This is Floyd Wynne with THE VIEW FROM HERE 5/19/05

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle!
The Legislature is still hassling with what to do about Measure 37. How to interpret it and apply it to all parts of the state.
Over thirty years ago the Thousand Friends of Oregon, as they called themselves, managed to get land use laws passed that detailed what one could or could not do with their property.
On the face of it, at the time, it seemed that it would be thrown out as unconstitutional, but they managed to get a LCDC board named by the governor and pretty much in sync with the wishes of those same Thousand Friends.
Claiming that good farmland was being paved over and the state was in dire need of losing a lot of its productive land the law was first passed to set up guidelines for each county to put together its own land use program, detailing pretty much where the urban grown boundaries would be and pretty much guaranteeing that no farmland could ever be subdivided and that it would be nearly impossible for one to build a home on forest land.
They then got the next step taken....instead of guidelines...it turned out to be state directives that a county either followed or they were threatened with the loss of any state funding.
So....over the thirty year period....LCDC kept the genie in the bottle.....that genie being the sanctity of property rights.
Then along came measure 37 which was passed by 60 percent of the voting populace in the state.
That measure restored property rights....and dictated that if a government regulation devalued your property....that government had to either compensate you, buy your property.....or permit you to go ahead with whatever plans you might have for your property. It seemed pretty simple. What it did was let the genie out of the bottle in which the state had placed all land in the state.
Currently there is a struggle going in the Legislature to determine just what the sponsors of Measure 37 really intended. LCDC had been demanding that one had to show that a forested piece of property had produced income of $80,000 per year for two of the last three years in order for one to build a home on it. Also all farmland, both prime and marginal were not to be subdivided. A farmer could construct a building on his land for his employees, but not for his family.
That’s the genie that they kept in the bottle these past 30 some years. Measure 37 took the cap off the bottle and the genie is out.
All efforts at the Legislative level seem aimed at putting the genie back in the bottle in one fashion or another. They have set a time limit on its effectiveness. One must have owned the property at the time the measure was passed by the people, and it seems that they feel that the ownership with its property rights intact cannot be sold and passed to another owner.
The Thousand Friends are trying to re-allocate farmland into three categories....prime....good....and marginal. The prime, they maintain, should never be subdivided....the good could qualify for a benefit under 37 which they could then sell to someone who could use it to build in a qualified urban boundary, and the marginal could be subdivided into 20 acre lots.....maybe.
Another alternative they are looking at is some kind of a state fund that would enable the state to maintain its current land use laws by buying any damaged property rights.
No clear alternative appears to be gaining favor, and it will be interesting to see how they plan to put the land use genie back in the bottle.

This is Floyd Wynne and that’s THE VIEW FROM HERE.