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By SAM LOWRY
For the Hood River News
December 27, 2006
Publicity surrounding thousands of
last-minute Measure 37 claims, and political moves by the governor and
others, make it likely that the coming legislature will revisit the
2004 property-rights law. And so the land use debate could shift once
again.
But the Oregon Task Force on Land Use Planning is not too concerned.
“The (2007) legislature might be … polarized, but I doubt that’ll
change anything we do,” said Portland attorney Jill Gelineau, a task
force member.
The group’s three-year review of the entire statewide program, known
as the Big Look, will continue before, during and after the 2007
session, preparing recommendations to the 2009 legislature.
Most agree it is overdue. No full review of the statewide program,
highly controversial after 37 years, has ever occurred despite
frequent calls for one. Senate Bill (SB) 82 authorized the Big Look in
the final days of the 2005 session.
The task force’s 10 members have met near-monthly since March, in all
corners of the state; they’ve taken testimony from people
knowledgeable in every realm of planning, received hundreds of letters
and other citizen input, engaged with groups of various stripes, and
toured local areas, all to educate themselves about planning’s
complexities.
So far, they have remained resolutely neutral and independent.
“None of us wants to be politicized,” said David Bragdon, president of
the Metro regional council in Portland and a task force member. “We
can resist it.”
“I have yet to really see a personal agenda,” observed Pendleton
rancher Mike Thorne, who chairs the task force. “That is very
gratifying.”
Up to its nose in planning arcana, the Big Look task force is
garnering acceptance and praise, its share of concern and critique,
and universal high hopes for land use peace and fresh direction.
COMPLEXITY
If resolution of the Measure 37 furor is a key to the state’s land use
future, so, too, are the task force’s quiet, deliberative
conversations.
John Pinkstaff, a property attorney, and Ron Eber, farm and forest
specialist for the state Department of Land Conservation and
Development, sat side by side at a table in a small room at Gresham
City Hall last month.
“I was a very idealistic, liberal guy,” said Pinkstaff. “I thought
land use (law) was the most wonderful thing… then I went out to try to
apply it.”
The pair, both 30-year veterans of Oregon planning, had been invited
by Gelineau, Albany City Manager Wes Hare, and Cameron Krauss of the
Swanson Timber Group, who comprise the Big Look’s “Benefits and
Burdens” work group, to speak about fairness and “safety valves” in
the statewide program.
“The safety valves aren’t spraying enough opportunity for landowners,”
Pinkstaff said.
Eber countered with data showing 800,000 acres of rural residential
land statewide — more than all the cities’ urban growth boundaries
combined — and 7,858 new dwellings allowed in farm zones statewide
since 1994.
“They are just really, really hard to get,” Pinkstaff insisted.
Rural residential development, the issue most affected by Measure 37,
is the task force’s highest-profile concern, but it is only one of
many. In July the group formed six work groups to examine different
sets of complex, interrelated questions. Each member participates on
two work groups.
“The challenge will be to see if six … different views (become) part
of a larger whole,” said Rob Zako of 1000 Friends of Oregon, the
planning watchdog group, who is a regular Big Look observer.
Testimony going on simultaneously next door highlighted his point. The
Growth Management work group, chaired by The Dalles orchardist Ken
Bailey, and the Role of State and Local Government work group, chaired
by Lake Oswego Mayor Judie Hammerstad, were hearing from two of
Bragdon’s Metro colleagues, councilors Rod Park and Rex Burkholder.
“The economy does not recognize boundaries,” Park told them; the two
were espousing MPOs — Metropolitan Planning Organizations — as a way
to ensure coordination of growth. Task force members had heard about
“Regional Problem Solving” during their October meeting in Medford;
they knew regional planning models could be successful, or slow, or
divisive. Oregon has six MPOs, but coordination problems linger.
“The current governance (structure) does not take into account the
phenomena that we are seeing,” Park continued. Too often, various
jurisdictions plan separately and don’t — or can’t or won’t — work
together. Job growth in the metro region has outpaced housing growth,
and people seeking less expensive housing have moved to neighboring
towns, the pair testified. Commutes have risen 40 percent in 10 years;
state transportation planners must respond.
Their decisions further affect patterns of choice.
It is happening quickly, and in multiple areas, Burkholder said. “Bend
is scary … they expect to have 500,000 population in the Bend-Redmond
area within the next 20 years.” (Bend is home to task force member
Gretchen Palmer, a developer.)
The Metro leaders were arguing for true planning; for economic
development and recognition of personal choice, but against
randomness.
“How can you protect (an) investment if you cannot protect the land
use around it?” Park asked.
Two conversations, two rooms; two very different but related slices
through the land-use pie.
Multiply these, to six, hour-long conversations per month for three
years, and you’ll grasp the Big Look’s vastness. The most common
comment about the task force’s work? “What a huge job; glad it’s not
me!”
SETTING NEW GOALS
“Creating great urban places was not part of the 1973 program,”
Bragdon said in welcoming fellow task-force members to Gresham and
introducing a presentation on Metro’s 2040 plan. “We feel it should
be.”
He’d put his finger on one of several emphases many feel are sorely
missing from the land-use program. Nineteen statewide planning goals,
drafted in the 1970s, serve as its charter; but times have changed,
and the task force is very aware of it.
Keith Cubic, Douglas County planning director and an articulate critic
of the Big Look, has mentioned three other gaps: infrastructure, rural
growth management, and economic development — all necessary to
“keeping something wonderful,” he says: a prosperous, planned Oregon.
The infrastructure question loomed large in Gresham as discussion
turned to Pleasant Valley and Damascus, an area and a new city,
respectively, to the southeast of Portland, slated to urbanize but
scarcely able to do so without funding mechanisms for basic
improvements.
Eber dramatically encapsulated the second gap: “There are many of us
who thought long ago that there needed to be a Goal 20, for rural
development,” he said. (“That’s an interesting, big-picture comment,”
Gelineau exclaimed.)
The third gap, economic development, looms as large as any issue the
task force faces.
Steve Clark, task force member and president of the Portland Tribune
newspaper, heads the work group on the Economy; task force members
Bailey, Krauss, and Nikki Whitty, a Coos County Commissioner, are on
it as well.
As does each task force member, Clark brings special expertise: As a
representative of the Oregon Business Plan, he was a “tireless
supporter” of SB82 passage, according to DLCD director Lane Shetterly.
“Agriculture, forestry, manufacturing, fishing … the task force has a
responsibility to push all of them,” Clark said. “And Oregon is a
recreation and a retirement state …”
Insisting on investment, Clark believes, will be the key. “We have to
invest, “he said. “It takes more than just policies and programs …
this is not an intellectual exercise.”
TRADEOFFS
In Gresham, the Economy work group got a dose of reality from Bruce
Laird, the state’s chief business recruiter.
To truly compete in the global economy, Laird said, will take more and
better industrial sites, and much more speed in issuing permits. So,
where are the best sites?
“Gosh, how many people can I offend?” Laird quipped as he suggested
agricultural land, south of Wilsonville.
It is all about tradeoffs, and the task force has made that crystal
clear.
When they set out next year to seek widespread public input, they plan
to pose questions in terms of tradeoffs. What’s important? What’ll you
sacrifice to get it?
Oregon’s growing up.
*****
Sam Lowry is a Portland freelance writer and was a reporter with The
Goldendale Sentinel in 2003-04. He has written numerous articles for
the Hood River News, including a short history of Oregon land use law
in the Nov. 11 edition. Lowry, who worked as a planner for Yamhill
County, attended every Big Look meeting in 2006. He is writing a book
about Oregon land use history. |
