Sunday's Columbian noted that Clark County's revised comprehensive growth plan quietly became effective this January. Now that the new plan is in effect, I think that we could take the next few years to do something extraordinary: Plan for our future. But isn't that what we just did? Actually we didn't. County commissioners adopted a 20-year growth plan. Planning for the equivalent of one generation is short-sighted. When I was planning director of Metro, the Portland regional government, we settled on a 50-year plan covering three generations. But that was for a metropolitan region of 1.2 million people at the time. Clark County now has more than 400,000 people. It's time we took a more sophisticated approach to planning.
The ultimate planning horizon would be to plan for build-out and to forget about how many years ahead we are planning for. We should plan for the endgame. Either of these approaches is far superior to the status quo. The good news is that Clark County is not bound to doing only 20-year snapshots of tomorrow. And if we won't be updating the current comprehensive plan for a few years, then we have the time to get it right.
This proposal is exactly the opposite of what is being done in Clark County. You don't start by asking folks, "Who wants to add land to the urban growth boundary?" That is the irrational political allocation model used by most local governments. Instead, it is important to follow a more scientific, rational planning model in three phases.
The first phase in a truly rational planning approach is to begin with an environmental assessment analysis. We ask, "What land should not be added to an urban growth boundary?" This inductive approach is better than the current deductive approach because it protects specific lands that citizens think are important. So what do we protect?
We identify natural areas and corridors that have important ecological values.
We then identify important natural resource lands in terms of forestry, agriculture and mining.
Finally, we decide where appropriate greenbelts and open spaces should be to keep cities separated.
The current county process is backward. The county decides where to build and then does an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on what was already decided. Amazingly, the EIS is usually done by a consulting firm that agrees with the local government's proposal.
The next step
Having decided what we don't want to develop, we move on to what can be served. The second step is to do a major infrastructure cost analysis. Again, we don't leap ahead and start asking people where they want to develop. Instead, we look for the most cost-efficient delivery areas for road, water, sewer and schools. Why deliver infrastructure to places that will only cost the taxpayer or ratepayer more money?
Finally, the third phase is to do a land-use suitability analysis. The first important question to ask is "Where do companies that provide family-wage jobs want to locate?" In the current planning approach, elected officials decide where to put housing and commercial properties first because these are the most lucrative for developers. Industrial land is always put on the left-over lands. If we are serious about economic development, then we need to locate employment lands first.
Having been a planner for some 30 years at city, county, regional and state levels, I've had a lot of time to ponder what should be versus what is. That has taught me that there is a rational and equitable way to plan for future human settlements. However, the human condition is usually one of personal indifference or personal greed when it comes to planning for our future. As Yogi Berra said, "You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
Rich Carson (www.richcarson.org) is a land use planner and writer who lives in Hockinson. He is the former president of the Southwest Washington Section of the American Planning Association and former director of planning for Clark County.
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