This is a great article for getting your head around Measure 49 and what it all means.
By Eric Schuck, Professor of Economics at Linfield College
Like most people, I like leaving my day job at work. But
the moment most people find out that I'm an economics
professor, I get asked a lot of financial questions
("What's the stock market going to do?").
Lately, though, I've been getting a tough question, a
really tough question: What does Measure 49 mean?
At root, Measure 49 seeks to settle the question of whether
or not the cost of preserving open space will be carried by
private landowners or whether the costs of sprawl can be
shifted to society as a whole by private landowners. From an
economic standpoint, neither side has exactly staked out the
moral high ground.
In this kind of decision-making environment, economists tend
to focus on incentives and process. And by these criteria,
passing Measure 49 is much less worse than leaving Measure
37 in place. To see this, we need to flash back to 1973.
Open space is what economists consider a public good, a good
where the collective benefits to society outweigh the costs
of providing it, but where the benefits to any single
individual are sufficiently diffuse and the costs
sufficiently concentrated that no single individual has an
incentive to provide it. To overcome this problem and to get
society to actually produce benefits like open space,
economists generally favor either subsidies or direct public
provision.
By constructing tax and land-use codes that provide
differential -- indeed, deferential -- treatment for
agricultural lands and forestlands, Oregon took the subsidy
route. But it also took the least desirable route to direct
provision: zoning certain areas into specific production of
open space without paying for it.
That's where Measure 37 came in. To undo some of the
less-desirable traits of Oregon's land-use laws,
Measure 37 sought to put control back in the hands of
landowners. But it went too far, devolving land-use and
open-space decisions to their least-regulated environment.
Under Measure 37, regional land-use decisions come from the
private decisions of landowners with the longest tenure.
Basically, an area's land-use patterns are now dictated
by the oldest property owner with the least patience,
regardless of what the general population might want.
Worse still, by making this decision-making privilege a
one-time, non-transferable deal, Measure 37 gave landowners
an incentive to make their choices sooner rather than later,
and to do so faster than their neighbors lest they be boxed
out of the most profitable paths. This is why we saw the
flurry of maxed-out Measure 37 claims right before the
submission deadlines. People didn't want to lose their
spin at the roulette wheel.
Land-use decisions have taken on a chaotic, casino-like
feel, where every landowner is trying to hit the development
jackpot regardless of regional consequences. Turning our
regional growth patterns into a slot machine outcome is a
dumb way to run a state.
Which brings us back to Measure 49. For all of their flaws,
the basics of Oregon's land-use laws were generated
through a deliberative, legislative process, a process that
allowed society's larger interests in land-use policy
to be reflected. It set up a system that took long-run
consequences into account and gave a certain amount of
stability to the region's development path, stability
that has made our future much easier to map.
Measure 49 would restore the positive incentives and stable
process that Measure 37 stripped away, while recognizing
that producing open space without compensation is unfair. So
what does Measure 49 mean? An end to land use by lottery in
Oregon.
The same timber companies and developers who funded the "Yes on 37" campaign in 2004 are spending a fortune trying to defeat Measure 49. As part of that campaign - in television ads, mailers, flyers and in the voter's pamphlet - the Stop 49 Campaign has offered up "spokespeople" who claim that Measure 49 would prevent them from undertaking modest developments on their property. But the claims they are making are very different than the claims they have actually filed. Below is a chart of some of the "Stop 49" spokespeople in ads from the last several weeks. Read the real facts behind these spokespeople, and why they are working for the "Stop 49" Campaign.
