The Big Look bill (HB 2229) on Tuesday passed out of committee to the House floor. The current bill reflects several amendments completed by the House Land Use Committee during its April 23rd work session. Once passed to the House floor, the bill is subject to additional amendments as it continues to progress through the legislature.

There wasn’t much of anything good in the bill to begin with. There’s nothing left in the bill that could be considered either “big” or a “look” at Oregon’s land use planning program.

The Task Force’s proudest accomplishment is the adoption of “overarching principles”:

The four overarching principles guiding the land use program in Oregon are to:
(A) Provide a healthy environment;
(B) Sustain a prosperous economy;
(C) Ensure a desirable quality of life; and
(D) Equitably allocate the benefits and burdens of land use planning.

The bill is crystal clear that these four principles are “aspirational” only – they expressly have no legal impact whatsoever.

Oh, one more thing is notable in the “principles” section:

Additionally, the land use planning program should, but is not required to, help communities achieve sustainable development patterns and manage the effects of climate change.

You read that right – the planning program is not directed to be used as a tool to help us figure out how to live within our energy or other resources or to head off climate change. At most, it “should, but is not required to, figure out how to live with the consequences of climate. That’s the best the Land Use Committee could do to address the most consequential issue of our time (the Task Force didn’t even try). And there’s no hint at all in the bill that we’re facing an impending energy crisis.

The Task Force’s controversial proposal to allow two or more counties to adopt their own definition of farm and forest lands is gone, replaced by new Sections 5 – 7 that allow counties to legislatively revisit their inventories of farm and forest land and redesignate them “nonresource” if they fail to meet the Goal 3 definition of “agricultural lands” or the Goal 4 definition of “forest lands.” Of course, counties can do this already, either legislatively or quasi-judicially.

There’s a long and complicated technical fix to the existing regional problem solving process.

There’s a pretty meaningless provision saying that local governments “should consider directing” infrastructure investments to further compact urban development.

And there’s a “content neutral” review of land use laws and regulations to reduce complexity.

Not much to show for four year’s work.

And a definite failure to come to grips with the extraordinary challenges before us.

Chair Nolan’s admirable and even astounding achievement was to get some bill out of committee while making the folks who were involved in this project feel good about the end result. That was magic.