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A new look at land use An Oregon task force resumes its work after a one-year hiatus

By David Steves
The Register-Guard
Published: March 11, 2008 12:00AM

Nobody was trying to keep a big-box store out of town. There were no emotional property-rights ballot measures. People worried about whether they could get rationed gas for their cars — not whether they should ration the emissions that came out.

That’s how it was in 1973, the year Oregon’s land use planning system was born.

But since then, much has changed. Oregon’s population has grown by more than 1 million and is on pace to have doubled by 2025. As more residents come to Oregon, more farmers and forestland owners are looking to get out of the natural-resources business — with the hopes of converting their rural lands into subdivisions, resorts and commercial developments.

At the same time, worries about climate change have added to the debate something not contemplated a generation ago: How does land use planning affect Oregon’s carbon footprint?

In other words, perhaps it’s time to take a big look at Oregon’s generation-old land use planning system and make sure it’s sufficient for the next 35 years.

That’s the idea behind the Oregon Task Force on Land Use Planning, also known as the Big Look Task Force, which resumes its work Friday after a one-year hiatus.

“The whole purpose of the task force is to step back and look at it from the 35,000-foot level,” said Richard Whitman, director of the state Department of Land Conservation and Development, which is working with the task force.

The 2005 Legislature created the task force at a time when Oregon was coming to grips with the voters’ approval of the property-rights initiative Measure 37.

Then, last year, the Democrat-controlled Legislature put a scaled-back rewrite of Measure 37 on the ballot, and withdrew from the budget money needed for the Big Look Task Force to do its work.

Measure 49 passed in November, and in February, the Legislature came up with $426,008 for a consulting firm to handle the Big Look panel’s workload — starting with its Friday meeting.

From ordinary citizens with an interest in whether and how Oregon’s farmlands, forests and scenic areas are developed to the most ardent activists in the state’s land use wars, it seems the Big Look is being welcomed as a great idea.

But what sort of ideas should come from the task force and win approval from the 2009 Legislature? There’s no consensus so far.

Bonnie Thielman, whose family lives on a piece of Lane County forestland her father once owned and managed for timber production, said she’d like to see the task force recommend more balance.

Thielman is one of five siblings who each were given 42 acres from their father’s nearly 300 acres near Fern Ridge Lake. Until she started applying to build on her parcel in the mid-1990s, she always thought the system was meant as a framework to keep strip malls and subdivisions from gobbling up agricultural and forest lands.

But what she found was a rigid bureaucracy that required landowners to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers, consultants and government fees.

“I don’t want this to be as crowded and overrun as California, but I also would like to be able to allow a citizen to plead their case and be heard with a reasonable request,” Thielman said.

Cottage Grove activist Cathy Bellavita has ideas of her own for what might fix the land use system’s ailments. Unlike Thielman, Bellavita’s interest in land use planning was spurred by opposition to a proposed development. She and other Cottage Grove residents rallied to oppose subdivision development on the town’s 881-foot butte, Mount David.

Like Thielman, Bellavita thinks the government makes it too hard for ordinary people to get involved. Citizens who want to have a say must compete with developers who hire traffic experts, lawyers and consultants. And fees can cost thousands of dollars to take a legal challenge all the way to the state Land Use Board of Appeals.

“The Big Look will not be worth anything if it does not fully engage citizen involvement,” Bellavita said.

The Big Look Task Force has made public input a top priority. It can count on hearing from traditional advocacy groups on both sides.

Eric Stachon, spokesman for 1000 Friends of Oregon, said his group will press the Big Look Task Force to consider how land use planning can minimize Oregon’s impact on global warming. Specifically, the group wants the effects of sprawling suburbs — and the long-distance, carbon-emitting car commuters who populate them — taken into account.

The bottom line for his group, Stachon said, is that the task force shouldn’t drastically pare back Oregon’s planning system.“Protecting farm land, protecting our working forests, creating smart, compact growth within cities, making transportation work for folks — all that is still valid,” he said.

Oregonians in Action President Dave Hunnicutt, unswervingly, has a different take on what the Big Look Task Force should produce. His group wants the task force to scrutinize the most fundamental aspect of Oregon land use regulation.

“Where the system went wrong was right at the start, when the Legislature delegated to a centralized state bureaucracy the power to make land use calls that used to be reserved to local government,” he said.

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