Metro head: Reserves bill ill-timed
House bill adds noise to final week of urban-rural reserves debate
On Monday, the Oregon Legislature pulled the plug on a bill that would have changed the way counties and Metro can use urban and rural reserves.
That’s good news for David Bragdon, president of the regional planning agency Metro.
Bragdon was frustrated Monday that the House was even considering House Bill 3648, before the region’s governments have inked deals to set aside reserves.
“I would hope the majority of the legislature wouldn’t want to short-circuit the process that they authorized,” Bragdon said.
Arnie Roblan, a Coos Bay Democrat, said amendments aimed at shaping what the land-use bill would actually do didn’t make it to his House Rules Committee in time.
“At this time we’re not intending to do those. However, we’ll be watching,” Roblan said. “An amendment or a new bill for 2011 may be available.”
Bragdon, who along with Metro Councilor Carl Hosticka put together the framework of a regionwide compromise on the reserves issue, said he was surprised that in the 11th hour of a two-year planning process so much hardball was being played.
At the heart of the debate was land north of Council Creek near Cornelius. Clackamas County Commissioner Charlotte Lehan put serious pressure on Washington County leaders to exclude the 600-acre area north of town, which local planners say is a vital area for industrial development.
“I was surprised that people would make such an issue about 400 to 600 acres around Cornelius,” Bragdon said. “Even threats to wreck the whole process just because somebody didn’t like 200 acres. There was just no sense of proportion.” Dave Vanasche, who farms north of Cornelius and has argued that identifying land north of Council Creek for urban reserves would harm the ability of farmers to negotiate long-term loans on their property, told the News-Times that the legislature may be their only chance for slowing urban growth in the fertile Tualatin Plains, bound to the North by Highway 26, the south by Forest Grove and Cornelius and the east by Hillsboro.
It’s not entirely clear if that was the goal of HB 3648, introduced by Rep. Brian Clem, a Salem Democrat.
Clem didn’t return the News-Times’ phone call, but he did tell Carla Axtman, who writes about Washington County politics for the website BlueOregon.com, that all legislative options are on the table.
“I probably could have passed a bill during the special session,” Clem told Axtman. “Citizens and groups from across the spectrum have been complaining about this, including builders, conservation groups and farmers. All options are on the table given how upset the farm and conservation people are.”
Those options include:
• Putting restrictions on what undesignated lands could be used for during the next 50 years.
• Throwing out the regionally-defined map and starting over again in the legislature.
• Setting aside the reserves and telling Metro and the counties to return to the old way of planning for growth, by expanding the Urban Growth Boundary to include lands based on their soil type.
The region could return to its former way of planning for growth if affirmative votes don’t come out of a flurry of sessions this week. Washington County voted late Tuesday on the map, with Clackamas and Multnomah counties and Metro set to follow suit on Thursday.
Talks intended to reach a regional consensus blew up earlier this month after Clackamas County walked away from a deal between leaders there and Washington County officials.
The counties decided to break up the “Core 4” — a group comprised of Washington County Chairman Tom Brian, Metro Councilor Kathryn Harrington, Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen and Clackamas County Commissioner Charlotte Lehan — when they reached an impasse over land near Cornelius, Sherwood and the west end of Multnomah County.
Instead, leaders decided to enter bilateral talks between each county and Metro.
Those discussions yielded a map very similar to Bragdon and Hosticka’s initial compromise, released in December and known as the Bragdon-Hosticka map.
“The map that we put forward was not our personal preference. It was our assessment of what the parties could agree to, and it’s turned out close to that,” Bragdon said.
The latest iteration of the map scales back reserves north of Cornelius to Long Road and drops controversial reserves in Multnomah County and in Clackamas County near Sherwood.
But the map isn’t exactly a win-win — it’s more of general compromise, with Clackamas County giving up a fight to keep the Stafford Triangle an undesignated reserve area and Washington County reducing the size of its urban reserves by more than half.
Even so, conservation groups like 1000 Friends of Oregon and the state’s Farm Bureaus have indicated that they’re not done fighting the plan, which sets aside significantly more land for potential urban development over the next half century than they’d like.
And at the core of the fight: the 400 or so acres of urban reserve north of Cornelius.
But taking the fight to the legislature disappointed Bragdon.
“I think it’s unfortunate that any party that doesn’t get 100 percent of what they want immediately goes running off to the legislature,” Bragdon said.