Bob Stacey is the executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, an organization that he describes as being active in implementing state land-use planning laws and pioneering smart-growth policies. He led the group during its unsuccessful efforts in 2004 to defeat Measure 37.

Let’s talk a little about the history of Measure 37, before the initiative actually went before voters. Just very generally, as best you can recall, where did this come from and when did it first arise?

There’s a group here in Oregon, Oregonians in Action, that is formed in response to — and in opposition to — Oregon’s land-use planning laws, and particularly in opposition to some of the laws that protect working family farms, forest lands, and other resource areas by limits on residential development, parcelization, and subdividing. These folks and their backers believe that private property should not be subjected to regulation and have sought to repeal Oregon’s land-use planning laws. In 2000, they put on the ballot a constitutional amendment requiring compensation, as they put it, for land-use regulations that reduce property value. The voters of Oregon passed that law, [but] the Supreme Court of Oregon struck it down as having more than one change to the constitution, in violation of the constitution’s own requirement for an amendment. Then, in 2003-2004, the group came back with Measure 37, which was statutory in nature and therefore exempt from that multiple-change provision.

What was the 2000 initiative called?

It was ballot Measure 7.

Were you in your current position at that time?

No, that was before I was at 1000 Friends. I came in 2002.

What were you doing back in 2000?

In 2000, I was on sabbatical and at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for a year.

Oregon clearly is a state that takes land-use regulation seriously, right?

You bet. The law was passed by the legislature in 1973; the state planning regulations came along in 1975. There are 19 million acres of private land in Oregon that are in so-called exclusive farm-use zones and another 7 million acres in forest-land zoning. Some of that is large-scale commercial timber, but [other portions are] family-owned timberland as well.

Given that history, how do you suppose Measure 7 passed back in 2000?

The proponents of the measure, like [with] Measure 37, presented a very appealing case that small property owners — a widow, a retired couple — were being wrongly handled by government, being told one thing and then having the rules change on them during the course of their property ownership, denying them the ability even to build their dream home, or to add one more home on a farm for a family member. They found very compelling stories about specific individuals and told that handful of stories over and over again.

For both Measure 7 and Measure 37?

Yes. The same widow in the Portland area, Dorothy English, was used it both campaigns. She was 90 in the first campaign; she was 94 in the second campaign. Her gravelly voice and her tough demeanor were very compelling to a lot of radio listeners in Oregon.

So when Measure 37 got on the ballot in 2004, the techniques that the “Yes on 37” forces used shouldn’t have been surprising, since they had used them back in 2000?

That’s right. There was not much surprise. It was very clear that if the proponents spent enough money to repeat the message they used in 2000, it would be extraordinarily difficult to stop them — both because of the success they had in 2000 on a shoestring budget and because polling, focus group work, showed that Oregonians did not believe that this measure, with a caption [to the effect of] “requires government to compensate when regulations reduce property value,” that this had anything to do with good planning and zoning to protect the countryside and their neighborhood. The idea that passage would erode land-use planning protections was rejected by people when questioned in polls and sort of scoffed at in focus groups — “That’s not what this is about.” Which made it very difficult to construct a good campaign on the measure.

What sorts of things did 1000 Friends of Oregon try do to try to counteract the Measure 37 campaign on the other side?

This was a community-wide coalition that participated in the “No on 37” campaign. We had business leaders, we had responsible developers, we had farmers, we had 15 county farm bureaus oppose it — every newspaper in the state that editorialized wrote an editorial opposing Measure 37. But the arguments that were used by the campaign, based upon the research, focused on increased government expenditure, uncertainty about how government would implement the measure, unfairness because of inconsistent application, and rising taxes and red tape as a result of the cost of implementing the measure.

If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently — if Measure 37 were on the ballot this year?

I think one thing that opponents need to look at in cases like this is to find a way to compellingly tell the story that there are other interests involved besides widows and retired couples — [namely,] that the people who are putting money into these campaigns have ulterior motives, that they are trying to weaken community protections —and to tell the story about the tricks in the measure and overcome the natural skepticism, at least of Oregon voters, about tall tales of destroying the land-use planning program. That’s going to be a challenge for other states and other communities.

Was Howard Rich in any way involved in Oregon, two years ago, to your knowledge?

No, it appears that the funding for Measure 37 was homegrown. We had a number of small timber companies and mid-sized timber companies, a lot of deeply motivated, antiregulation, antigovernment business owners in Oregon who footed the bill with contributions of between $25 and $100,000 to build the million-dollar-plus war chest. There were some eight companies responsible for 70 percent of the total expenditures on the Yes campaign.

What were some of those companies?

Seneca Jones [Timber] Company was the primary ringleader. Aaron Jones helped pay to draft the thing; [he is] the owner of Seneca Jones. He clearly contacted a number of his friends in industry and specifically in the timber industry. There were a number of different Lane County small timber companies — Seneca Jones is also in Lane County. A-dec [a dental equipment manufacturing company], JELD-WIN [a window and door manufacturer] — they’re not national names, [but] they are privately owned [Oregon-based] corporations. They each appeared to have some sort of grievance about government regulation or government in general that motivated them to take this on as an issue.

Let’s fast-forward to today. I just want to get a sense of what the impacts of Measure 37 have been so far. Clearly there have been thousands of claims filed. The government, since it’s not writing checks, is granting waivers, correct?

That’s right, that’s right.

So characterize for me, if you will, sort of where things stand right now . . . what the impact has been, to date, and what we might expect in the years down the road.

Just very quickly, the numbers. Three thousand claims is the best estimate — that’s done by Portland State University, which tries to aggregate both county and state-level claims. I say county advisedly — nearly all of the claims are in the countryside, outside of urban-growth boundaries, outside of city limits. Most of them are on agricultural forestland. One hundred seventy thousand acres are subject to claims for exemption or compensation. There are no counties [that have paid claims], nor does the state write checks for compensation. In fact, the state’s process, and the process of many local governments, is to presume that the existence of a restriction or regulation that was adopted after the property owner acquired the property must have reduced the value of the land. And therefore no real inquiry is made about the exact amount of reduction in value or the exact amount of compensation that should be due, because they’re not writing checks — they’re only granting waivers. We’ve filed litigation to challenge that practice. We think that, if people actually measured the true reduction, if any, that occurred back in the 1970s when farmland was zoned for farm use, we’d find that there are a lot of way-overblown dollar claims and it would be perfectly possible to pass the hat and compensate people for a significant number of these claims. But litigation is a slow road.

You asked about whether anything is happening on the ground. Individual homes have been built on some parcels, under Measure 37 claims, two or three at this date that I’m aware of, but no major land developments have gone forward — in large part because Measure 37 provides that the waivers are a personal license to violate the zoning. They do not change the zoning of the land. So a subsequent purchaser, after a claim is granted, is buying land that’s still subject to the regulation as far as he’s concerned. Therefore, you can’t get a waiver and then sell a development right; you have to use the development right yourself. And most people are not prepared to self-finance a major development project.

So what does that mean? What might we expect in the coming year or two or three out there, given what you just said?

First, you can expect intensive litigation on that point, a lot of hard lawyering to try to get around that transfer problem. And then this bizarre phenomenon: an argument made by literally thousands of claim-holders to the future legislature that their rights are being frustrated by bureaucrats and that they should be granted the right to sell to a developer in order to allow countrysides to be ruined and neighborhoods to be adversely affected and the property values of their neighbors to be hurt. In other words, it’s not just enough to be compensated; we now demand the right to a windfall. That’s the next chapter that we expect to see unfolding here in the legislature. And, of course, we’re taking the opposite position: that compensation for loss is what the people voted for. They didn’t vote to support greed.

Measure 37 passed 61 percent to 39 percent, which would suggest that people were caught off-guard — or just simply didn’t understand what the initiative was about. What would you have to say to residents of, I guess it’s now four, states that have takings initiatives on the ballot this fall? What would you have say to those folks who are concerned about those initiatives?

There was a Multnomah County commissioner a few years ago who was known for his malapropisms. “You would be opening a Pandora’s can of worms” if you do what Oregon voters did. We face litigation at unprecedented levels, thousands of claims affecting hundreds of thousands of acres, and a few fingers in the dike that so far have prevented a massive unleashing that would leave to massive developments in rural neighborhoods, affecting working family farmers — bizarre things like a pumice mine in a national monument, a waste dump next to the vineyard land in Washington County. These are unthinkable things, but people are thinking them, planning them, and suing government to do them. Don’t make the same mistake we did.