The fire seasons to come.

Byline: The Register-Guard

As the fire season in the Willamette Valley moves into the September home stretch - and as Oregon voters prepare to vote this fall on a proposed legislative rewrite of Measure 37 - it's worth reflecting briefly on the severe burden that the property rights law could create for firefighters in rural areas throughout the valley and entire state.

Long before Oregon voters approved Measure 37 in 2004, increasing rural development created complications and forced strategy changes for the federal, state and local agencies charged with fighting wildfires. Now, Measure 37 threatens to compound those problems by allowing an unprecedented construction boom in many isolated rural areas across the state.

When voters OK'd Measure 37, Oregonians won the right to use their property however they could have when they bought it. More than 7,500 applications for Measure 37 waivers have been filed, most of them proposing housing on forest and farm lands where state and local land use planning rules have restricted development sharply.

A quick glance at a map of the Measure 37 claims filed in Lane County (www.co.lane.or.us/Planning/Measure37/documents/M37MapSmall.pdf) reveals the magnitude of the problem. Proposed developments are strewn across the county like pepperoni on a pizza - most of them well outside established communities and cities. It seems safe to assume that the people who eventually buy homes in these developments will fully expect government agencies to protect their homes from wildfires.

Rural development, often referred to as the "urban interface," already has changed the focus of firefighting throughout the West, with the majority of resources now going to protecting homes. This shift has been costly not only in terms of taxpayer dollars, but also in human lives. Each fire season brings new reports of firefighters killed while deployed in the line of "structure protection" duty.

The urban interface problem has been compounded by rising temperatures and increasingly prevalent drought conditions throughout the West. From a firefighting perspective, these are conditions and times that call for more, not fewer, restrictions on rural sprawl.

Then there's the related issue of conventional fire and ambulance protection. Most of the rural developments proposed under Measure 37 are far from existing fire stations and hospitals. As a result, already overextended emergency services would be stressed to the breaking point by the need to either build new facilities or to drive long distances in responding to emergencies.

Measure 49, the proposed legislative rewrite of Measure 37 that is on the November ballot, would address some of these concerns by banning large commercial developments and limiting the number of homes that Measure 37 claimants can build.

From a firefighting perspective, Measure 49 would be an imperfect fix. It still would leave the door open to the construction of a significant number of isolated homes in rural areas across the state, although the number would be far below what an unmodified Measure 37 would produce. New homes built under Measure 49 still would require protection from wildfires, as well as conventional firefighting and ambulance services, but the increased demand should be substantially more manageable than it would be under Measure 37.

By the time Oregon voters decide the fate of Measure 49 this fall, the firefighting season will have ended and the rains once again will have moistened the Willamette Valley. But while the forests, fields and hillsides are still kindling dry, it's worth reflecting on what Measure 37 could mean in fire seasons to come.