William G. Robbins - Oregon - This Storied Land

W HEN THE FIRST edition of Oregon: This Storied Land went to press in 2005, Oregon was recovering from a severe recession in which its percentage of unemployed people ranked first in the nation. The state had lost more than one thousand teaching positions and suffered significant reductions in state and local workers. As the economy improved, an influx of newcomers slowed the effort to reduce unemployment. There were other challenges: acrimony over tax policy, support for public schools, property-rights disputes, assisted suicide, gay and lesbian rights, and access to federal timber. Mirroring politics at the national level, Oregon lawmakers engaged in hotly contested debates leaving little room for compromise. As the calendar approached 2020, legislators argued over taxation, carbon sequestration strategies, the states Public Employees Retirement System (PERS), gun rights, and the vaccination of children.

Oregons contentious polity since the mid-1990s differs dramatically from the remarkable cadre of Republicans and Democrats who declared the cleanup of the Willamette River during the 1960s, passed a measure asserting public ownership of the states ocean beaches (1967), pushed through the nations first Bottle Bill (1971), and established Oregons pathbreaking land-use planning measure in 1973. The unlikely threesome behind the latter proposal included the governor, Tom McCall, born to wealth in Situate, Massachusetts (1913); Hector Macpherson, born in Albany, Oregon (1918), the son of a former legislator and farmer; and Ted Hallock, Portland born (1922) and a student at the University of Oregon when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They were strikingly different in temperament. McCall, the best known, was gregarious, a journalist and television commentator who served two memorable terms as Oregons governor. Friends described the slender, quiet, well-educated Macpherson as a cerebral dairy farmer. Hallock, brilliant and temperamental, eventually founded a successful advertising agency in Portland.

The two Republicans (McCall and Macpherson) and the urban Democrat (Hallock) shared a passion in defending Oregon from exploiters near and far. Macpherson founded a planning commission in Linn County in the early 1960s, out of his concern for unregulated land use in the Willamette Valley, where farmland threatened to be little more than a monument to mans greed and shortsightedness. Elected to the Oregon senate in 1970, Macpherson found kindred planning supporters on McCalls staff and worked with the governors office to draft a land-use bill that would place ultimate authority with the state. Hallock, elected to the Oregon senate in 1962, chaired the Senate Environmental and Land-Use Committee, supported land-use regulation, and backed McCalls efforts to shutter pulp companies fouling the Willamette River.

In the lead-up to the 1973 legislative session, McCall launched a campaign to promote land-use planning and travelled the state to push the proposal. The capstone to McCalls effort was his stirring January address to the legislature, warning about the spread of sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley. With S.B. 100 before his Senate Environment and Land-Use Committee (Macpherson was also a member), Hallock held hearings before crowds of onlookers without gaining much traction. With the assistance of an advisory committee headed by L. B. Day, the fiery former head of Oregons Department of Environmental Quality, Hallock shepherded a compromise bill through the senate that passed eighteen to ten. Hallock and Macpherson delivered the bill to the house, dominated by liberal Democrats, where the measure passed without amendments.