ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Lane County has reaffirmed the public’s right to participate in the land use decision making process by lowering the fee imposed for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners from $3,700 to $250.

The adoption of the Chapter 14 amendments was the culmination of years of work by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Board of Commissioners at its meeting on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 4  unanimously approved amendments to Lane Code Chapter 14 to streamline and expedite the way the county processes applications for permits and zone changes. Most importantly, the revised Chapter 14 dramatically lowers the cost of getting through the local process to a final decision. The new procedures provide two tracks for appealing a hearings official decision to the Board of Commissioners. For $3700 – the amount currently charged – a party can ask that the Board hold a public hearing and make the final county decision on an application. But for only $250, a party can ask that the Board not hold a public hearing, but rather simply ratify the hearing official’s decision as the final county decision. On either track, the decision to hear or not hear the appeal rests with the Board.

Goal One first introduced a bill to cap local appeal fees during the 2003 legislative session. That proposal withered on the vine due to vociferous opposition from lobbyists for the League of Oregon Cities and Association of Oregon Counties, who complained that it would impose “unfunded mandates” on local governments.

Seeking to sidestep opposition from local governments while addressing their concerns, we then crafted an approach that would offer local governments two options. The default option would be for permit and zone changes to be processed with only a single public hearing – the decision resulting from that hearing would be the final local decision, obviating the need for a local appeal and avoiding all the related costs and expenses. If the local governing body insisted on retaining final approval authority, the fee for an appeal hearing to the local governing body would be capped at an affordable amount. Goal One Coalition attempted to generate interest in this new concept leading up to the 2007 legislative session, but got nowhere.

Our attention then shifted to local initiatives: if we could get the concept implemented in just one jurisdiction, that could serve as an example and real-life test case for the rest of the state. Building on the strong partnership between Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County and LandWatch’s extraordinary effectiveness, Lane County offered an excellent opportunity. And Lane County desperately needed a fix:  exorbitant appeal fees made it effectively impossible to challenge any decision beyond the hearings official level.

Because Lane County’s appeal fee was so high, and because Land Management Division (LMD) attempts to fund all of its operations from user fees, we believed any proposal to dramatically lower and then cap the fee for an appeal to the Board would be a non-starter. Our approach, therefore, was to eliminate the appeal to the Board and make the hearings official decision the final county decision.

We presented our proposal to the Board of Commissioners in 2008. In March 2009, the reconfigured Board of Commissioners directed LMD to initiate the process to adopt the joint Goal One/LandWatch proposal.

At a joint public hearing before the Lane County Planning Commission and Board of Commissioners in July, the Board directed Land Management Division to conduct stakeholder meetings to try to reach a consensus among advocacy groups and developer representatives. Out of those meetings came the proposal to keep the option for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners while providing a way to get through that appeals process for only $250. What was really surprising is that the $250 cap was proposed by the developer group – they figured that was the price that needed to be paid to get what they wanted, a process which they believe protects their interests from arbitrary interference from the current progressive majority on the Board of Commissioners.

The text of the Chapter 14 amendments adopted by the Board is available here.