Guest Column: Planning the Future

Big Look Task Force Struggles To Find the “Vision Thing”

By Sam Lowry, 11-02-06

It can be damned hard to rekindle an old flame. Just ask Oregon planners, who are trying to get the state’s citizens psyched about … well, about the future of their state, is all.

Just last week, the Oregon Land Use Task Force — aka,the Big Look task force — returned to the road for a two-day public session in Medford. It was be the group’s ninth meeting since its ten members first convened in March, called up from diverse walks of life by Senate Bill 82 to rework the state’s land use planning system.

In Pendleton last month, the task force’s six subcommittees edged forward, each studying a separate set of planning questions, grappling with massive learning curves and overwhelming amounts of information. (The six subcommitees first met in August; they were formed during a July retreat in Lincoln City.)

That the task force is moving forward in cautious, systematic — some would say slow — fashion has started to cause angst, notably from the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association (OAPA), which suffers from having enormous hopes and expectations, a bursting knowledge of the issues, and a bit of the Gepetto syndrome.

Oregon planning group wanted reform for years.

OAPA lobbying – years of it – was instrumental in creating the task force; it’s right that OAPA’s planners should care to the point of distraction about the group’s direction and outcomes.

Indeed, a central OAPA tenet holds that with Oregon’s program a generation old, and with so many newcomers to the state, it is critical to reinvigorate citizens’ appreciation of planning, best done by asking them to help create a fresh vision.

“Somehow or other we just have to get more enthused,” Stafford Hansel, former LCDC and Gorge Commission chair, said way back in 1993.

Easier said than done; but OAPA set out to try. Along the way, incidentally, they were among the first to publicize the need for planning reform. They held a Statewide Planners’ Dialogue in 1997, and four years later – overlapping with passage of Measure 7, precursor to Measure 37, later invalidated – they conducted the Evaluation of Planning in Oregon, 1973-2001, called the COPE report (Committee on the Oregon Planning Experience).

The COPE report recommended seven changes. Among them: develop a vision for the future; expand education; streamline planning; explore regionalism; address fairness and equity.

Sound familiar? It should: most of COPE’s proposals are now part of the Big Look work plan. (Two, however – developing a vision, and expanding education – are not.)
Three respected PSU professors in 2004 said that OAPA should keep leading the educating, visioning, and reforming, what with the state’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the environmental watchdog group, likely considered biased.

So OAPA kept after it. The 2001 and 2003 state legislatures were difficult and polarized; they achieved no agreement on reform. Then in 2004, Measure 37 passed and the world changed.

Big Look’s independence frustrates planners.

In the 2005 legislature, following passage of Measure 37 and despite strenuous effort, there were still no results on reforming land use – except SB82, the Big Look bill.

“Our focus and arguably greatest success since [the COPE report] involved our lobbying for successful passage of Senate Bill 82 and initiation of the Big Look,” Phil Farrington, the OAPA president, wrote to this reporter.

Ten years of work. And now the Big Look members are going off and doing things their own way – hashing out all the serious issues, but seeking no new planning vision, and conducting no education.

Impatient criticism – constructive, but pointed – bubbled forth at OAPA’s Planning Institute, their annual conference, held last month in Eugene.

“Is the [Big Look Task Force’s] assignment right? No. Are we getting information? No. Are we engaging our critics? No. Have they formulated the right six questions? No,” said Keith Cubic, Douglas County planning director, to his audience in one session.

It is expected that the planners will express their anxiety directly to the task force. (An e-mail to OAPA representatives asking for comment for this story received no reply). OAPA’s letter to the task force dated October 11 promised input in time for the Medford meeting, in response to a request the Big Look subcommittees sent to 35 groups representing all sides of the issues.

“While we will do our best to answer the questions,” said OAPA’s letter, “our responses may also encourage you to look at the issues differently, or to broaden the scope of your inquiry.”

How will this play? On the one hand, desiring to control the Big Look’s work may not be thought constructive; in the post-M37 climate, OAPA could also be seen as biased.
On the other hand, it is patently clear that even greater than OAPA’s expectations for its child, its creation, the task force; and outweighing any risk of drawing criticism for pushing their own profession, is planners’ worry that if the Big Look group continues to be so introverted, its work will all be for naught.

“The Big Look Task Force is not shaping up like anyone expected it to,” said Reeve Hennion, a COPE co-author, at the OAPA “Re-Engage Oregon” committee’s meeting during the Eugene conference. “They could end up with the best recommendations, but nothing would happen if there is no … interest from the public.”

Would-be reformers call for more public input

Engaging the public is an important point; and OAPA is not alone in making it. But if that public interest is planners’ holy grail, it is just about as elusive. Public interest reached its zenith 32 years ago, when a legendary effort from the first LCDC, led by L.B. Day, resulted in 76 hearings around the state and 60,000 comments, crafted into 14 of the goals that still guide the program today.

Day’s effort built a constituency for planning that lasted through three ballot-box challenges, before Measure 7 showed the mandate was past its pull-date.

That Ur-success is part of why OAPA craves a reprise – and why 1000 Friends is attempting one, with its Envision Oregon series. Some have expressed fear that it’s why the Big Look doesn’t want a repeat; that they don’t want the program so strong again. Maybe. Time will tell.But the bottom line is that OAPA may be barking up the wrong tree in any case: while the Big Look may be OAPA’s creation, it is not OAPA’s arm; the task force, once convened, has been stubbornly independent-minded.

There is method to that madness.

“The best thing we have going for us is the perception that we are unbiased,” said Wes Hare, Albany city manager and a Big Look member, in Pendleton.

There is also a sort of inevitability to the body’s shyness about public outreach. They were chosen for their diversity, diplomacy, knowledge. Collectively, they don’t seem much like vision people. They lack charisma, and interest in exposure. The Big Look Task Force members continue to give signs that they are sincere in wanting to find compromise that three successive legislatures – count ‘em, three – have failed to find. That’s valuable. But it may ultimately be up to others to give the compromise political life.

Can the 1974 constituency-building exercise be recreated? Probably not. But new forms and movements have a way of gelling unexpectedly; it’s worth the work to try and help them along.




Sam Lowry is a former Gorge resident and freelance writer who specializes in writing about Oregon's land and politics.

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