Nature Conservancy Magazine: Spring 2008 - Newsfront: Ballot Battle

Go Deeper

The Nature Conservancy in Oregon
In Oregon, The Nature Conservancy owns or manages 46 nature preserves and has helped protect over 494,000 acres of important habitat.

A national surge in property-rights ballot measures hit a wall in Oregon last November, when voters there overturned a law allowing developers, timber companies and other landowners to challenge land-use regulations. “At watershed moments, Oregonians have voted to protect our coasts, rivers, forests, farmlands and special places for future generations,” says Russ Hoeflich, The Nature Conservancy's director in Oregon. “This is one of those times.”

Sixty-two percent of Oregon voters cast ballots in favor of Measure 49, which rolled back a 2004 law, Measure 37, that allowed property owners to seek compensation if state and local regulations reduced property values. Measure 37 was adopted in response to resentment over land-use laws limiting rural development. In practice, however, Measure 37 threatened to overwhelm the state’s land-use regulations, allowing landowners to develop huge housing projects, strip malls and landfills without challenge. In just three years, landowners had filed more than 7,500 claims on 750,000 acres.

The state legislature put Measure 49 on the November 2007 ballot as a compromise fix to the 2004 property-rights law. The new law preserves a land-owner's right to build homes but curbs large commercial and industrial development. A broad coalition of farmers, business groups and conservation groups raised $4.5 million in support of the new measure. The Conservancy invested more than $1 million in the campaign, fearing that protected lands would become fragmented by unregulated sprawl and development.

The Oregon vote is the latest skirmish in a regulatory battle over property rights and community values playing out across the country. Eleven states saw property-rights initiatives in 2006. Only the initiative in Arizona passed.

“The momentum is now on the side of those who want to protect rural communities,” says Don Chen, the former director of the anti-urban-sprawl group Smart Growth America. But this election year is likely to bring new challenges to land-use laws, he says. For now, however, Oregon voters have made clear a mandate for conservation.

—Jane Braxton Little