A personal message from Councilor Liberty
Our line in the sand
For the last four years the Metro Council and Metro staff have been toiling away to develop a new plan for our region's growth.
And now it is coming time for some big decisions, decisions by the Metro Council, by Clackamas, Washington and Multnomah counties and by all the cities in our region.
How big?
Big enough to be important to our planet. Big enough to affect every neighborhood where we live.
At the core of all of these decisions is our urban growth boundary.
The urban growth boundary is the line that separates the city from the country.
It is the line that protects the farmland where our food is grown, the farmland where we go for a bike ride, to sample wine, pick strawberries or a Christmas tree.
It is the line that keeps the subdivisions and the malls out of the forests that produce wood, provide a place for wildlife and allow our streams to run clear, cold and clean.
It is the line that allows us to focus our precious tax dollars in maintaining and improving the streets, the water pipes and the parks that we already have. Without that line, we would be spending our taxes to build new roads, sewers and schools on the farmland and the forest land at the edge of our region.
It is the line that allows us to be efficient with our tax dollars, keeping the tax burden lower for the businesses providing the jobs we need.
It is a line that allows us to drive less and have more choices of how to get around, which is good for our pocket book. Because we can drive less, we reduce the amount of climate-changing pollution we send into our air.
And even more fundamentally, it is the line that separates us from the sprawl in New Jersey, or California or Texas. It is the line that defines our region and our state as a special place, very different from so much of the rest of America.
So moving the urban growth boundary too much, too fast and in the wrong place is a step toward erasing that line, toward becoming more like the places we don't want to be and can't afford to be.
Over the next few months the Metro Council, Washington, Clackamas and Multnomah counties and the cities will be considering how much land we ought to be identifying for future urban development, lands called "urban reserves." Urban reserves are the places where we believe the urban growth boundary should be moved in the future.
The Washington County planning staff is recommending that 50 square miles (33,000 acres) of farm and forestland should be designated for future development, about one-fifth of all the remaining farmland in Washington County.
When you next drive out Highway 26, take a look at everything on both sides of the highway and imagine it filled up with subdivisions and malls and gas stations. Your ride to the coast will be a lot more like a drive along Highway 1 in New Jersey.
Clackamas County is still mulling over how much land they want as urban reserves, but it could be as much as 20 square miles.
By contrast, the citizens committee advising Multnomah County on urban reserves recommended 80 acres of urban reserves. The citizens committee believes that the county's future growth can be realized by rebuilding dilapidated buildings, developing vacant lots and parking lots. In fact, that is how the city of Portland has been growing for the last several decades.
Metro's own analysis shows that we don't need very much land at all, for housing or new jobs, provided that we make good use of the land that we already have. We might need a bit more land for large-scale companies. But we also want to make sure that good jobs are distributed fairly around the region, so that we don't have to spend so much time and money commuting to them.
And there is another thing we need to consider: how much would it cost the taxpayers here to pay for the new roads, schools, transit lines, sewers, fire stations, sidewalks, parks and community centers to cover 70 square miles of land?
Washington County studied this question for 800 acres added to the urban growth boundary a decade ago. They concluded that if the full range of taxpayer-funded costs were considered, it came out to about $100,000 per house or about $600,000 per acre.
At that rate, the taxpayers would have to come up with $27 billion, yes billion, to pay for all the new improvements on 70 square miles added to the urban growth boundary.
And once the taxpayers had paid $27 billion to build the new neighborhoods, how much money would be left over to maintain the pipes, parks, roads, transit lines and schools we already have? Shouldn't maintaining and improving the neighborhoods and downtowns we have now be a higher priority than building new communities? In this sense the urban growth boundary is also a line drawn around our taxes.
And what about the new development we want in some of our downtowns and along our main streets? Will it have all been built out at the edge, leaving our existing main streets and downtowns to decay? What would that do to our property values if our neighborhoods started to go downhill?
Yes, yes, all of our planning is much more complex and more subtle and multi-faceted than the urban growth boundary. But when all is said and done, it still comes down to that line, the urban growth boundary.
That is why, even though the urban growth boundary goes through lush farm and forest lands, it is still a line we have drawn in the sand. It is where we need to take our stand.
