Day of the land use “hired gun” may be over
April 23rd, 2009 by Jim JustIt looks like the days of the land use “hired gun” – soil and forestry consultants retained by a property owner to swear that his land was good for nothing but growing houses – may be drawing to a close.
HB 2761 passed out of the House Committee on Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Communities this morning on a unanimous vote with a “do pass” recommendation.
The bill would make the experts who do the farm and forest capability analysis answer to DLCD rather than to the property owner seeking to develop his land. If a property owner wanted to rezone his land from farm or forest use to a development designation, he would pay a fee to DLCD and the agency would then contract with an expert from a list of certified and approved soil scientists and other experts. This would ensure that the data relied on is objective and scientific and would eliminate the corruption that is inherent in the current process.
The bill was originally drafted to address only agricultural capability, but was amended to include forest capability as well. Goal One Coalition pushed hard for the scope of the bill to be expanded to address the problem of biased data produced by forestry consultants under pressure to produce the results they’ve been paid to obtain.
Unfortunately the amended version is still not available on the legislature’s website. We’ll post it as soon as we get a copy of the text of the bill as amended.
UPDATE 4/30: The amendments did not get into the House version. The fix is expected to happen in the Senate.