Metro land use planners knew they were taking some risk when they tried a new approach to the regional government's most recent urban growth boundary review.
They didn't expect that state regulators would want so much detail to support the decision the Metro Council made last October, to add 1,985 acres to the region's developable land.
The land use experts at the regional government seemed stunned Friday by a report from the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, saying Metro hadn't done enough to back up its 2011 urban growth boundary expansion decision.
The staff report, led by acting DLCD director Jim Rue, emphasized that DLCD didn't necessarily find fault with the Metro Council's decision on where to expand the boundary. But like an algebra teacher grading homework, it said the state commission should reject the final answer – even if it's accurate – because of the way Metro did the math.
The report from the state department isn't the last word. On May 10 and 11, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission, a seven-member, governor-appointed board, will decide whether to agree with state staff, and partially reject Metro's 2011 UGB expansion. The commission's decision can be appealed in court.
Metro planners hope they're not the ones doing the appealing.
"We're hoping they (the commission) will see the big picture, that the decision ended up doing what the state land use program is trying to achieve," said John Williams, Metro's deputy planning director. "That's protection of the vast majority of farmland around the region, natural resources and adding the areas that have the best chance of becoming great places."
State staffers had three main objections to Metro's expansion.
- Metro didn't properly identify how it picked how much land to add to the boundary. Metro staff didn't decide how much land needed to be added to the UGB. Instead, it told the Metro Council a range of how many people it thought could possibly move to the region in the coming 20 years. The Metro Council picked a number within that range, which was supposed to be defensible by Metro's research. State officials said the number the council picked wasn't properly backed up by research.
- Metro didn't explain how it decided which 9,800 acres to study for a UGB expansion. With more than 28,000 acres of urban reserves to choose from, Metro staff said it picked from the 9,800 acres most suitable – and likely – to be developed in a reasonable timeframe. (This, in contrast to the 2002 expansion in Damascus, which, a decade later, still has had little development.) The Metro Council picked 1,985 acres for a UGB expansion from that 9,800 acres that staff analyzed in detail.
- Metro didn't properly study the available employment land in the region. Staff contends that with 260,000 acres already in the urban growth boundary, the level of analysis required would be wasteful, especially given that all 25 cities in the region have already looked at said inventory.
Some of the complaints are based in Metro's new process for evaluating potential urban growth boundary expansion. The new way of looking at things, said Metro Councilor Kathryn Harrington, could have led to the staff's recommendations.
"We've taken a risk with the new techniques," she said. "We may have to spend some additional time with the staff of DLCD, as well as with the commission, to make our case that we did base our decision on accurate information that meets the requirements under state regulations."
Williams said he thinks most of the data state staffers were looking for is in the information Metro submitted to regulators.
"I think there's some places, perhaps, where we just didn't make it black-and-white enough that it was obvious what we had done," Williams said. "We had no idea they were going to get this much into the weeds."
Take page 23 of the director's report.
"Metro uses a formula of 1.4 acres per 1000 new residents in order to estimate a 20-year land need for churches, which it took from its 1997 UGR (urban growth report)," state staffers said. "The (report) lacks findings supported by evidence justifying use of a 1997 formula for the 2010-2030 periods."
There is no state requirement to plan for churches – Metro staff said if the regional government hadn't tried to guess how much land for churches future Portland-region residents might need, it wouldn’t have gotten dinged by the state for allegedly haphazardly guessing how much land to set aside for said churches.
That's an easier equation for every other UGB the state reviews – everywhere else in the state, individual cities review their own urban growth boundaries; only the Portland region works as a team to figure out how to adjust the boundary.
The Portland region has about 1.5 million residents. The next-largest UGB-reviewing jurisdictions are Eugene and Salem, with one-tenth the population.
That leads to Metro's planners' biggest beef with the review – the employment land inventory.
State regulators, in the past, have not required Metro to look at the region-wide availability of employment land, broken down by employment sector. Cities and counties have always done that work. But as part of changes to Statewide Planning Goal 9, approved after Metro's most recent boundary review in 2002, the region itself has to report to regulators how much land is available within the boundary for employment growth.
"It's a pretty high standard, to expect a region to look at all of our employment sites, comparing the development possibilities for a variety of sectors for 20 years," Williams said.
"They're asking us to duplicate all that effort, and spend money on it," said Dick Benner, Metro's lead land use attorney.
State officials didn't just pull the complaints out of thin air. Their recommendations to the state commission were based on complaints, or objections, received from parties ranging from land conservation group 1000 Friends of Oregon to generally pro-development cities in Washington County.
One of those cities, Hillsboro, filed what that city's planning director called a "placeholder objection," giving the city legal standing to get involved later if it didn't like the outcome of the state's review of the UGB.
Problem is, the state staffers recommended that the commission uphold the objection. Hillsboro's plans for an urban growth boundary expansion could be undone if the commission sides with staff.
Hillsboro planning director Pat Ribellia said he'll be at the May hearing on the boundary.
"Whatever we can do to support Dick (Benner) and his effort, we'll be there to do that," Ribellia said.
Representatives of some of the other objectors, such as 1000 Friends of Oregon lawyer Mary Kyle McCurdy and Westside Economic Alliance executive director Jonathan Schlueter, hadn't yet reviewed the state department's report when reached Friday, and were unwilling to comment on the report before reading it.
Metro staff has 10 days to respond to the state report, filing "exceptions," in the parlance of Oregon land use law.
Benner said the state could issue a supplemental report after reviewing Metro's exceptions. And Williams said he wonders what else could be done to back up the Metro Council's decision.
"Considering our process took three years and had thousands of pages of supplementing materials, it seems like if our analysis didn't get there, it's hard to imagine exactly what would," Williams said.
"The bottom line is, we think what we did does substantially comply" with state law, Williams said. "That's the standard – substantial compliance."