Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land Use Revolution

Chapter 9: The Agency, the Watchdog, and the Dynamics of Local Planning

191 Chapter 9 The Agency, the Watchdog, and the Dynamics of Local Planning “The work can’t all be done at once. LCDC needs to give some direction on what should be done first.”—henry richmond With the department of Land Conservation and development budget approved , much of the agency’s attention for the remainder of 1975 was focused on putting in place a process to give state money to local governments . Proposed plans and ordinances had to be submitted to Land Conservation and development Commission for review by January 1, 1976, or local governments had to show evidence of satisfactory progress toward meeting the statewide planning goals. First, LCdC had to define what “satisfactory progress” meant, taking into account the priorities the Joint Ways and Means Committee had articulated in its budget note. Working closely with its Local Officials advisory Committee and an ad hoc group of local planners, dLCd staff began to craft a feasible allocation process . Planning advocates worried that the commission might be reluctant to state clearly how satisfactory progress should be measured, and 1000 Friends of Oregon mobilized to prevent the goal displacement they saw looming ahead. in mid-June, the Local Officials group presented its allocation recommendations to LCdC. they proposed a point system with five criteria, the weightiest of which addressed the Joint Ways and Means Committee’s concerns about local progress and commitment. the criteria also took into account growth and development pressures on a jurisdiction, ability to pay, willingness to share resources with other local governments, and size of population and land area. that system would be used to rank requests for time extensions and money. dLCd asked local governments to evaluate the 192 oregon Plans progress they had made in planning and implementation in light of LCdC’s goals and report what remained to be done. the legislature’s mandate that LCdC evaluate local government work done pursuant to Sb 10 thus became a requirement that local governments evaluate their own progress. the Local Officials group incorporated into its proposal a review role for itself regarding the prioritization of requests for funding (Carter, 1975a). at henry richmond’s request, two professional planners at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill reviewed the group’s proposal. “in its present form,” they reported, the plan “does not address the most basic issue facing Oregon ’s cities and counties—i.e. —what does it take to comply with LCdC’s goals and guidelines. Unless compliance is clearly defined now, the next two years could be a planning nightmare for LCdC.” LCdC needed to articulate a procedure for evaluating and improving local plans already adopted and in process and to describe what local governments would have to do to comply with the statewide goals. the two planners also developed a workbook to guide local planners through their compliance efforts (Crandall and diemoz, 1975). richmond had another concern: “the grant criteria are applied to who the applicant is, rather than what the applicant proposes to do with the grant money . . . planning grants should be used as a tool to effectuate state land use policies and to secure compliance and satisfactory progress as defined by . . . LCdC.” he told L. b. day that LCdC ought to explicitly establish priorities for the next biennium, because everybody knew that cities and counties would not be able to comply with all of the goals during that period. “the work can’t all be done at once,” he concluded. “LCdC needs to give some direction on what should be done first.” Program priorities should vary by region, he thought, with money tied to specific standards related to goal compliance. the priority for Willamette Valley cities, for example, should be the designation of urban growth boundaries, required by the Urbanization goal; Willamette Valley counties should focus on implementing the agricultural Lands goal outside those boundaries. “Such a framework for local planning,” richmond said, “will enable LCdC to give the 1977 Oregon Legislature a meaningful and persuasive status report: e.g. ‘x’ thousands of acres of Willamette Valley farmlands have been identified on maps and protected by implementation of LCdC’s agricultural Lands goal” (richmond, 1975d). he urged day to consider making growth control a priority in the Willamette Valley, reminding him about the continuing the agencY, the watchdog, and the dYnamics of local Planning 193 loss of farmland there and the availability of soil information that could be used to designate agricultural lands...