Podcast: Play in new window
Oregonians in Action has been in the fight for property rights for many years. Why does a farmer need to make $80000.00 a year for two years before he can build a house on his farm? The answer is the communist centralized land use planning that has been penalizing hard work for decades in Oregon. Who do these people that enact these “rules” think they are? I have a feeling things are going to be changing for Oregonians real soon. The critical mass necessary for real change is building and the winds of change are beginning to blow…
Infill? Urban growth boundaries? What are they? Listen in to find out. Beware. You’re not in Kansas anymore.
“In some areas, lands currently planned for resource uses have little direct value to their owners for those uses.” Now there’s an understatement! These numbers don’t include all of the land owned by the federal, state, and local governments in Oregon. In fact, over 55% of all land in Oregon is owned by government, not private parties. What does all this mean? It means that Oregon has a lot of land that LCDC calls “farmland” or “forest land” that really isn’t, and that we are under no risk of running out of land for food or timber production. Since the definitions of “agricultural land” and “forest land” were first adopted in Goals 3 and 4, they have proven controversial. As former DLCD Director Richard Whitman (currently the Governor’s Natural Resources Policy Director) noted in 2009: “Two of the primary reasons for establishing Oregon’s land use system were the desire to preserve working farms and forest operations and to limit inefficient sprawl. Recent research indicates that Oregon’s program has been relatively successful in achieving both of these goals relative to other states. Nevertheless, there is continuing sentiment in some parts of the state that our land use policies do not adequately recognize differing conditions in different regions, either in terms of what lands are needed for farming or for forestry, or in terms of growth pressures. Some counties also report that their mapping of farm and forest lands is not accurate. READ MORE HERE http://oia.org/images/lookingforward/vol19-issue1online.pdf 
