February 26th, 2010
Yesterday the Metro council approved a package of 28,000 acres of future urban growth boundary expansion areas and 272,000 acres of “rural reserves“ that will be off limits to urban growth boundary expansion for the next fifty years. What does it all mean?
In the best case, the urban reserves approved yesterday should be relatively unimportant parts of our future. Far from being the region’s “growth engines” for future jobs and housing, we should think of them as our “water wings”—something to fall back on as we learn how to grow in a more sustainable way inside the existing urban growth boundary. This region has a smart, community-based vision, the “2040 Plan,” that says we should focus homes and jobs in downtowns, along main streets, and in existing industrial areas. Compared with expanding out onto 28,000 acres of farms and other rural land, this “2040” approach will save us tax dollars, give us more affordable and convenient transportation choices, and protect our water, air, farmland, and natural areas. If our plans fall short—if we can’t accommodate all the housing and jobs that come our way—then we can carefully use parts of these urban reserves to meet those needs (particularly, for large-site industrial uses that provide high paying traded sector employment). The reserves should be a fallback, not our first choice for development.
That’s why it’s been frustrating to see one set of regional partners—Washington County and some of its cities—take a radically different approach. Using a decision making process that effectively excluded farmers and other rural landowners until very late in the game, Washington County and some of its cities essentially adopted a strategy of “let’s see how much we can get”—as if sprawling onto valuable farmland were a good thing. Washington County initially proposed an eye-popping 47,000 acres of urban reserves in that one county alone—over 50 percent more than the total being adopted for the region. And they started at 47,000, says former Hillsboro mayor (and my current opponent) Tom Hughes, because “we didn’t think we could get 70,000 acres.”
Unfortunately, a majority of Metro Council members has now voted to reward that kind of “planning” by approving a set of reserves that is unnecessarily harmful to Washington County’s best farmland. The urban reserves in Washington County include hundreds of acres of farmland north of the town of Cornelius. There’s no present or future urban land need for that area; it is simply a political gesture to an economically disadvantaged small town that needs a coherent jobs strategy, not a swath of farmland taken out of the heart of the agricultural economy that surrounds Cornelius. It will fall to the next group of elected Metro and Washington County leaders to correct this misstep, and to avoid premature expansion into other urban reserves before they’re needed.
