I am trying, trying hard to imagine what a "zoning emergency" might be. Is a slaughterhouse about to fall into a swimming pool? Is a dam about to break?
Maybe you have a better imagination than I; maybe you won't recoil like I did at a statute passed by Oregon's state senate.
Senate Bill 823 — passed 23 to six by that august body — sets out to prohibit all development on or within spitting distance of the historic Oregon Trail running from the state line to the city of The Dalles. It's quite a bite out of the future, for the sake of the past.
And it strikes me as utterly absurd.
But, even if it were not, on the face of it, a stupid and intrusive law, a usurpation, nothing more than plunder tarted up as a never-ending history lesson, how could it be construed as an emergency?
Yes, that's how the august Oregon state senators labeled their legislation. Emergency. A zoning emergency. Here's the wording:
SECTION 3. This 2007 Act being necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is declared to exist, and this 2007 Act takes effect on its passage.
The senate's act would prohibit Oregon's no-doubt equally august zoning bodies from ever approving any application for a permit — or any other development approval — to change a current land use at any location within 100 feet of the route of the Oregon Trail.
The senators in their debate, I'm told, gave no real context of the emergency character of their notion. They just added the section. It's the thing to do these days. We live in "emergency-oriented" times.
Steve Buckstein, of the Cascade Policy Institute, noted the cavalier way the solons thought through the bill. "[N]o one realized during the Senate debates that there were serious unintended consequences of such a feel-good bill." Fortunately, Buckstein publicized the thing, and by the time it got to a committee of Oregon's House of Representatives,
no one testified in support of the bill as written. Property owners showed up to explain how this bill would prohibit them from even remodeling their own living rooms because their homes sat on a trail used by their ancestors 150 years ago. Others testified how the bill would devastate their farming operations, even on stretches of the Trail where there were no remaining physical signs of the covered wagons that traveled there long ago.
At the heart of the bill lie two very distinct things: sentimentalism regarding history, and, as Buckstein astutely noted, a betrayal of that very history: "The Oregon Trail was all about progress, opportunity, and the right to own and control one's own property." But
if this bill becomes law, it will add a dark chapter to the Trail's history. It will tell future generations that we turned our backs on some of the very values the pioneers risked their lives to achieve along the Oregon Trail.
Of course, the people of Oregon are much saner than their representatives. They know that the present and the future are more important than establishing unalterable trails in honor of one makeshift trail that began their history. Continued... |