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The riddle of the rimrock
By helping to conserve the landscape's productivity, voters can help protect its beauty, fairly and squarely
October 14 , 2007
Editorial by Mary Kitch, The Oregonian
"In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the Earth."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What would you do if your town's singularity were in peril, the striking feature synonymous with the place?
In Prineville, that's the rimrock. Ride east from Redmond, and you drop through the rimrock as you drive into town. "You have to be from Prineville to understand the value we place on" the rimrock, says Mayor Mike Wendel, 37, who grew up with it jaggedly sculpting his skyline.
This year, the town of 9,080 had to decide whether to protect the rimrock or see it scarred. The community enacted scenic protections in 1978, but Grover and Edith Palin had bought land on and near the rims in the 1960s. They filed Measure 37 claims, threatening to build a house or houses, motel or restaurant there.
For many Prineville residents, who brag about the rimrock on their business cards, logos and Web sites, one house was one too many. "It really would damage the skyline," says Mike Warren Sr., a real estate agent.
Last month, Prineville spent $180,000, or about 4 percent of the city's general fund, to pay the Palins for not building. Setting that compensation figure took several appraisals and negotiation -- the Palins, at one point, claimed they deserved $1.5 million or more -- but in the end, the city found a happy compromise.
It's a unique case, since no other city in Oregon is known to have paid a claim. Yet it epitomizes the riddle Oregonians face on the November ballot: How do we reconcile fairness to property owners with fairness to the community and future generations?
In the past three years, Measure 37 has unleashed 7,500 claims to develop strip malls and strip mines, erect more than 50 billboards and build subdivisions on hundreds of thousands of acres, mostly farm and forest land. If these developments go forward, Oregon will be one of the unfairest states in the land.
Thousands of Oregonians who bought homes and farms, counting on protective zoning and scenic vistas, now will have Measure 37-spawned sprawl across from them instead, devaluing their own property rights And Oregon's signature green philosophy -- what Gov. Tom McCall once described as Oregon's mystique and Gov. John Kitzhaber called its identity and ethic -- will be forever diminished.
November's Measure 49 would dial back the damage while actually boosting the fairness the earlier law was supposed to foster. Measure 49 would permit property owners to build up to three houses -- in some cases four to 10 if they could prove regulations have devalued their land. (But that's hard to prove. At least three studies have shown even farmland has appreciated dramatically under Oregon's land-use laws.)
Under Measure 49, property owners could no longer get away with asking to develop the moon and the stars, as they've demanded to do under Measure 37.
Instead, Measure 49 enforces a standard way to determine real estate losses. A more reasonable approach would allow some cities and counties to pay off a claim -- fairly -- and prevent some scars on their scenery. Although the Prineville case is emblematic, it's also unusual in that it was plainly and simply about beauty. And that's a touchy subject in Oregon's land-use system.
What's beauty got to do with it?
It's not just that the "b" word is mushy and subjective. It also antagonizes some rural property owners who believe they've been furnishing open space all these years for others to enjoy.
There's no doubt that the state's beauty helped to shape a constituency, in the late 1960s and 1970s, in favor of protecting farmland. Gov. McCall himself grew up on a ranch near Prineville, and the beauty of Crook County's rimrock got into his blood, as his biographer, The Oregonian's Brent Walth, wrote in "Fire at Eden's Gate." McCall repeatedly warned about the state's uglification.
And yet, the land-use rules that boosted the state's beauty were actually designed to protect something more basic: its income from natural resources. That's why the rules worked. For all their imperfections, they fostered a coincidence of economic and environmental prosperity, not only for the state but also for individuals. Farm and forest owners got handsome property tax breaks, pegged by the American Land Institute at $4.9 billion over 30 years, while the state got productive land.
Nearly a century ago, visionary Gov. Oswald West set a utilitarian tone for Oregon's land-use policies when he set aside the beaches for public use. A picture postcard of West on horseback at Crescent Beach (which West sent to a colleague in 1958) suggests how strongly beauty figured in his thinking.
On the back of it, West alludes to his historic ride from Elk Creek via Arch Cape to Nehalem, scrawling, "This was when and where I caught my inspiration." And inspired it was. After that ride, West declared Oregon's wet-sand beaches the essence of functionality: a public highway.
In a way, it's still true, though the purpose of the beaches has shifted like sands. They do still provide an irreplaceable transportation asset, though -- to every Oregonian who loves to walk on the beach.
In Oregon, beauty is more than land-deep
The point is, environmental instincts often pay off, even if we don't know exactly where they'll take us. Forty years ago, farsighted dairy farmer Hector Macpherson, later a state senator, knew it would be a sickening waste to chew up rich soil for scattershot developments. And he was right, righter than even he could have guessed.
Saving farmland has created a $4.3 billion agricultural industry, but also a wide range of economic benefits no one anticipated. Who could have predicted farmers markets would mushroom, ranchers would raise natural beef, restaurants would peg their success to local foods, the nursery business would take off or that pinot noir would become an international phenomenon? All of these today are Oregon signatures, dependent on prosperous farms.
And since prosperous farms are beautiful, we also got an ethereal landscape. But Measure 37 puts all these assets in jeopardy.
Bolstering the beauty of fairness
If beauty is priceless, Measure 37 claims like the one in Prineville do feel a bit like blackmail. "I have the feeling it's almost like a ransom," says Rick Steber, the popular Prineville-based writer. "If you don't pay, I'm gonna kill her -- or, in this case, I'm gonna build on it."
And yet Measure 37 only encouraged property owners to do what comes naturally, jack up the price of their land. Measure 49, if voters approve it, will do an invaluable service by insisting that property owners' claims be appraised properly and fairly. That will make it possible to save more places like the rimrock.
"What do we have here? We have the natural beauty of the state -- and if we don't preserve it, it's gone," Steber says. "That's what we have that's different than everywhere else."
The Prineville City Council members didn't wait to see how Measure 49 would play out. They went ahead and secured the rimrock for future generations.
Yet Prineville has pointed the way toward middle ground. And that's fitting perhaps, since it's not only in the center of Oregon but also the late Gov. McCall's hometown. "What would Tom McCall have wanted them to do?" asks planner Richard N. Ross. "I think they did it."
I do, too. Now it's up to Oregon voters to apply Prineville's rockhound-signature good sense to the entire state.
Reach Mary Pitman Kitch at marykitch@news.oregonian.com or at 503-294-4010.
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