Oregon has been the first state to officially experiment with Smart Growth. - since then it has been a wild road of planning efforts, repeals, and now laws that put planning back in the limelight. Here is an article written by Dave Hunnicutt from the Oregonians in Action, the primary sponsors of Measure 37 which repealed the zoning laws initially in place to encourage smart growth urban development.

One step back on an irreversible path

One step back on an irreversible path

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

T he passage of Measure 49 marks another chapter in Oregon’s long struggle with land-use planning.

The dark side of last week’s vote is the impact it will have on the 7,500 families and Oregon businesses who filed Measure 37 claims. But despite the fact that Measure 49 is a bitter disappointment to many, its passage puts Oregon on an irreversible path toward greater protection of individual property rights.

Why? Because for the first time in Oregon’s 34-year-old experiment with statewide centralized land-use planning, its most zealous advocates have acknowledged that there is a need to balance the rights of the individual property owner with the desires of the planning community, and that Oregon’s system has done a poor job of balancing those competing interests.

In the past two months, these land-use advocates have spent nearly $5 million to pass a measure that explicitly recognizes that Oregon’s experimental land-use laws have created unfair hardships on many Oregon property owners.

They’ve sent mail pieces, run television ads and given speeches assuring us all that it’s only fair that these longtime property owners finally see a return on their lifetime investment that has been slowly and systematically stripped from them by one new land-use rule after another.

They’ve worked hard to pass a measure that claims to provide protection to Oregon property owners if state or local governments adopt new land-use regulations in the future.

What a topsy-turvy world.

Of course, there’s a simple reason why land-use planning advocates are finally acknowledging that the system needs to change. That reason is Measure 37.

As the Bend Bulletin wrote in its editorial in favor of Measure 49, “The Legislature wouldn’t have approved Measure 49 if voters hadn’t supported Measure 37 first. If lawmakers have demonstrated anything when it comes to land-use reform, it’s that it takes a bulldozer to move them an inch.”

No kidding.

Prior to Measure 37, every effort to change the Oregon land-use system to correct some of its most glaring inequities was met with opposition by the same urban legislators and groups who supported Measure 49.

But thanks to Measure 37, those inequities are no longer being ignored. Finally, there seems to be universal recognition that our laws must change. It took 34 years, but the time has arrived.

Thanks to Measure 37, the governor, Senate president and speaker of the House formed the “Big Look” task force to review Oregon’s land-use laws and recommend changes. The task force was well into its work in doing just that when its funding was mysteriously cut by the Legislature. Funding for that Big Look should be fully restored.

So now is not the time for gloom and doom. Today, despite the passage of Measure 49, Oregon property owners have far more property rights than they did a decade ago, thanks to Measure 56 (land-use notification), Measure 7 (compensation), Measure 37, and Measure 39 (protection from eminent domain). Now is the time to hold Measure 49’s proponents to their word.

Measure 37 was a giant leap forward. Measure 49 is a small step backward. That’s a win. If we keep fighting, better days are ahead.

Dave Hunnicutt is president of Oregonians in Action, sponsor of Measure 37.

Relying on the property tax

New England states are more dependent on the property tax to fund local services, including schools, than most other regions. Nationwide, about half of local revenues come from the property tax. But older industrial cities need to charge higher rates on lower assessed values to get the revenue they need, said Barry Bluestone, Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University in Boston. Bluestone spoke at a Lincoln Lecture Nov. 2 at Lincoln House titled “The Potential for Uneven Economic Development in Massachusetts: The Role of Property Taxation and State Local Aid.”
The property tax is a stable source of revenue generally, but it does put older industrial cities such as Pittsfield, New Bedford, Fall River, and Lawrence at a disadvantage: the more they raise rates, the harder it is to attract economic development. The state does step in to make up for shortfalls in local revenue, mostly in the area of school funding. But the state revenue stream is subject to vagaries of the economy, resulting in instability for non-educational local government funding. Spending on police per capita appears even across municipalities, but a closer look reveals much greater police spending per crime in thriving suburban communities, Bluestone said.
One surprising finding in Bluestone’s research: the inequities would be much greater without Proposition 2 ½, which limits the increase in revenue raised from the property tax across all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns.

http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/atlincolnhouse.asp

What’s land got to do with it?
Because climate change is the “ultimate externality,” as MIT’s Robert Solow has put it, the world of land policy faces complex questions. How much impact does land use have on emissions and energy efficiency? If one city, region or state ties land policies to reducing emissions, will the impact be diluted because the neighboring jurisdiction does not? Are other things more central in the climate debate, such as continued international reliance on coal-fired power plants or the price on carbon?
Those were some of the questions that planners and policy leaders wrestled with at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s New England Smart Growth Leadership Forum, attended by about 100 people at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Nov. 1. In the conference, titled “Climate Change: The Emerging Role of Land Use,” Tufts University research professor Paul Kirshen catalogued the New England industries that are already feeling the results of changes in temperatures: fishing, blueberries and cranberries, maple sugar, dairy farms, and ski resorts to name a few. Steve Winkelman, manager of the transportation program at the Center for Clean Air Policy, explored “why sidewalks are as sexy as hybrids” - that is, how zoning, design, and transportation funding priorities can produce environments that reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT). “Cars last 15 years,” he said. “A street grid is for a century.” Better ways of quantifying the relationships between the built environment and auto use are needed, he said.
In a panel discussion, Geoff Anderson, director of the EPA’s Development, Community and Environment Division, said in the years ahead a new measure may emerge, showing how development of various kinds affects greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. “I’d like to go to the Multiple Listing Service and see it right along with the property tax - how much am I going to drive if I live here?” he said. There may not be a silver bullet to counter the global warming challenge, said Beth Nagusky, project director of Grow Smart Maine, echoing comments by Bill McKibben, “smart growth may be the silver buckshot.”
Douglas I. Foy, former secretary of the Office for Commonwealth Development in Massachusetts and founding partner of the firm Serrafix, said in keynote remarks that the framework for land use and settlement patterns is slowly changing. “Congestion is a good thing, not a problem,” he said. The goal of transportation policy should shift from mobility to “being there,” in walkable or transit-accessible environments.
Armando Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute, said there was clearly a role for land policy and cities in the challenge of climate change. “It may be useful to think of cities as great carbon-reduction machines,” Carbonell said. “We’ve got to fix the cars, but we’ve also got to address VMT growth, and that is done by providing environments where one can walk or take transit. Planners are on the supply side of the problem, providing places for people to live with lots of amenities and diversity in housing - and by the way, such attributes are increasingly in demand anyway.”
There may well be a cap-and-trade regime in place in the years ahead and a price on carbon, he said, and at that time urban environments will be even more in demand.
The real estate industry has begun to come to grips with climate change, largely for business reasons. At a recent Urban Land Institute conference, industry leaders expressed concern that office space and other buildings will be obsolete fairly soon because they lack “green building” features. Rising sea levels are also seen as a threat to extensive property holdings in coastal cities.
The Lincoln Institute continues to be engaged on land use and climate change, convening 30 big city planners to share best practices in climate action plans, sponsoring research by New Orleans recovery director Ed Blakely on how urban planning must adapt to the inevitable impacts of global warming, and participating in the Superstition Vistas project on 275 square miles of desert state trust lands in Arizona, new development with a goal of being carbon-neutral.

http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/atlincolnhouse.asp