Rural Chaos and I-933 - #17
Guest contributor Dan Staley is Planning Director for the City of Buckley, a small town in rural Pierce County, Washington. He writes this post as a private citizen. [Note: this is part of a series.]
I get all kinds of phone calls in my office from folks with questions about some parcel of land for sale: What’s the zoning? How can it be developed? When will sewer be available? These questions all share one important premise: that the rules today will be the same rules tomorrow.
But I-933 would eliminate these questions to my office because land use planning in Washington will purposely be thrown into chaos. This chaos will have two main effects for rural areas, in my view.
First, many people buy land in rural areas as security for the future. Three or four decades ago, folks bought land in rural Pierce County so that they could live quietly, retire, and perhaps pass on some of their land to their children, prompting the phone calls to my office. They followed the rules and the rules told them that they could live out their dreams of selling their land to retire at some point in the future.
But I-933 takes away our dreams of quiet living then retirement by making our property insecure.
Running With the Wind
Winona LaDuke, Ralph Nader’s running mate on the 2000 Green Party ticket and longtime leader on tribal environmental issues, is stumping in Oregon again. This Thursday, July 20, she will address a gathering at the Portland Art Museum at 6:30 PM. (Details here.)
This time, she is not after votes, but wind turbines and solar panels. In the six years since she left the limelight of Presidential politics, LaDuke has been campaigning for renewable energy, especially on tribal reservations. A member of the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, LaDuke says tribes have reaped few benefits from energy extraction and suffered a disproportionate share of the environmental fallout from mining, drilling, nuclear waste disposal, and emissions from coal burning. She believes that the combined wind power of the gustiest reservations, such as Rosebud and Pine Ridge in the Great Plains, could meet more than half of current US demand for electricity.
