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Shortcut gives landowners zone leverage By JOHN DARLING for the Mail Tribune Starting today, a new county ordinance allows owners of marginal farm and forest land to shortcut complex state land-use laws and ask for zone changes that allow some rural home construction. Since the start of statewide land-use planning in 1975, such landowners had to embark on an expensive, two- to five-year "exception" process, hoping to prove that soil quality, slopes or water access were adverse enough to allow them escape from farm or forest zoning. The goal was usually development of 5- to 20-acre rural residential parcels with homes. The new law allows landowners to make their case through a simplified process at the county level, usually by demonstrating their soils lie outside the prime farmland soil classes 1 through 4, said Ali Turiel, county planner. Soils determined by U.S. Soil Conservation Service maps to be class 5 and poorer would justify zoning other than farm or forest, she said. "At the start of land-use planning, the county zoned the vast majority - 95 percent - of unincorporated land as farm and forest resource land," she said. "But we've got a lot of tremendously marginal soil here, and the statewide land-use people didn't anticipate this. They thought all land could be either farm-forest or residential-commercial - but there's a lot of land in between, and it's not really located well for suburban use." The county law change was inspired by the case of Joe Rutigliano, who five years ago began an exclusion campaign with plans to rezone his 65 acres of exclusive farm-use land along the Rogue River to 12 rural residential parcels. The county deemed the steep, stony land as non-farmland, a decision that was appealed to the state Land Use Board of Appeals by the Jackson County Citizens League. LUBA remanded the case to the county with instructions to amend its laws to handle such cases. The new law, said Mary-Kay Michelsen, president of the citizens league, "will allow for unguided and unplanned development" in some rural areas, when - if marginal lands were kept in resource zoning - they could be used for grazing or vineyards, uses that do well on poorer soils. "The law will greatly affect quality-of-life issues which are a large part of why people choose to live here - open space, natural beauty, separation of cities, easy access to recreation and relative freedom from traffic congestion," she said. "We think it will promote sprawl by increasing development away from urban boundaries." The law change will allow cities to grow in a noncontiguous manner, said County Commissioner Jack Walker, so as to incorporate more open space and resource land. The growth pattern supported by state land-use laws and the citizens league, he added, requires cities to absorb only adjacent land, swallowing up farmland that might have been saved if it earlier had been allowed to break into rural residential parcels. "The new law is opposed by a group of people who believe no one should build homes on anything that looks like a farm," Walker said. "They're scared to death to let go of any type of regulation. But the reality is, we could set aside a lot more land if people were able to live on it (as rural residential parcels). "When you push this kind of frustration (the exception process) on property owners, it makes government look bad. Property owners have a right to prove their land isn't zoned right, and now they have a process where, maybe it's still not easy, but they can see the light at the end of the tunnel." The new county law still fulfills the county's obligation under state land-use goals 3 and 4 - to protect all viable farm and forest land outside urban growth boundaries from development, said Jackson County Planning Commissioner Don Green. The change will not affect many parcels, he added. "It's a good thing. It's going to allow a few people with land that's mis-zoned to use it without the three- to five-year process that costs $8,000 to $10,000. But it's still going to be complex and will take a few years," he said. Under the amended law, landowners will have to demonstrate their rezoning will not violate state goal 14: to guard against actions that create or contribute to a pattern of urbanization, said Turiel. "This is a very subjective call," she said. "One man's urbanization is another man's hobby farm." Walker said he didn't expect to see a significant growth impact from the new law. Most rezoning would be into 10- to 15- to 20-acre rural residential plots with 2.5- and 5-acre parcels near cities, he said. "It just gets us past this built-in stumble so the county can determine if it's farmland or not, and if it's not farmland, it shouldn't be restricted to farming. The exceptions process had to be eliminated. It was time-consuming, costly and accomplished nothing." John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.