Sustainability

This should be a no-brainer: preserving a uniquely special place in Oregon — the Metolius River Basin recreation area — that is threatened by two large destination resorts.

But brains are in short supply among some who approve of this potential travesty.

As noted in my 2007 "Save the Metolius from destination resorts," Jefferson County commissioner Bill Bellamy came up with this astoundingly poor reason for allowing about 3,000 homes and a couple of golf courses to be built near the Metolius:

This shows the mentality that led Jefferson County to change its zoning of the area to allow the resorts, even though the vast majority of people who live in the Camp Sherman area were opposed.

In the 2007 legislative session a Metolius-saving bill, Senate Bill 30, died after Gov. Kulongoski said that he wanted to let the land use planning process go ahead before intervening.

I noted that even horses were for SB 30, yet opponents of the resorts didn't get a fair shake at the hearing that I attended on the bill.

Now its 2009 and the Governor is doing the right thing, even though an Oregonian editorial failed to realize this. Kulongoski isn't playing "red light, green light" with the would-be developers, because he said back in 2007 that if state agencies told him that current laws can't protect the Metolius Basin, something needed to be done.

Bob Stacey, 1000 Friends of Oregon executive director, cleared up the editorial board's confusion in his own follow-up opinion piece, "Protecting the Metolius."

It is true that during the 2007 session Gov. Ted Kulongoski
signaled that he would not — at that time — support proposed
legislation that offered special protection for the Metolius.

But The Oregonian suggests that "the developers naturally took the
governor's stand as a sign he would allow them to pursue their resorts
under existing land-use law."

That reasoning ignores the fact that on June 22, 2007, the governor
instructed state agencies to report back to him on whether existing
state law would be sufficient to protect the Metolius Basin. What the
governor heard back was that existing laws would not fully protect the critical natural resources of the Metolius Basin from harmful effects of resort development.

As a result of these reviews, the governor concluded that additional
protection for the Metolius is warranted. We agree. We find it odd to
suggest that the governor should not consider every tool in the toolkit
to protect this unique treasure for all Oregonians. We applaud his
leadership.

So now Kulongoski has asked the Department of Land Conservation and Development to consider whether the Metolius River Basin should be designated an "Area of Critical State Concern."

Public hearings have been scheduled next week in Sisters and Madras. Comments on the proposal also can be emailed. If you're a lover of the Metolius, as my wife and I are, let DLCD know that you don't want this beautiful area to be ruined by giant destination resorts.

If the Area of Critical State Concern process doesn't work out, the Governor has a backup plan: legislation that would stop the resorts. Central Oregon Landwatch and others also have succeeded in getting the Oregon Supreme Court to accept an appeal of the Jefferson County rezoning.

So one way or another, I'm hopeful that the Metolius will be protected.

It'd be a shame to allow the greed of a few county commissioners for more property tax revenues to trash an area that has been officially designated "wild and scenic."

Adding 3,000 homes in and near the Metolius Basin, where only a few hundred people live now, doesn't sound like a good way to preserve a wild and scenic river.

(Click below for an email message I got from Central Oregon Landwatch, describing the upcoming hearings and the need for people to comment on the Area of Critical State Concern plan.)

Yesterday I was pleased to be one of about three dozen people who roundly said, "No way!" to the Big Look task force's attempt to weaken Oregon's highly successful land use planning system.

As noted previously by someone I highly respect (namely, me), the task force spent a lot of time, money, and energy coming up with astoundingly wrong-headed proposed legislation for the 2009 session.

Somehow the Big Look managed to simultaneously conclude that: (1) Oregon's current land use laws are doing a great job protecting farm and forest land, and (2) the laws need to be changed so less farm and forest land is protected.

Huh?

This was the entirely justified reaction of virtually every person who took the opportunity to testify (for two minutes, more or less) before the House Land Use Committee public hearing on HB 2229.

[Update: The committee has scheduled two additional public hearings on HB 2229, both on Tuesday, February 10. More info. about the hearings is here.]

I was at the hearing for 80 minutes. During that time I can recall only two people speaking in favor of the bill. More than thirty trashed it in various degrees.

Some parts of the proposed legislation were viewed as acceptable, or even desirable. But sections 5-8 received an almost unanimous thumbs-down from a wide range of groups and individuals.

Including me. Here's the testimony that I submitted on behalf of our neighborhood's Keep Our Water Safe committee.
Download HB 2229 testimony PDF

I focused, as did quite a few others, on how it'd be a really bad idea to allow counties the option of redefining farm and forest land so subdivisions could sprout instead of crops and trees.

Politicians (county commissioners) would be lobbied by aspiring real estate developers to rezone their farm or forest properties. The last thing Oregon needs is increased politicization of our land use system. Yet the Big Look task force has called for just that.

There were quite a few moving moments at the hearing.

Some people spoke of how their relatives had come on wagon trains over the Oregon trail to settle here. They are still farming the ancestral land, and are deeply concerned about dismantling Oregon agriculture so urban sprawl can Californiaize our beautiful landscape.

Along that line, another person said that he'd escaped the Santa Clara valley many years ago (as did I, having gone to college at San Jose State before moving to Portland for graduate work). He didn't want to see Oregon become what he'd fled from.

I enjoyed the remarks of a man from southern Oregon, which were along the lines of:

"Coos and Curry counties are some of the last holdouts of the pioneer spirit. People there don't like to be told what to do. County commissioners don't appreciate directives coming from Washington, D.C. Nor from Salem. That's why HB 2229 shouldn't be passed — the legislature can't allow these guys to screw up the south coast."

Today the Salem Statesman Journal ran a story about the hearing. I left a comment on the SJ web site critiquing reporter Peter Wong's coverage. He fell prey to the "fair and balanced" B.S., where one quote from an opponent has to be balanced by one quote from a supporter, even though over 90% of the testimony at the hearing was against HB 2229.

[Update: got an email today with info. about Henry Pir, the guy quoted in the SJ story who claims that he isn't able to replace a house that burned down. I was told:

He states that he "just wants to rebuild a house that burned". What B.S.
What he forgets to mention is that:
1) It burned sometime around 1990.
2) That was two owners ago.
The county turned him down twice and then, wouldn't you know it, the commissioners gave him the OK. This was appealed to LUBA by neighbors and Pir threw in the towel early apparently knowing of certain failure.

Such is largely confirmed by minutes of a Marion County Board of Commissioners meeting.
Download 050708BoardSessionMinutes 

So this actually shows that the land use system is operating fairly, but that local elected officials often try to grant certain favored people a dispensation from rules that should apply to everybody — which is precisely why HB 2229 is such a bad idea.]

Here's an excerpt from my testimony, most of which I read to the committee before getting the "your two minutes are up" signal.

It’s apparent that Oregon’s Big Look Task Force shouldn’t have much attention paid to its recommendations in the 2009 legislative session.

This group was supposed to step back and take, well, a big look at Oregon’s land use system.

The notion was that Oregonians in Action and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the yin and yang of land use advocacy groups, would find common ground in reasonable changes that balanced individual property rights and communal environmental protection.

Didn’t happen. Today’s Salem Statesman Journal had a front page story on the Big Look recommendations, "Plan boosts local input on land use." 1000 Friends of Oregon doesn’t like that notion. Neither do I.

You can read 1000 Friends’ reasons here. They make good sense.

First and most important, where’s the problem local control is supposed to solve? The Task Force has come up with a solution in search of a problem.

As the Oregon League of Conservation Voters says:

A widely-spread misconception repeated in today’s Oregonian is that somehow our statewide land use system, which has state standards that guide local plans, is "one size fits all."

Our laws have different requirements for different types of farmland and forestland, different requirements for lands in the Willamette Valley and outside of it, different requirements for different size cities, and so forth. Five our 19 land use goals only apply to certain areas of the state.

The Oregonian article says that 1000 Friends of Oregon called the local control proposal "a very bad idea." So much for bringing opposing groups together. The Big Look Task Force has been casting its gaze mainly in one direction: more development on irreplaceable farm and forest lands.

Which its very own survey found is opposed by a clear majority of Oregonians. When asked, "Would you support using public money to permanently protect farm and forest lands from urban development?" almost twice as many (48%) said Yes rather than No (27%).

Those who attended Big Look Task Force meetings or filled out an online survey were even more enthusiastic about protecting resource lands: 60% to 29%.

Yet somehow the Task Force concluded that what Oregon needs now is more paving over of farm and forest land. Crazy.

As the 1000 Friends critique points out, remapping these resource lands is the wrong thing to do:

This proposal destabilizes Oregon’s outstanding agriculture economy at exactly the wrong time.  Agriculture is an ever-increasing economic engine, topping almost $5 billion in gross farm income in 2007.  Agriculture is responsible for over 10% of Oregon’s jobs and is the second largest traded-sector part of the economy.  And it has been amazingly stable and strong – growing almost every year for the past three decades, and in a variety of crops located in every part of the state:  wheat, nurseries products, livestock production, fruits & vegetables, orchard fruits and nuts, and more.

Oregon agriculture, unlike other sectors of the economy, is strong and will not abandon the state by moving operations overseas.  We should be thanking Oregon’s farmers, not putting their family businesses at risk by sweeping the deck clean of past experience with the planning tools the Task Force earlier determined work well.  Remapping is expensive, controversial, and will create years of unneeded turmoil and uncertainty in our rural communities.  We urge you to drop this concept.

Oregon agriculture has been changing with the times. Our neighborhood is fighting a proposed 217 acre Measure 37 subdivision that wants to "plant" 43 homes on high-value farmland.

Grass seed and Christmas trees used to be grown on properties like this one in the south Salem hills. Now vineyards dot the countryside along Liberty Road between our house and the Salem city limits. This shows that farmland needs to be protected, not remapped, because new and better uses for Oregon’s agricultural lands keep being found.

The Big Look Task Force is bent on loosening Oregon’s pioneering, and hugely successful, land use policies. My wife found that out when she tried to testify at a Big Look meeting and was disrespected.

If the Task Force truly was interested in reflecting the views of Oregonians, it would listen to them. Instead, it has produced proposed legislation that makes me wonder, "Who the heck ordered that up?"

The 2009 Legislature will have lots of serious problems to deal with. Land use isn’t one of them. The Institute of Natural Resources at Oregon State University prepared a report for the Big Look Task Force that concluded, "Oregon’s land use system is sound."

Every governmental task force likes to say, "Our report won’t sit on a shelf and gather dust." Well, in this case that’s just what should happen.

I’ll end with a piece by Mitch Rohse, an experienced and respected land use planner. He explains more cogently than I have why the Big Look Task Force is on the wrong track.