The “Big Look” bill is getting ready to move, contents still uncertain
March 18th, 2009 by Jim JustOn Tuesday the House Land Use Committee held another work session on HB 2229, the bill that came out of the Big Look Task Force’s four years of work.
Except for the “remapping” sections 6 – 8, the sections of the bill that remain in consideration are non-controversial. The four “overarching principles” are still in. The Section 15 directive that infrastructure spending be prioritized to “attain the densities needed to support alternative modes of transportation” has been expanded to apply to cities and counties as well as state agencies. The Regional Problem Solving sections are intended to improve the existing process by identifying up front (1) what the regional problem to be solved is, and (2) to identify which local governments must be involved to solve that problem. It’s looking like the bogeyman of land use law “complexity” will be handed off to the Oregon Law Commission for a “policy neutral review.”
Sections 6 through 8 of the bill as submitted by the Task Force would allow two or more counties to come up with their own definition of agricultural or forest land? Chair Nolan (D-Portland) said right out there’s consensus on the committee that these sections won’t survive. But what, if anything, will take their place?
Rep. Greenlick said that he sympathized with the problem the Task Force was grappling with when they came up with their remapping idea, but thought the underlying problem was the difficulty and expense property owners ran into if they thought their property was mis-zoned and wanted to change the zoning. Rep. Clem (D-Salem) then proposed that the process should be made more fair, objective, and cheaper by providing that an expert selected and paid for by the appropriate state agency rather than the property owner evaluate the resource capabilities of the land, with the property owner reimbursing the state for the expense of the review.
Clem’s idea seemed to have some traction. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. Chair Nolan announced she expects the next work session to be the last, and that the bill in some form will move out of committee.
Clem’s concept – which he explained as only applicable to farm land – is currently embodied in HB 2761. The reasoning also applies in the forest land context, and the concept should be expanded to apply to forest lands too.
The most enlightening moment of the day was provided by Rep. Wingard (R-Wilsonville). Wingard argued that the dispute really was between those who were pro-growth and those who were anti-growth, and that between the two there was really no ground for compromise. Rep. Greenlick (D-Portland) suggested the world to others did not appear so black and white; Chair Nolan tactfully and gently chided Wingard for imputing motivation to others.
What no one dared do was take up the opportunity offered by Wingard to deny the gospel of growth and argue proudly and forcefully, in public, that growth is responsible for most of our environmental problems and has caused global warming and is likely to result in catastrophic climate change; and that peak oil means maintaining exponential growth will prove impossible. Growth neither can nor should continue.
The time that you can say “growth is bad” in public will come.