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Oregonians should vote YES for measure 63. If I want to build an unsafe addition on my own home that puts my narrow-minded pea brain at risk of death, than so be it!

Come to think of it: Measure 63 does not go far enough!! I want a constitutional amendment that prohibits all government! Yes! All government! Zippo! End of story! We don't need it!

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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Tom's observation may sound extreme, but we may only look to our neighbors to the north for evidence of what local control of land use really looks like. In Washington State, there is strong local control with the only checks and balances being state oversight by a weak state agency (Washington Dept. of Community Trade and Economic Development, CTED) and special hearings boards where local governments can be challenged by enviros, developers, and [rarely] state agencies charged with protecting public resources [like CTED, and the departments of Ecology and Fish and Wildlife].

Washington has a lot more sprawl than Oregon. That is a simple fact. Part of this is due to local control, where zoning and land use and development regulations are defined by local governments with a vested interest in growing their property tax revenue. Oregon's LCDC is a state-wide agency, and has more oversight power to check local governments tendency to want to rezone land to grow their property tax revenue.

For great maps illustrating Washington's sprawl vs. Oregon's more compact development see

http://www.sightline.org/maps/maps/Sprawl-ClarkCo-CS07m

Washington also has a system that attempts to define forest and agricultural lands of state-wide significance, to protect these lands AND to free-up non-significant lands for rural residential development (read: sprawl!). Here again it is the fox guarding the hen house. Local governments control the definition of lands of state-wide significance not the state - go figure!

I work as Washington state agency representative charged with reviewing and commenting on local government land use plans and proposed development under a "local control" scheme. Trust me, we don't want this in Oregon!

-marshwiggler

posted 4 years, 10 months ago
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