Planning Paradise: Politics and Visioning of Land Use in Oregon

3. A Star Is Born

3 A Star Is Born The story in Oregon goes like this: One day in the late 1960s, Linn County dairy farmer Hector Macpherson Jr. drove past a neighbor’s farm and noticed a Caterpillar tractor moving soil. Macpherson shouted, “What ya plannin’ to grow here?” The tractor driver replied, “Houses” (Rusk 1999: 156). According to Oregon legend, Macpherson saw that the farming economy and a way of life were being paved over by rural sprawl, got himself elected to the state senate, and wrote a law that has been the cornerstone of Oregon’s land use planning system ever since (as well as a model that has been highly studied and influential for land use planning nationwide). Reflecting on the story in 2009, Macpherson confirmed that it is essentially true: “I saw the whole subdivision of the area was starting in, and there was one on White Oak Drive that was really the trigger. I could see that these kinds of things were coming. . . . I had all kinds of things as a dairy farmer: the flies, the noise, manure.” Macpherson’s wife Kitty interjected, “The cows getting out.” “You expected that [cows get out],” Macpherson continued, “but people called to ask me to not spread manure . . . . The farm is next to the church. People called to ask me to not spread manure the week before they got married!” Macpherson laughed. “I saw I was going to need protection if I was going to maintain my dairy farm.”1 When he arrived in the Oregon Senate, Macpherson met with powerbrokers and plotted, as he describes it, “like revolutionaries” to create that protection.2 But these revolutionaries had soil under their fingernails : when asked if Willamette Valley farmers like him spearheaded the creation of the state’s land use planning system, the usually modest Macpherson replied, “Absolutely.” Today, those present during the creation of Oregon’s land use planning system in the early 1970s agree that it was commercial farmers, not environmentalists or left-­ leaning A Star Is Born 43 city folk, who led the charge for land use planning (see Abbott and Howe 1993). Even though led by conservative (mostly Republican) farmers, it is no exaggeration to say that the system of state-­ level land use planning they created was indeed “revolutionary.” Oregon historian William Robbins observes that Oregon’s planning “is nationally one of a kind. There is no other state—Hawaii and the state of Maine have tried in different directions—but they have never been as comprehensive or have functioned for such a long period of time as Oregon’s system.”3 Chapter 2 describes Oregon’s unique land use planning system and compares it to the efforts by other states to cope with rapid growth and development in recent decades. In this chapter and chapter 4, we consider the political how and why questions: How did Oregon’s unique statewide comprehensive land use planning system emerge? Why did it emerge in Oregon? Why 1973? How and why did it survive essentially intact for three decades? What conditions led to the weakening and, ultimately, the near-­ death experiences of Oregon’s planning system in 2000 and 2004? (We explore this last question in chapter 5, and again in chapter 9.) In the following section we briefly describe the conception and birth of the program. The Birth of Oregon’s Planning System This book is largely about the celebrated land use planning system that Hector Macpherson and his allies engineered (commonly referred to under its legislative title, Senate Bill 100 [SB 100]) and the complex political life of that system from its inception up to today. To begin, however, we note that Oregon’s planning system was not created from whole cloth in 1973; rather, pressure to address growth through state-­ level policy had been building since the 1960s. Up to 1969, growth in Oregon was haphazard and largely unregulated. Zoning and planning were voluntary, and most land use plans, if they existed, were merely advisory. Zoning was mainly limited to cities. Where rural zoning existed, it often allowed subdivision of farmland, forestland , and rangeland into five-­ acre lots—a recipe for sprawl and a major threat and concern for farmers by the early and middle 1960s. Neighbor- 44 Planning Paradise ing California (especially Southern California, as discussed later in this chapter) provided a powerful reminder of how uncontrolled growth can transform landscapes and farm economies—and, to many Oregonians, a model to be strictly avoided. In 1967...