Monday, March 05, 2007

You're a rich man, Burdette... big ranch, pay a lot of people to do what you want 'em to do.

This post by Peter Bray over at Land Use Watch is an excellent first hand account of the inanity that is Measure 37.

One of the things Measure 37 doesn't require, but should, is some sort of proof that the landowner had planned on developing their property in such a way that was later prohibited PRIOR to land use/ zoning laws going into effect. What we're left with is a situation where landowners get to pull a Pee Wee Herman claiming "I meant to do that." Long term property owners who had previously no plans of development suddenly saw dollar signs after the passage of Measure 37.

I've been hoping the legislature addresses some of the biggest issues in Measure 37 but now I'd just like to see the thing repealed.

4 comments:

Swinebread said...

37 chaps my hide

Don Snabulus said...

I think we should all file and say a nuclear waste dump was going in on our property and now it can't. Please give me $1 billion apiece or let us dump nuclear waste in our back yard.

Anonymous said...

You'd like proof?

Would you like to have the 30 years of papers from me trying to work with Oregons land use do-do? I weighed my papers the other day, 16 pounds worth of files.

I and those like me have been carrying the weight of the land use in this State and we're tired of it. Each legislative session they take more, compounded by the State employees in their little DLCD cubicles who sit around all day looking for more ways to steal from me and those like me.

You are practicing their tactic...stall....delay...deny. If you can hold us off long enough the spiders at DLCD can spin their little webs to steal again.

Dean Wormer said...

Annie,

Thanks for the comment.

The state needed sensible land use reform that took people like Dorothy English into account. Measure 37 wasn't it. But then it was never intended to be, was it?

I'm sure people like you knew what M37 would REALLY do to Oregon's very popular and very progressive land use laws. I'm sure you knew that the Oregonians in Action ads were a red herring, that the small land owners like English who had a true beef would only make up a small portion of claims once the law came into effect. I'm sure you didn't care that the ads were downright deceptive given the intention of M37s backers.

At best this makes you dishonest by extension. If you can't win an argument on merit then you haven't really won. And I simply don't care that you'll have 16 or 106 pounds of land use files sitting around your office. You'll have nobody to blame but yourself.