This election season in the
West already looks as hot as a wildfire running on a dry wind.
High-profile campaigns target congressional seats and
governorships. But beware: The most important campaign runs in
stealth mode.
It’s the campaign by libertarians who want
to cripple your state and local governments. They’re doing it with
ballot initiatives, appealing directly to voters. Their goals
include limiting taxes in ways that would undermine government
services, ousting judges who make unpopular rulings, imposing term
limits on legislators.
The campaign has local supporters,
but it’s largely political spin by libertarian activists from
outside the region. The campaign’s most intrusive arm would
strangle land-use regulations. An examination of it reveals the
pattern.
Libertarians believe many common regulations on
real estate, such as zoning and subdivision limits, unfairly reduce
property values. They call it “regulatory takings.” They want
governments to compensate all the owners, or back off. It may sound
fair enough. But here’s how the principle works: If you could fit
20 houses on your land, plus a junkyard and a gravel mine, and the
government limits you to six houses, then the government must pay
you whatever profit you would reap on the rest of the developments.
Of course, no government can afford to pay you, so regulations
would be waived and you could do the maximum development, no matter
what your neighbors think of it.
Libertarians push such
regulatory-takings initiatives in Washington, Idaho, Montana,
California, Arizona and Nevada. Americans for Limited Government, a
Chicago-area group, and the Fund for Democracy, based in New York
City, have funneled more than $2.75 million into the initiatives so
far. That money hired petition-circulating companies that got as
much as $4 per signature, persuading registered voters to put the
initiatives on the November ballot.
To sell the idea, the
takings initiatives cloak themselves in another issue — the
government’s “eminent domain” power. Governments use eminent domain
occasionally, to condemn property and force the owners to accept a
buyout, to make new roads, urban renewal and other projects that
benefit the public. Eminent domain is the most unpopular government
power, due to a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Kelo
case. The court said a Connecticut city can use eminent domain to
condemn a few homes, to make room for a drug manufacturer’s plant.
That ruling set off anger and hysteria over eminent domain.
Taking advantage of it, the initiatives in five states
combine limits on eminent domain with the regulatory-takings idea.
In the sixth, Washington, the initiative’s preamble cites the
eminent domain issue. The initiatives have alarmist titles like
“Protect Our Homes” and “People’s Initiative to Stop the Taking of
Our Land” — as if the government is about to sweep in with
bulldozers everywhere. Yet governments use eminent domain on behalf
of developers only a few thousand times per year, nationwide. If
the takings principle becomes law, it would choke off governments’
ability to pass any new land-use protections from now on, affecting
millions of property owners.
Libertarians persuaded
Oregon voters to approve such an initiative, titled Measure 37, in
2004. Oregon had tough regulations that needed some loosening, but
Measure 37 blew huge holes in its system for protecting landscapes,
the environment and neighborhoods.
Now, thousands of
Oregonians have crises summed up by Renee Ross. Ross lives on 32
acres south of Portland. She thought Measure 37 was a good idea.
But two of her neighbors have filed Measure 37 claims: One wants to
build houses on 60 acres, and the other wants to dig a gravel mine
on 80 acres. Handcuffed by the measure, her county government
waived regulations and OK’d both schemes. Ross worries most about
the mine.
“Our atmosphere is totally peaceful — the
birds, the creek rambling through our property,” Ross says. “When
they start up (the gravel mine), it’ll be within 200 feet of our
house. They’ll be doing blasting, and they’ll run a rock-crushing
machine. It’ll also be trucks backing up, the
beep-beep-beep. The sound will echo. We’re
devastated. … We went from having a very strict land-use policy
to having no policy. I don’t mind if you do whatever you want on
your land, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else’s life.”
If you live in any of the states that have takings
initiatives, and someday you might want a new regulation to
preserve your neighborhood, or to put conditions on a Super
Wal-Mart, or to protect streambanks, or to require developers to do
anything for open space and affordable housing, you would be wise
to vote “no” in November. As with all the different libertarian
initiatives, if you side with people who don’t believe in
government, you’ll get a lousy government.
Ray
Ring is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the paper’s
Northern Rockies editor based in Bozeman,
Montana.
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