Property Rights Law Is Upheld in Oregon

Oregon’s highest court Tuesday upheld a voter-approved law requiring that landowners be compensated for development restrictions -- handing a major victory to the property rights movement and galvanizing efforts to put similar measures before voters this year in Washington, Nevada and Oklahoma.

But environmental groups in Oregon said the ruling would spur their efforts to repeal the law, which could upend the state’s decades-old, carefully controlled development laws preserving a patchwork of green around Portland, Eugene and other major cities.

In its unanimous decision, the Oregon Supreme Court overturned a lower-court ruling that had tossed out the law, known as Measure 37 and passed by voters in November 2004.

Under Measure 37, county governments must either allow landowners to exercise development rights that existed before the state’s land-use restrictions were put in place or compensate the owners for the lost value caused by those limits.

In practice, this could mean that land now restricted to agricultural use would be opened to housing or even commercial development, since suburban and exurban growth demands have made those uses more profitable than farming.

Because no money was set aside for compensation under the law, and most cities and counties in Oregon are strapped for cash, many local officials have warned that they would be unable to select the compensation option.

Property rights advocates dismiss those predictions as Chicken Little warnings and praised the court’s revival of the measure. About 2,500 applications have been filed under it, and they have been in limbo since the lower-court ruling; Tuesday’s decision will probably force local officials to make decisions on the applications in the coming months.

“We had law, fact and common sense on our side,” said Ross Day, director of legal affairs for Oregonians in Action, the group that wrote Measure 37.

Environmental groups said they would put a measure on the ballot asking voters to decide the issue, perhaps by establishing a compensation fund.

“The court held that Measure 37 is legal. The court did not rule that it is fair,” said Bob Stacey, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Oregon. “The government needs to find a way to pay those people who experienced a loss without sacrificing our quality of life and hurting neighbors.”

The ruling gave a jump-start to a campaign in Washington state for a “property fairness initiative,” unveiled recently by the Washington Farm Bureau and other sponsors. If enough signatures are collected, the measure will go to the state’s voters in November.

Similar movements are underway in Nevada and Oklahoma, and might eventually pick up speed in California and other states, said Andrew Cook, an attorney in Bellevue, Wash., with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a group that works to promote property rights. The Oregon ruling is a “huge boost” to those efforts, Cook said.

Futurewise, a Seattle-based group that is against sprawl, criticized the ruling as “a big win for developers” and vowed to persuade Washington voters to turn down a similar law.