Seeking a middle ground on property rights

Arie van der Hoeven voted against Initiative 933, the property-rights measure that voters rejected overwhelmingly last week. He says it only would have meant more uncertainty for rural landowners like him.

But the Microsoft program manager also says he sympathizes with the frustration that fueled the initiative.

He says his dealings with King County as he tries to build his dream house near Ames Lake, east of Redmond, have taught him that growth-management rules sometimes impose unreasonable burdens on property owners and that those rules need fixing.

"Initiative 933 isn't the solution," van der Hoeven says, "but there is a problem."

During the just-completed campaign, opponents warned that I-933, which would have required governments to compensate property owners for many development restrictions, would have touched off a development free-for-all.

But many foes, like van der Hoeven, also acknowledged there was some truth to what I-933's backers were saying: Land-use rules aren't always fair. Now that the initiative is off the table, some are vowing to do something about that.

The Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the moderate Mainstream Republicans of Washington, while opposing I-933, also have ripped some growth-management policies as excessive and called for reform.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has said the state's 1990 Growth Management Act "isn't perfect" and offered to lead an effort to revise it.

Economist Glenn Pascall, who wrote a report concluding that I-933 would have cost taxpayers billions, also says some landowners probably do deserve compensation. He calls I-933 "a reminder of a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed."

Aaron Ostrom of the anti-sprawl group Futurewise once likened I-933 to drinking hemlock to cure a cold. But he also says "there probably are some real hardship cases out there."

"If there are situations where people are really getting hurt, we're willing to sit down and work to address them," Ostrom said Tuesday night.

Dan Wood of the Washington State Farm Bureau, I-933's sponsor, said he intends to hold people such as Ostrom and Gregoire to their word. But he also has said he isn't optimistic: "We've had 15 years of talk and broken promises from Olympia."

He already has threatened another initiative campaign unless that changes.

Cost, complexity cited

When Arie van der Hoeven and his wife, Yuki Ito, bought five heavily wooded, wetland-pocked acres near Ames Lake four years ago, they quickly found themselves in the middle of the fight over King County's controversial Critical Areas Ordinance.

The first drafts would have increased buffers around the wetlands on their land from 50 feet to 200 feet, which would have nearly covered their entire property. They probably still could have built, but a special permit would have been complicated to get and would have cost $5,000 or more.

As passed, the 2004 Critical Areas Ordinance scaled back the wetland buffers on van der Hoeven's land to just 60 feet. He plans to break ground on his house next year.

But he says the scare left scars.

It isn't just the content of growth-management regulations that galls many rural landowners, he says, but the cost and complexity of complying with them.

Recently, for instance, he completed a critical-areas stewardship plan for his land under a new county program that promises property owners both greater flexibility and a possible tax break. He estimates he put 40 hours into the document.

"This is too complicated for most people," he says.

Money is another issue. The price of getting a permit from the county land-use agency, whose budget comes almost entirely from fees charged to landowners and developers, can run into thousands of dollars.

The Critical Areas Ordinance requires rural property owners to keep up to 65 percent of their land in native vegetation. The idea is to protect threatened salmon streams. Ken Konigsmark, an I-933 opponent, rural landowner and veteran environmental activist, supports it.

But he also says rural property owners should get something in return — a tax break, perhaps.

It makes sense to help salmon by preserving the habitat that's left, Konigsmark says, but "they've taken the sins of millions of us who live in this region and tried to correct that by putting all the burden on the rural and forest landowners."

When I-933's supporters complained of unfairness, he adds, "they were right to some degree."

"Fairness" elusive

Harvey Jacobs, an urban-planning professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the property-rights movement, says its persistence and its success in some places is forcing growth-management supporters to do some serious soul-searching.

They're starting to realize that land-use regulations create winners and losers, he says. "They're saying, 'Maybe we over-reached."

But solving the "fairness" problem won't be easy, Jacobs says. Most people sympathize with small landowners whose modest plans for their property have been stymied by growth-management rules, he says. But, at the same time, they don't want to open doors to big developers.

One possible approach, Jacobs says, is transfer of development rights. When government wants to restrict rural development, owners could be given credits as compensation. They could then sell those credits to urban landowners, who would use them for permission to develop more densely.

Some transfers like that already have happened in King County. For example, last week a developer of a downtown Seattle condo project agreed to pay nearly $1 million into a King County fund for permission to add three more floors to the project, with the county using the money to protect a few hundred acres of rural land from development.

Pierce and Snohomish counties are starting to explore similar concepts. But so far no one has tried it on a regional scale.

State Rep. Fred Jarrett, R-Mercer Island, another I-933 opponent, says policymakers need a better understanding of just what the problem is before they get down to specifics. He proposes that a task force of state legislators look into the issues I-933 has raised.

"The Legislature has been unable to have a sophisticated conversation about growth management because we've had the people who think it's a good idea and the people who think it's a bad idea screaming at each other," Jarrett says.

"We've been frozen for a decade."

Arie van der Hoeven hopes there's a thaw. The choice shouldn't be the status quo or something like Initiative 933, he says:

"What many of us in the rural areas are waiting for is a middle path."

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com