I stopped in the office to pay my bill, and we discussed the 75-cent Portland tax on the utility, an unwanted dividend of the annexation some time ago of my home in midcounty to the city. Because the overall water bill only amounted to $15 for the two-month period, the Portland tariff equaled 5% of the bill. It was not a trivial surcharge just because the pipes run through a few blocks of territory that became Portland. The tax might be only a minor consequence of the area’s recent runaway growth, but it set me to thinking again about the issue and how pervasive the effects of growth are.

I had discussed the subject with Andy Kerr the day before. The onetime head of the Oregon Natural Resources Council spent 20 years fighting to preserve old-growth forests and now lives east in Joseph. But he returned to Portland often and has kept his eye on developments. Since last fall, when he helped stage an Alternatives to Growth Conference in Portland, he has been looking into forming an organization to stop the current growth.

He said growth is unsustainable. Kerr thinks the state can instead concentrate on growing better, not bigger. He wants the promotion of "true economic, personal, intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth by supporting policies that move Oregon toward sustainability." Kerr thinks he is onto a mainstream idea. He wants you to start thinking: "How much better off am I these days now that the state is well into its growth spurt?"

He wants you to look at your own life, not the welfare of some big computer chip company, and ask some quality-of-life questions: Are your commutes any better than before? How about your property tax, is it still going up? How about other costs of living, including housing? And how about your children’s schooling, has it improved?

Kerr is betting that the answers will be a resounding "no."

That leads him to his next question: why do we have to assume that growth is always good? And does it have to be inevitable? It seems those have been the assumptions for some time now. Even Tom McCall, the former governor famed for telling people to visit Oregon but not to stay, thought that growth could not be avoided, but that planning could be done on how best to deal with it.

Kerr is going beyond that premise, suggesting that all growth does not equate with good. And he is putting the finishing touches on a business plan aimed at setting up a statewide organization that would challenge the old assumption. "It is time to advocate for an end to population and consumption growth in administrative, judicial, legislative, educational and community arenas," he says. "There are compelling economic, social and ecological arguments to end growth. To date, these arguments have not been effectively injected into the debate."

He asks, "Why keep rewarding development by subsidizing each new house to the tune of $25,000 in infrastructure that is paid for by you and me, taxpayers?" Instead, he wants to see development, including those big chip firms, pay their own way.

He also wants to see population pay for itself. He would like to see public policy that encourages and helps pay for a first child and a second one, but puts any progeny after that at the full expense of the parents. So far, the thoughts are only starting points, and Kerr is not ready to divulge specifics. Stay tuned.

He says the state ultimately might need to determine just how big it wants to get. After all, you don’t build a house without knowing how many people it is meant to accommodate. "You can’t just manage growth and still keep Oregon Oregon," he says. "You would just end up with a better-planned California, L.A. with light rail." For everyone choking on the current growth, Kerr says: Take heart, there may be limits in our futures. He is working to try to make it happen. Source: March 28, 1999 Oregonian, by Sonya Zalubowski.

Kerr's group is putting on workshops throughout the state this month. The Eugene gathering will be from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday at the Hilyard Center, 2580 Hilyard St. The cost is on a sliding scale from $15 to $30.

Saturday's workshop, "Endless Growth, or the End of Growth: Making Your Community Better," will feature talks by Kerr, Eben Fodor, a Eugene researcher and author of "Better Not Bigger," and former Eugene City Councilor Shawn Boles.

Kerr said his talk will be about what continued growth means to Oregon and how to stop it. He helped put together an "alternatives to growth" conference last year in Portland.

The workshop also will focus on House Bill 3401, which would allow local governments and schools to charge developers for the full cost of growth. Schools currently cannot levy fees against developers to pay for building new schools, and cities cannot charge such development fees to finance new police and fire stations.

Kerr, who now lives in Joseph, said he's been interested in growth as an environmental issue since he was the conservation director for the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

He said halting or slowing population growth can be done. He also said taxpayers ;must stop subsidizing growth and giving financial incentives to industries to locate in Oregon, which fuels more growth. "If we keep packing people in, Oregon is just going to be a well-planned California," said Kerr, best known for his efforts to save the region's dwindling old growth forests. Source: April 8, 1999 Register Guard, by Lance Robertson.

Note: Alternatives to Growth Oregon workshop scheduled in Florence April 18, 1999.

Under the agreement, the manufacturers of personal watercraft will provide anti-pollution education and offer personal watercraft to help Tahoe Regional Planning Agency enforce its rules.

Two-stroke engines release up to a quarter of their fuel unburned into the water. The fuel contains chemicals that environmentalists contend are tainting the lake. Source: March 26, 1999, Register Guard.

Also see: Community Water Supply - draft agreement would allow boats on Clear Lake, Florence's future water supply

"I have never written anything defamatory, but that's what they claimed," Foster said of the lawsuit, which resulted from an effort to block a building permit on an undersized lot near a historic county road and hiking trail. Even the threat of such suits, she said, is "increasingly a method of shutting people up." That's because many people involved in local government decisions don't want to risk being taken to court and having to pay large attorney fees -- which they often can't afford -- to defend themselves. The result of the lawsuit against the Yachats group has been to "shut down public participation on the coast in a dramatic way," Foster said.

The testimony came before the House Judiciary Civil Law Committee during a hearing on House Bill 2805, which has been introduced by Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Canby, to discourage the so-called SLAPP suits -- Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. Mitch Rohse, an official of the Department of Land Conservation and Development, which supports the bill, said such suits increasingly are used to stifle opposition and have "a chilling effect on public debate." He said nine states, including California, have laws protecting against frivolous lawsuits, and 10 other states are considering it. Gov. John Kitzhaber supports the idea behind the bill.

HB2805 would grant immunity "for any statement" made by someone participating in the decision-making process before a public entity. It says defendants should be awarded attorney fees and other expenses if they are sued and a judge finds that their statements are immune. "It will protect citizens against very sophisticated, well-heeled, and sometimes well-intentioned, special-interest groups with a lot of power," Schrader said. "We need more citizen participation, not less."

A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate, but no hearing has been scheduled. Several members of the House committee said they are sympathetic to the issue but are concerned that the immunity clause would go too far and could allow someone to make false or defamatory statements with impunity. "This is a very broad immunity," said Rep. Max Williams, R-Tigard. "I'm very concerned about closing the courthouse door to a particular group of people." The committee chairman, Rep. Lane Shetterly, R-Dallas, said at the close of the hearing that the bill might be revised to address whether immunity is too broad, as well as other issues raised during the hearing. Among them is whether to extend protection to people who write letters to the editor published in newspapers. Compromise wording would put "the burden on those trying to sue . . . rather than on the citizens themselves," Schrader said. The only witness critical of the bill was Jon Chandler, lobbyist for the Oregon Building Industry Association. He said he wouldn't support developers or anyone else "suing people to discourage debate" but called the bill too broad. "I'm not sure there aren't already remedies."

Michael Sheehan, a Scappoose lawyer, testified that broad immunity, including protection against libel and slander, is necessary to make the legislation workable. Almost all SLAPP lawsuits involve an allegation of libel or slander, he said. "If you leave that door open, you accomplish nothing," Sheehan said. Sheehan cited an instance in which a county commissioner blocked a recall effort against him by threatening to sue anyone who signed the recall petitions.

Jeffery Lamb, chairman of Oregon Communities for a Voice in Annexations and a strong supporter of the bill, was among several witnesses who wanted it strengthened to include a provision allowing a judge to dismiss any lawsuit designed only to stifle someone from speaking out. Source: March 25, 1999, Oregonian, by R. Gregory Nokes.

In the past three years, the voter-annexation effort has caught fire, particularly among small- and medium-sized cities in the fast-growing Willamette Valley. Its proponents say they are fed up with city councils and planning commissions rubber-stamping the wishes of developers and builders, then asking voters to pay more for the schools, water and sewer systems required to serve new housing.

Home builders, in an unusual alliance with the state agency that enforces Oregon's strict planning rules, argue that the measures undercut Oregon law and invite chaotic planning. A critical part of their reasoning is that voters, unlike a planning commission, do not have to state any basis for their decisions.

Although the powerful home builders lobby had made passage of such a bill among its highest priorities in 1997, it could not get past the loud and persistent opposition of member cities united under the Oregon Communities for a Voice in Annexations group. Jon Chandler, a lobbyist for the Oregon Building Industry Association, said it had no intention of taking a lead role in pushing the Deckert bill. The reason, he said, is to avoid the scenario that led to 1997's failure: Nasty home builders take on upstanding citizens. "I don't see that the politics have changed much since the last session," Chandler said. "We're not backing away from the issue, but it becomes a morality play very quickly."

Another reason the 1997 bill failed was that home builders never were able to demonstrate that their fears -- citizens randomly voting down annexations -- had come to pass. In fact, Corvallis representatives showed that most proposed annexations had gone through. Even in November, at the same time seven cities decided to require voter approval of annexations, five other cities that put actual land annexations to a vote agreed to 17 separate proposals. None was rejected.

Chandler said builders also intend to mount a legal challenge if and when a proposed annexation is voted down even though it appears to meet state land-use criteria. Deckert said he was introducing the bill because he thinks the local measures undercut state laws. "You can't have statewide land-use planning and have local communities opting out of it," he said. For the same reason, the state Department of Land Conservation and Development supported a bill similar to Deckert's two years ago. But Richard Benner, the department's director, said he was not sure where the department would stand on rolling back voter-annexation measures in 23 cities, as the current bill would do.

Jeff Lamb, chairman of Oregon Communities for a Voice in Annexations, said the voter-annexation movement had, if anything, restored the public faith in its ability to take part in planning, the first goal of state land-use law.

And an extension of the movement, he said, has been to further discussion about who bears the costs of growth. "If you suspend the ability of people to hold an election," he said, "you suspend their ability to debate the underlying issues." Source: March 22, 1999, Oregonian Newspaper, by Alex Pulaski.

Most crimes involving unintentional acts - an accidental shooting, for example, or vehicular manslaughter - require proof of at least gross negligence, or a failure to use even slight care. But the court said the Clean Water Act was a "public welfare'' law, designed to protect people from the dangers of water pollution. Criminal prosecutions under such laws can be based on ordinary negligence, or a failure to use reasonable care, the same standard used in most civil suits for injuries.

``Civil negligence throws the criminal net pretty broad, and brings in a lot of conduct that would otherwise warrant perhaps civil fines,'' said Jerry Juday, a lawyer for an Alaska railroad worker facing a six-month jail sentence for an oil spill. Edward Hanousek Jr., a roadmaster for Pacific & Arctic Railway and Navigation Co., was convicted of negligently discharging between 1,000 and 5,000 gallons of oil that spilled from a ruptured pipeline into the Skagway River in 1994.

The court said Hanousek was in charge of a rock-quarrying project above the river, next to a high-pressure oil pipeline. The pipe was punctured by a backhoe operator. A jury acquitted Hanousek of conspiring to provide false information to investigating Coast Guard officers but convicted him of violating the Clean Water Act. He was sentenced to six months in jail, six months in a halfway house and a $5,000 fine. In upholding his conviction, the court said Hanousek was held responsible for his own negligence, not the backhoe operator's. Source: March 21, 1999, Register Guard, by Associated Press.

The 1973 law created urban growth boundaries and militantly discouraged development incompatible with farm and forest uses outside those boundaries. Previous land use law titled in favor of people who wanted to develop their property. Senate Bill 100 required local governments to give more weight to the interests of the neighboring property owners who opposed incompatible uses or simply wanted to be left alone.

Thirty years ago the arrival of bulldozers was the first notice neighboring property owners might get of a new subdivision. The present land use legal process – some argue overly legalistic – assures that people are heard, if not always heeded, before development decisions are final.

Urban growth boundaries allowed Oregonians to avoid the question of "where to put all those people." The answer then was that cities will fill their urban growth boundaries and discuss enlarging them later. The day of reckoning was further delayed by the recession of the 1980s, which slowed Oregon's feverish growth rate. For the last 30 years Oregon's population growth has been accommodated by developing land inside the original urban growth boundaries. The big battles were fought over incompatible development on farm and forest land.

Land use battles since 1973 were fought by the two original interest groups formed under the passage of SB 100. Oregonians In Action unsuccessfully opposed statewide land use planning. 1000 Friends of Oregon included the original supporters of the new approach to land use planning. Both groups are still around. Neither is run by its original members.

Oregonians In Action was rejuvenated by Gary and Larry George. This father and son team say they were farmers in California who moved to Oregon when development in that state made farming uneconomic. Larry George manages Oregonians In Action. Sen. Gary George, R-Newberg, shares the Senate Land Use Committee that considers legislation his son's organization supports and opposes. 1000 Friends of Oregon is now headed by its second director, Robert Liberty, and run by a young staff.

Despite a new cast of characters, much of the revived land use debate is the same as it was 30 years ago. With so many newcomers to Oregon in the last three decades it is clear a new generation must resolve the issue all over again. Relatively few Oregonians remember former Gov. Tom McCall and the chord he struck with his half-serious statement to "please come and visit us in Oregon again and again. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live!"

The new land use debate has shifted from McCall's condemnation of "coastal condomania" and "sagebrush subdivisions" built by the "grasping wastrels of the land." Oregonians In Action styles itself as a "property rights" group. Neither term is particularly accurate. Oregonians In Action is concerned with its members' development rights. 1000 Friends is concerned with the property rights of landowners affected by development.

Both groups are searching for slogans and themes that "resonate" with Oregon newcomers. Oregonians In Action like to call Oregon's land use laws a "failed experiment." 1000 Friends continues the theme of "protecting farm and forest land."

Ironically, the strongest evidence the Oregon's land use experiment is successful is in Yamhill County, in Gary George's Senate district. About 30 years ago, Yamhill County commissioners declared the "death of agriculture" in their county and rezoned much of the farm land into 5- and 10acre "ranchettes." Speculators sold lots in Coast Range cutover timber land to unsuspecting out-of-state buyers. The statewide planning goals adopted by the Land Conservation and Development Commission after vigorous public debate effectively prohibited development on this land outside urban growth boundaries. Once the speculative frenzy stopped, prices dropped to the point at which adjacent farmers and timber land owners could buy the land for farms and tree farms. Yamhill County's entire wine grape industry is built on land county commissioners once condemned to development.

Statewide evidence of success is even stronger. The farmgate value of Oregon agricultural production rose from $986 million in 1973 to about $3.6 billion last year. Six of Oregon's top 10 agricultural counties are still in the Willamette Valley, despite a doubling of the state's population in the last 30 years.

Demographers predict another doubling of Oregon's population in the next 30 years. Environmental officials say the Willamette River is as polluted today as it was when major cleanup efforts began in the 1960s. Those expensive efforts were defeated by the doubling of the state's population in the last 30 years. All of Oregon's efforts to protect farm and forest land, keep its streams and rivers clean, protect its beaches and restore its salmon runs will be defeated if the population doubles again.

Oregon's three-decades-old solution to urban growth – compact development, effective mass transit, limiting new highway capacity – is being challenged by a generation of newcomers who do not understand it and do not support it. The alternatives they are proposing in the Legislature – more highway capacity, less mass transit, enlarging urban growth boundaries, more development on "secondary" farm land – are not new. They are the alternatives Oregonians considered and rejected 30 years ago because Oregonians knew where those policies would lead. They only had to look north and south on Interstate 5. It is worse 30 years later.

From Bellingham to San Diego, 75% of all Americans who live west of Denver are shoehorned into a strip of urban sprawl 100 miles wide along I-5 – the Pacific Slope. Oregon's land use debate is moving beyond the question of "where will we put all those people" to "should we even try." The new debate will challenge the assumption that sprawl is the inevitable handmaiden of economic growth. March 15, 1999, Register Guard,. By Russell Sadler.

It wasn't asked, so it didn't try to tell. Besides, the issue might not be a question with an answer, the task force's completed report said. "Whether growth is good or bad for Oregon cannot be determined definitively because of the complexity of growth relationships, uncertainty, and the diversity of interests and perspectives," the report said.

In other words, it's controversial.

The loss of farmland for housing can be bad for farmers who want to farm and for homeowners who want open spaces. But it's good for farmers who want to sell their land and for homeowners who might find lower prices, the yearlong study found. "Characterizing the choices confronting citizens in the region as pro-growth versus no-growth is wrong both politically and technically," the report said. The presence of both slow-growth and pro-growth advocates on the 15-member panel complicated any effort by the task force to come down on one side or the other. Kitzhaber asked the task force to assemble facts about he effects of growth to help people form conclusions about the amount, type, location and rate of growth that "would be desirable or acceptable."

Indeed, the report is a 130-page compilation of analysis and facts, ranging from distribution of population to factors that encourage growth to the costs of providing estimates the total cost to be $30,000 to $50,000 for a single-family home, more than other recent estimates. Income inequality is worsening: The top fifth of households earned nine times more than the bottom fifth in 1994-96, compared with seven times more 1988-90, the report said. And the cost of living is slightly higher than the national average, it said, though the cost of housing is slightly less.

The task force estimated that 1 million more people will live in Oregon by the year 2015 and another million by 2040, raising the total from 3.1 million in 1995 to 5.2 million. More than 70 percent, or 1.7 million, will be from migration. One million more people will require about 500,000 more homes, plus the services that go with them. Newcomers will demand about as much new urban land as now exists in the Portland area's urban-growth boundary, or about 375 square miles.

The task force concluded, not surprisingly, that the state's growth is highly imbalanced, with most of it occurring in the Portland area and Willamette Valley and less in Oregon's rural areas. Of Oregon's 3.2 million people in 1997, nearly 70 percent were in the Willamette Valley, which has only 14 percent of the state's land area. Seventy percent of the jobs are also in the Willamette Valley. The report said newcomers are drawn to different areas of the state for different reasons. Among them:

• The Portland area tends to attract younger people, many educated, who are looking for jobs, especially high-tech jobs.

• Central Oregon attracts older-than-average and wealthier people who are strongly pro-environment.

• Southern Oregon gets the "oldest newcomers," with slightly higher incomes and considerably more education than the existing population.

It said "very wealthy immigrants" are attracted to two destinations: Clackamas County and, more recently, the Central Oregon counties of Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson. The task force expects no significant change in the imbalance in the near future. It said state and local policies probably could slow growth in the Portland area and Willamette Valley but probably not redistribute it to other parts of the state. Rather, it said, growth discouraged in the Portland area, for example, would more likely occur in cities such as Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia, than in Pendleton.

"Portland provides specialized cultural, legal, medical and financial services that are not available in Pendleton," it said. "Portland's economy -- both in its size and composition -- is not simply a larger version of Pendleton's economy. It more closely resembles Seattle." It said that there is a link between urban and rural economies of Oregon but that it is "more likely to be complementary than offsetting," so that Eastern Oregon is more likely to grow if Portland does, too.

Growth Task Force Recommendations

• Ensure that adequate tools exist to help communities plan to protect forests and farmlands and meet other state planning goals; finance the Regional Problem Solving Program; and provide for regionwide planning reviews.

• Seek improved ways of limiting growth in certain areas to protect natural resources.

• Allow local governments to tax the added value created when property is added to urban growth boundaries to help defray the cost of growth and promote affordable housing.

• Develop state mechanisms to help local governments finance infrastructure needs in a timely manner, such as a state-financed loan fund available to municipalities.

• Gain legislative approval of an increase in the gasoline tax to finance transportation improvements across the state and create financing mechanisms for local transit needs.

• Consider increasing state technical assistance to local governments to manage growth, such as a "how-to" manual.

• Establish a task force to "more thoroughly" research growth issues during the 1999-2001 biennium and oversee implementation of these recommendations. The group should "specifically address the basic fairness issues surrounding the question, 'Who should pay for growth?' "

Source: February 28, 1999, Oregonian, by R. Gregory Nokes.Source: February 28, 1999, Oregonian, by R. Gregory Nokes.

Get used to it, because we may be in for more of the same extra-soggy conditions during the next few decades. Scientists say evidence is mounting that a shift is occurring in the Northwest's climate cycle that would bring wetter-than-average winters than have been experienced in the past two decades.

Although this year's La Niña climate event is contributing to the dreary dripping, the primary culprit may be a recently discovered phenomenon named by University of Washington scientists as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. It is one of the most fundamental drivers of the region's climate, switching between wet-cool and dry-warm phases about every 10 to 30 years.

The oscillation's cycles are based on sea-surface temperatures. A warm, dry phase occurs when there is a large pool of cooler-than-average surface water in the north-central Pacific Ocean and a narrow strip of warmer-than-average surface water near the West Coast. When the opposite temperatures occur, the oscillation enters its cool, wet phase.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is much slower to flop from one phase to another than the fast-fluctuating El Niño Southern Oscillation, which involves the tropical Pacific and can switch between its El Niño and La Niña states in only a year or two. The average El Niño normally results in warmer, drier conditions in the Northwest, while a La Niña is more likely to produce cooler, wetter weather.

Until recently, the Northwest had been in a warm, dry cycle for about 20 years. In this century, wet phases occurred from 1900 to 1925 and from 1945 to 1977, with the dry cycles recorded in the remaining years. Philip Mote, a research scientist with the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean, and his colleagues say a wet Pacific Decadal Oscillation phase has persisted for the past six months, though it may be too soon to say with certainty that it will last. "PDOs are not well-understood," Mote said. "We don't have the instruments out there beneath the ocean's surface that would help us gain better data, and there aren't a lot of people doing research into these events."

George H. Taylor, state climatologist for Oregon, said he thinks we've been in a wet oscillation phase even longer than six months -- perhaps since the winter of 1994-95. "It's interesting in that there had been a period of about 10 years of drier than normal weather on average in Oregon, and there was the significant drought in the summer of 1994," Taylor said. "Then we got into October of 1994, and things suddenly got wet, and they've pretty much stayed wet ever since."

Mote said it's difficult to precisely ascertain a Pacific oscillation cycle change, adding it takes about five years of observations to determine when a shift has taken place. Mote and Alan Hamlet, a UW civil and environmental engineer, told a Northwest weather workshop last weekend in Seattle that two additional pieces of evidence suggest the climate cycle is changing to wet mode: Stream flows in the Columbia River Basin are increasing with the higher precipitation, and salmon populations off Alaska are decreasing as the Pacific water cools, causing the fish to head south. Hamlet said the high stream flow in the Columbia River in 1996-97 was intriguing because that has never occurred in warm-phase oscillations in the past century.

An El Niño during the winter of 1997-98 had been expected to bring warm, dry conditions and reduce Columbia Basin stream flows, but the flows were about normal. One explanation may be that the wet-phase Pacific Decadal Oscillation curbed the effects of a strong El Niño at that time, Mote said. "Considering how closely stream flows have reflected the phase of the PDO in the past, we think the Columbia River is telling us a shift might have happened," he said.

Pacific Decadal Oscillations provide the longer-term trends, but the shorter-lived La Niñas and El Niños also are a factor in the region's complex climate. "During the dry PDO regimes, El Niños tend to give us really dry conditions," Taylor said. "And a La Niña tends to give us just about average precipitation in the dry regime. But during the wet regime, El Niños tend to give us close-to-average conditions, and La Niñas tend to be really wet."

The La Niña the Northwest now is experiencing, combined with a wet oscillation phase, doesn't bode well for having a dry spring. Kelly T. Redmond, regional climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev., said forecasts for the next three months call for above-average likelihood of wet conditions in the Northwest.

Although the shift to a wet phase could mean that more landslides and floods are in the region's future, it also would provide better conditions for salmon, forest growth and hydroelectric power, scientists say. Redmond said despite the increased rainfall, the winter has been "generally warm," especially in the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon, and "near average" west of the Cascades.

The winter hasn't provided as much drama as some experts had expected last fall, particularly because the instances of cold weather and wet weather haven't occurred simultaneously except on a couple of occasions, said Redmond, a former state climatologist for Oregon. "The memory of this winter will probably more consist of a blur of a lot of modest events than a sharp recollection of one or two standout events," Redmond said. "An outcome of 'pretty wet' isn't enough to put in the scrapbook for the grandkids -- that yes, it was wet, but not up to our perhaps inflated expectations." Source: March 4, 1999, Oregonian, by Richard L. Hill.