Jeb Bladine: 'Ten pounds of confusion in a five-pound box'
Kudos to the city of McMinnville and McMinnville Industrial Promotions (MIP) for their Wednesday night performance of a civics lesson that cut tortuously close to what’s wrong with government in America.
And what’s right.
Audio/video of the production should be transcribed with footnotes; it should become mandatory reading, listening and viewing for everyone connected to Oregon systems of land use law; Ken Burns should convert its words and sounds and images into a multi-part documentary.
Today’s news story provides far more details, but here’s one synopsis:
MIP, a 70-year McMinnville institution of community economic development, wants to divide a 26-acre, northwest-McMinnville parcel to facilitate future industrial development. City staff, backed by internal and external legal counsel opinions, said city code would require various expensive conditions for the public road MIP would need to develop, including a long sidewalk currently running from and to nowhere.
MIP objected to those conditions in an appeal to the Planning Commission.
City staff thought they had reached agreement with MIP on a plan to defer the sidewalk work if properly secured by bonding or continuous financial reports. The Planning Commission approved that plan in March, with expanded road development conditions. But MIP appealed to the city council, arguing that poorly written city code is insufficient to apply various road/sidewalk requirements to this land use action.
That appeal set the stage for this week’s public hearing, where an abundance of dueling attorneys, befuddling legal theories and long-suffering city councilors were caught in the crossfire.
MIP attorney Katherine Gowell submitted calm, compelling testimony seeking to replace complex, contradictory legal semantics with common sense. After previously telling planning commissioners that the city’s code interpretation was “unreasonable,” this week she upgraded that adjective to “nonsensical.”
I could only agree this week after taking a personal tour of the development site.
The public hearing combined high-interest characters, drama and moments of comic relief. It also displayed a form of government fog-of-war mentality that prompted one councilor to ask if the city was working against MIP or trying to solve the problem.
MIP President Doug Hurl testified that MIP would comply amicably with whatever decision the council makes. But this last piece of the puzzle, he said, is “10 pounds of confusion in a five-pound box.”
That pretty much sums up the Oregon land use system. Cities, counties and their citizens are tangled in webs of land use statutes, ordinances and legal cases that confound all our lives. Those webs, unfortunately, extend throughout the many worlds of local, state and federal government regulatory powers.
Somehow, though, four McMinnville city councilors — unencumbered by law degrees or professional land use training — managed to part the clouds of confusion. The city code, they said, does not require all those conditions as put forth by city legal counsel.
Democracy worked, at least from MIP’s perspective. However, if McMinnville now decides to rewrite its land use code, as some have suggested, I suspect we would end up with 20 pounds of confusion in a two-pound box.
Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.
Comments