Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land Use Revolution

Introduction: Oregon Plans

13 Introduction Oregon Plans Oregon’s Senate bill 100—commonly called simply Sb 100—and the statewide land-use planning program it initiated were controversial from the start. Passed by the legislature in 1973, the program would affect in various ways the daily lives of everyone in the state, and would earn Oregon a reputation as a leader among states in the field. those who led the effort to pass the revolutionary legislation included environmental activists—some of them attorneys, professional planners, legislators, and state officials—business people, and farmers. their goal was to insert what they saw as statewide interests into land-use decision-making processes that had been up to that point resolutely local. they were motivated by pragmatic concerns about the future of critical sectors of the state’s economy and increasing costs to taxpayers , as well as by desires to protect the state’s natural beauty and livability . this is the story of the path to Sb 100, what it took to get it passed, and how it was implemented during the critical early period of the mid-1970s. Context advocates for statewide land-use planning expected opposition to Sb 100, and they got it—from local governments that were competing with each other to attract population and economic growth, state agencies that pursued projects shaped by local growth-promoting interests, and property owners and developers hoping to reap speculative gains associated with growth. advocates wanted to address the resulting environmental, economic , and social problems that transcended local government boundaries , and the transformation of land-use planning institutions and practices became the vehicle to accomplish that. Modernizing those institutions and practices involved elaborating a complex set of legal mandates and establishing a new agency to administer 14 oregon Plans them. it also meant enlarging the role of professionals in making and implementing plans and requiring them—and the officials they worked for—to base their work on objective information about current and likely future conditions. Enacting and implementing Sb 100 involved many thousands of Oregonians who sought to shape land-use-related actions at state and local levels in a variety of forums and provided intense scrutiny of what planners and elected officials at all levels were doing every controversial step along the way. Oregon began to chart a path toward Sb 100 in the early 1960s. the legislature, traditionally attentive to agricultural interests, attempted to preserve farmland on the fringes of growing urban areas by borrowing and tinkering with methods that had been used in states such as hawaii and California. the effects of urbanization were most clearly evident in the Willamette river Valley, where about two-thirds of the state’s population lived and where the most productive agricultural land was located. Oregon’s population grew by 18 percent during the 1960s. the Willamette Valley accounted for 86 percent of that growth, 54 percent of it in the Portland metropolitan area. during the 1970s, the state population grew by another 26 percent, this time with a larger proportion occurring outside the Willamette Valley. Land-use issues were becoming increasingly important throughout the state as a result. State lawmakers were also revising land-use planning laws that had been adopted in the 1940s and 1950s to facilitate farmland preservation. those laws enabled county governments to zone land for a variety of uses, but a county’s zoning code had to be consistent with a land-use plan. Most counties showed little interest in taking advantage of the opportunity to plan. in the early 1960s, the legislature authorized counties to create exclusive farm-use zones, a different approach to farmland preservation than was emerging in other states. Farmers in those zones would automatically be entitled to property-tax breaks that were intended to give them an incentive to keep their land in agricultural production. the path to farmland preservation in Oregon, though, still required comprehensive plans that designated land for farm use. With continuing resistance to planning in most counties, relatively little land in rural Oregon was planned or zoned into the early 1970s. interest in farmland preservation increased dramatically in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, especially from 1972 through 1974. introduction 15 Lincoln Tillamook Columbia Hood River Lake Harney Malheur Lane Grant Klamath Douglas Linn Baker Crook Umatilla Wallowa Wasco Jackson Union Coos Curry Deschutes Morrow Wheeler Jefferson Polk Gilliam Marion Clackamas Josephine Yamhill Benton Sherman Washington Multnomah Clatsop Map...