Daily Score Blog

The Hood River Valley has been ground zero for Measure 37 claims. Yesterday, we examined how the valley's prized farm country is threatened by an exurban population boom. Today, we take a different look at how Measure 37 jeopardizes Hood River farmland.

In the map below, properties with active Measure 37 housing claims are showing in red. Yellow is land that's zoned for agriculture.

Here, you can see all the new Measure 37 maps. And here, larger versions of this map.

While the Hood River country has astonishingly fertile soils, it's a fairly small area. Less than 25,000 acres is protected farmland. But Measure 37 housing claims occur on 5,447 acres of farm properties -- which adds up to 22 percent of the Hood River Valley's agricultural land.

What's wrong with houses on farmland? Simply put: the two don't mix. It leads to inevitable conflicts that often spell the slow demise of farming. But don't take my word for it, read what Gorham Blaine has to say. He's a Hood River Valley pear farmer.

Thanks to CORE GIS for maps and analysis, and to Deric Gruen for the legwork.

(Editor's note: Like this post? Digg it here.)

Over the past week or so, there's been a big to-do about greater Seattle's transportation measure -- affectionately known as the "RTID" -- that's set to appear on the November ballot. The measure would spend more than $17 billion on new roads, road maintenance, and rail transit, mostly through an increase in sales and vehicle taxes.

To many people's surprise, King County Executive Ron Sims (a former board chair of Sound Transit) came out against the RTID last week in an op-ed published in the Seattle Times. A chief reason for his opposition: global warming. Said Sims:

Tragically, this plan continues the national policy of ignoring our impacts upon global warming. In a region known for our leadership efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, this plan will actually boost harmful carbon emissions. [Emphasis added.]

On this latter claim, I think that Executive Sims could well be correct.

We recently took a look at the greenhouse gas implications of building a new lane-mile of highway in a congested urban area. Our conclusion -- which you can read in full here (pdf link) -- is that every extra one-mile stretch of lane added to a congested highway will increase climate-warming CO2 emissions more than 100,000 tons over 50 years. Those emissions are broken out as follows:

• Road construction and maintenance: 3,500 tons
• Net congestion relief: -7,000 tons [that's negative, folks]
  
• Additional traffic on the roadway: 90,000 tons
• Additional traffic off the roadway: 30,000 - 100,000 tons
• TOTAL: 116,500 - 186,500 tons
  

For a variety of reasons (which the full memo (pdf, nine pages) discusses in greater depth) these are conservative estimates. And to put all this in context: CO2 emissions in the US currently average about 20 tons per person per year. So 100,000 tons per lane-mile is a fair bit of CO2 -- not as much as a coal-fired power plant, but worth being concerned about. As I understand the package, the RTID will add over 150 lane-miles of general purpose roadways -- which, over the long term, could boost CO2 emissions by some 15 million tons. (Yoiks.)

Obviously, this isn't a full analysis of the RTID. It doesn't look at the greenhouse gas impacts of building or operating a train or HOV/HOT lanes, nor of the land-use impacts of more compact development that light rail may help foster. Still, Executive Sims may be on to something; if our estimates are even close to the mark, the greenhouse gas impacts of building new roads are pretty substantial.

As I've written before, voters in Alaska's Mat-Su Borough are confronted with 2007's only regulatory takings ballot initiative. Or rather, they were.

The initiative, Proposition 1, was a near carbon copy of Oregon's Measure 37 and the raft of 2006 initiatives. It would have led to a development free-for-all. And I'm pleased to report that on Tuesday, voters handed out a stunning victory to sensible planning and public policy: the ballot measure was defeated by 71 to 29 percent.

The Mat-Su election comes on the heels of last year's spate of so-called "property rights" measures. You remember? The ones that Western voters overwhelming shot down? (One did pass in Arizona, mostly because the ballot in that state was crowded and much the natural opposition was preoccupied with other issues.) The most surprising result at the time was conservative Idaho which delivered the most crushing defeat to a takings measure, trouncing it 76 to 24.

In a way, it's not surprising that the public keeps rejecting these initiatives. Consider how the sponsor of the Mat-Su ballot measure described the outcome to the press: he called the vote "a stunning victory for socialism."

Yikes.

This is not the sentiment of a guy who believes in community, or even the basic tenets of local democracy. It's the ranting of an ideology that is wildly out of step with American life.

In light of the Mat-Su vote, it's becoming abundantly clear that no matter what a handful of "property rights" activists like to believe, Americans really and truly like having a say in their communities. It's not that local government is perfect, or that zoning is uncontroversial, or that everyone always gets what that want. It's just this: Americans believe in democracy.