Let the land guide growth, not the state.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Bonnie Smith For The Register-Guard

In his Feb. 3 guest viewpoint on land use regulations, attorney Liam Sherlock speaks of "endless strip malls and subdivisions that mutate landscapes." When landowners are prevented from living in the country, they are forced to live in cities that now sprawl into prime farmland. Escalating urban populations are responsible for the strip malls, subdivisions, backed-up traffic, smog, and unaffordable housing - not rural landowners, who lost their assets in land and the right to use it.

Sherlock is right: Measure 37 will benefit few. The only way justice can be restored is to abolish Senate Bill 100, Oregon's basic land use law, and allow people to live where they choose.

Sherlock wants readers to believe that land use regulations are about environmental issues. On the contrary, land use law is a social program, engineered to control people. It is about profits for urban developers, corporations and special interests. It is about higher tax revenues for bureaucracies that write their own rules to control us. It is about high taxes, crime, pollution and dependence.

Regulations that limit rural living have concentrated Oregon's population in a few large cities, mostly in the Willamette Valley. These cities are expanding into our best farm lands, causing urban sprawl. Despite Oregon's miles of open space (more than half the state is publicly owned), we are causing future urban ghettos by prohibiting citizens from living outside the city.

The American Farmland Trust tells us, "The costs of providing public infrastructure to [urban] residential development averages around $1,063 for every $1,000 in new tax revenue, compared to $386 in costs for every $1,000 of tax revenue for services to farm and forest land." Rural landowners provide their own services.

Land is our greatest resource, and we can control our own destiny if we use it wisely. The key word is use. Tilling, planting, weeding, fertilizing and watering make land productive. Nothing is provided without owners living there to till, plant and weed. Saving private land for its wildlife, scenery and open spaces so the public can enjoy it without paying for it is not a use.

Land use regulations encourage corporate development at the expense of rural landowners. Corporate development has increased 79 percent in our 10 largest urban areas.

Most of this increase is on the farmland that regulators claim to want to "save."

Powerful urban developers and corporations hold special rights to expand their profit-making motels, restaurants, box stores and truck stops into ever expanding urban growth boundaries.

In the mid-1970s, I attended countless land use meetings and Senate hearings, and taped pages of testimony from landowners who objected to regulations depriving them of the use of their land. For every representative from 1000 Friends of Oregon there were 100 or 200 property owners. Landowners were ignored, and the 1000 Friends' view prevailed.

Regulations have created a false shortage of land that has inflated housing costs, created greater demand for urban services, and caused higher taxes. Before SB 100, the average home cost less than $20,000. Thirty years later, the average price is well over $150,000.

Increased rural development on less valuable resource land would alleviate pressures on urban expansion and provide much-needed tax revenues. Availability of water and sanitation determine whether parcels can be used as home sites. Land itself will determine its highest and best use without regulators' interference.

In Oregon, complex, confusing and restrictive regulations enacted by agency rule control land that citizens bought with their hard-earned dollars. Landowners sometimes spend as much on appeals as they paid for their land, and they usually lose.

How many would Sherlock sue if regulators prevented him from living where he chose?

Bonnie Smith of Springfield is a former real estate broker.