with the U.S. Army and Oregon Military Department, who have been working with the CDA, are retiring soon or have recently retired, replaced by new people who aren’t familiar with the years of work already done on the transfer agreement.

“I want to share that’s a real vulnerability for the CDA,” he said.

The former Army depot, which closed in 2012, comprises about 17,000 acres in Umatilla and Morrow counties along Interstate 84. About 7,500 acres have already been turned over to the Oregon Military Department for a National Guard training facility. The Army is working to turn over control of the rest of the property to the CDA, which is a partnership between five local governments, for development of a wildlife refuge and approximately 3,965 acres of industrial and commercial land.

So far, the transfer deal has hit seven years’ worth of speed bumps, from disagreements about water rights to drawn-out negotiations on preserving cultural sites, such as the Oregon Trail ruts that run through the property.

The agreement over cultural sites, known as a programmatic agreement, is one of the last pieces of the puzzle. Now that the CDA has come to an agreement with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Smith said the document needs to be approved by the federal Office of General Counsel.

“I’m nervous, because what I’m hearing from folks in D.C. is that the OCG is significantly backlogged, so we need to figure out how to make this a priority,” Smith said.

He said companies continue to express interest in industrial land on the depot, as soon as the CDA has the authority to lease or sell the property. The CDA’s infrastructure committee has been meeting with Anderson Perry & Associates, Umatilla Electric Cooperative, Cascade Natural Gas, railroad consultants and other companies as they create a plan for extending needed infrastructure to those sites.

The CDA didn’t have much business to conduct during its meeting, but they did approve Smith to work with Umatilla County Emergency Manager Tom Roberts on an agreement for the county’s emergency management department to use some equipment the CDA had been left. Roberts also thanked the CDA for allowing his department to use a couple of the depot’s concrete igloos, built to store munitions, for storage.