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September 12, 2006

Measure 37 Not to Blame in Newberry Crater Controversy

I think Measure 37 is getting a bum rap because of the controversy over the proposed development of the Newberry Crater. An editorial in yesterday's Register Guard by Douglas Larson, an adjunct professor at Portland State University, prompts me to explain why.

Larson writes:

When Oregonians approved Measure 37 in 2004, few realized that their passion for "property fairness" could threaten some of the state's most treasured natural wonders - including the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, located about 30 miles south of Bend. …

Newberry Crater would have been the perfect poster child to depict what Oregon could lose if Measure 37 became law. The 90-square-mile monument, with the crater as its centerpiece, was created by Congress in 1990 to "preserve for present and future generations the unique geologic landforms and many other resources."…

Yet, despite its national monument status, Newberry Crater may soon feature more than its unique geologic landforms, rare lakes and priceless plant and animal communities. Indeed, future visitors may also behold a geothermal power plant, an open-pit mine containing an estimated 8.5 million cubic yards of high-quality pumice, and a hundred upscale vacation homes equipped with septic tanks and drainfields.

All this would be on 157 acres of private property alongside East Lake.

And therein lies the problem. The land is privately owned. And unfortunately, the County can't afford to buy it so they have little choice but to allow the owner's development plans, which were legal at the time it was purchased, to move forward.

I can only ask why nobody ever moved to purchase this precious land for the public before. It has been nearly forty years – plenty of time to have raised the money to buy it – but the land is still in private ownership. Why? I think it is because people who recognized the resource decided that they wouldn't have to come up with the money if they just took the property through regulation. They thought they had it locked up.

Who cared about the man who invested in the property? It was just one guy. So what? Well, I'll tell you so what. It hasn't been just one guy. It's been property owners all over the state, some big and some small – enough of them that all the sky-is-falling rhetoric in the world wasn't enough to change Oregon voters' minds when they went to the polls – two elections straight – and stood up for private property rights. It is something that it is high time land use planners and environmentalists got through their heads.

The passage of Measure 37 never meant people thought natural resources weren't worth saving. Obviously, natural resources are a top priority for Oregonians. No, what the vote meant was that people thought it was wrong to be cheap about it – to take the resources for the benefit of the public by regulating away their use and not paying for them, leaving individual property owners stuck paying mortgages and property taxes on land they couldn't use. Oregonians are fair people, and they didn't like that.

The potential damage to the Newberry Crater is intolerable and I place the blame squarely on the backs of people who years ago recognized what could be lost and, rather than launching a fundraising drive to save the resource, instead worked to take away the owner's property rights. Now it's coming back to bite them, and all the rest of us, hard in the butt.

Posted by Becky at September 12, 2006 10:33 AM