Published January 2006

Individual property rights
must not be forgotten
in land-use planning

“When you buck hay, it’s more about your legs than your arms,” explained the rancher when I showed up the first summer as an undersized 14-year-old looking for work.

“Even a skinny kid like you can throw a bale of hay over his head if you got one leg,” he sneered as he demonstrated the technique, followed by a stern reminder that the truck pulling the hay wagon was a stick shift, and I’d better not grind the gears when it was my turn to drive.

I learned a lot working on ranches in the summer. I learned that no baseball bat is big enough to stop a full-grown stud bull when the only thing between him and a field of ready heifers is me. And I learned everything I needed to know about land-use policies.

The challenge of writing land-use laws is being played out before us in the Puget Sound region, where the transition from a place of ample open space and affordable developable land to a more urban and condensed environment is a reality. This challenges land-use planners and legislators to balance wide ranges of interests. Throw in tribal treaty rights and it gets really interesting.

Too often, today’s planning policies unfortunately pick away at property rights in the name of progressive thinking. But planning itself isn’t the problem. We have to plan. Even the rancher I worked for had to design a land-use management plan on his property to maximize production. So no one in a policy-making position is wrong for trying to manage the myriad array of uses, public interests, etc.

What makes land-use management by the government so different from the rancher doing essentially the same thing on his spread, however, are two things: First, compliance is required by the government. Second, it’s easy to forget about individual property rights in the name of broad social policy.

One thing a rancher knows, for example, is that his right to manage land ends at the fence line with his neighbor. He might work out joint-use arrangements on irrigation and even lease a field from his neighbor to rotate in some alfalfa, but it’s all done fair and square. Unfortunately, government doesn’t have to deal like that. It should — which is why so many property owners get rankled when it doesn’t. It should rankle everyone.

In King County, the Critical Areas Ordinance is allowing government to essentially take away use and value of mostly rural properties in the name of broader social good. It’s a good example of what might be coming to Snohomish County and other parts of the Puget Sound if nothing changes.

Again, we have to plan. The controversy is that we must plan carefully and with sensitivity to property rights as much as we do the environment we’re trying to protect.

To those whom the Critical Areas Ordinance impacts the most, they wonder. There’s no freeway coming through or sewer line being laid where property owners are losing rights in the form of wider setback requirements, waste-management restrictions, water-use limitations, etc. All they see are cars from Seattle passing through on their way to a corn maze or roadside fruit stand twice a year while they lose the use rights they’ve operated under for years.

There’s an affordable-housing problem in King County, but selling to a developer isn’t a viable exit plan for most under the progressive law of the land. They often can’t log it, either. Farmer Joe is stuck with the bill in the form of lost value and use but sees little of value in return, either directly or even for any immediately apparent social good.

In a normal government taking, the taxpayer must pay fair market value for a property in exchange for that freeway or sewer system. But under the Critical Areas Ordinance, rural property owners are getting nothing in exchange for lost use. Some even feel like they are at the wrong end of a plan designed to reduce the value of their property gradually so that the government can take it later for less cost. As it stands today, they are carrying the load on land-use planning and getting little in return, if anything.

Since private property rights tend to be something you understand in your core wiring or only after you’ve had them threatened, it takes a different kind of thinking to respect and understand this when creating and implementing land-use policies. Policy makers would be wise to take pause and make sure they aren’t unintentionally chipping away at property rights as they advance their plans.

I took my own pause when I asked the rancher I worked for why his neighbor didn’t cut the thistles out of his field. “You ought to go tell him to cut the thistles down,” I urged him. I didn’t think twice about it. If it was good for the ranch I worked on, it should be good for the ranch next door. “Otherwise, he’ll lose that whole field of hay.”

The rancher’s answer summed things up pretty succinctly and more or less galvanized my view of land-use policies and property rights in general: “No, I don’t think I’ll do that. Once I start telling my neighbors what to do with their property, they’ll just come over here and tell me what to do on mine. ... What he does on his ranch, as long as it doesn’t hurt me, is his business. Maybe I’ll buy it from him. Then I’d have the right to mess around over there.”

Plain and simple. Common sense. Kind of like the way he ended the conversation: “You talk too much, kid. Now, take the baseball bat and go get that bull back in the barn.”

Tom Hoban is CEO of Coast Real Estate Services, a commercial sales, leasing, investment and property management company with offices in Everett, Tacoma, Spokane, and Boise, Idaho. He can be reached at 425-339-3638 or send e-mail to tomhoban@coastmgt.com.

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