Planning Paradise: Politics and Visioning of Land Use in Oregon

5. “What Were People Thinking?”

5 “What Were People Thinking?” As mentioned in chapter 1, we wrote this book in part because of a particular event: in the summer of 2005, half a year after Oregon’s Ballot Measure 37 passed, one of us (Walker) was in Colorado to interview the director of a land trust on an unrelated topic. The director changed subjects and posed a question about Oregon and Measure 37: “What were people thinking?” After beginning intensive fieldwork for this book in the summer of 2008, we think we are closer to being able to answer that question. We conclude, however, there is probably no single answer. What Oregon voters were “thinking” when they filled in their ballots in November 2004 had much to do with a number of economic, social, institutional, and political forces that had been shifting the ways Oregonians experience and think about land use planning in the decades since the program was created in 1973. The importance of understanding the shifting currents that shape Oregon’s planning politics was illustrated well in 2002. With the Oregon Supreme Court’s invalidation of Ballot Measure 7 (which would have been a near-­ death blow to Oregon planning) in October of that year, supporters of Oregon’s land use system were jubilant. Their enormous relief was mixed with a vague sense of affirmation that of course Measure 7 could not stand—this was Oregon. Their interests might have been better served by a stronger sense of humility and introspection about why Oregon voters approved Measure 7 at all, and what could be done to address these underlying problems. Portland Metro councilor Brian Newman later observed, “Measure 7 was a wake-­ up call. We just slept through it.”1 Bob Stacey, who took over as executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon in the same month that the Oregon Supreme Court invalidated Measure 7, recalls how his organization was forced into a defensive stance and lost the initiative (literally and figuratively): 112 Planning Paradise In October 2002 [when Measure 7 was ruled unconstitutional], I thought, “Well, that’s finally behind us.” That was probably the most short-­ sighted perspective I’ve ever had in this position, or any position. I thought, “Now we can get down to some progressive changes in land use policy” . . . but Oregonians in Action was working on revisions to the Measure 7 template. And in the early months of 2003 our staff started getting soaked up in time-­ consuming efforts to respond to draft ballot titles being submitted by Oregonians in Action. As I recall, at least a dozen or more . . . and ultimately one of them became Measure 37.2 One could say that 1000 Friends of Oregon—the pioneering, first land use watchdog group of its kind in the nation—was caught snoozing. The reincarnation of Measure 7 in the form of Measure 37 should have surprised no one. Following the state supreme court’s invalidation of Measure 7 on technical grounds, property rights activists made no secret that they saw the court’s decision as a temporary setback, and they publicly promised to return with more land use ballot initiatives.3 Moreover, there was no reason to assume that the next property rights initiative would not pass. It did—and Measure 37 changed Oregon’s history by enshrining the principle of “just compensation,” probably permanently. Yet, after Measure 7 was invalidated, when Oregon’s land use advocates might have been working to take corrective action to avoid more such ballot initiatives, little changed. As Dave Hunnicutt, president of property-­ rights advocacy group Oregonians in Action, recalled to us in 2009, “What part of ‘we need to make some changes’ didn’t the planning community understand? . . . [They] all figured, ‘Well, Measure 7 is gone. So we don’t need to worry about it.’ What a stupid mistake! Ok, maybe the ballot measure is going to be invalidated, but the sentiment behind that ballot measure isn’t going away.”4 Measure 37 proved Hunnicutt right. The passage of Ballot Measure 49 in 2007—with compensation requirements for future regulation intact—could be said to have proved him right again. Yet, by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, arguably the planning community still had not asked the hard questions about the possibility that “we need to make some changes”—a failure that is arguably equally “stupid” today. “What Were People Thinking?” 113 To the extent that the pro-­ planning community in Oregon showed a capacity to...