First, I marked all of Gunderson's seven properties on the map. Without
exception, the properties would have been considered the boonies when I
was a kid, but they had been developed by the time I was out of
college. The next step was to figure out where the properties fell
along the growth boundary.
Fortunately, the library maintained a series of maps depicting the
original boundary line and all the changes made in the twenty-five
years since. The trend became obvious immediately. Six of Gunderson's
seven properties fell just inside the original boundary line. The land
would have been rural at the time, then made valuable by the sudden
restriction against future growth. The seventh was brought within the
urban area after the first boundary expansion.
Either Larry Gunderson was the luckiest landowner in Portland or I was
on to something.
I found a records librarian and asked her if she could pull the
legislative history for the Smart Growth Act, which had established the
original growth boundary in the summer of 1980. She looked at me like
I had to be kidding, then sighed heavily and walked away when she
realized I wasn't.
A good hour later, she reemerged with a handcart stacked with ragged
and dusty binders. 'I can't tell you exactly where it is in here, but
each binder has an index by bill number. Do you need help finding the
number too?'
'No, I've got it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.'
I gathered from her look of confusion that she rarely heard those
words.
The rest of the afternoon was spent wading through hundreds of pages of
legislative findings, debates, floor speeches, and other forms of word
combinations that hardly deserve to be called part of the English
language. Most of the talk was about whether to limit urban growth and
how. What captured my attention, however, were the pages detailing the
debates about where to draw the boundary line itself. I couldn't make
sense of it all, so I fell back on my handy dandy anti confusion
treatment, list-making.
Using a legal pad, I listed the various property areas in dispute, then
located each on my map. Four of the six Gunderson properties within
the eventual boundary had not been included for development under the
original proposal.
Next I turned to the legislators involved in the debates, noting their
names and where they stood on permitting development within each
disputed geographic area. For the most part, predictable
pro-development and pro-environment patterns emerged, with the act's
opponents favoring open development across the board while proponents
favored restrictions. But one legislator was clearly pushing the
expansions that favored Gunderson more than he was pushing others:
Representative Clifford Brigg.
I went back to the records librarian and asked for anything she could
give me on Brigg within six months of August 1980.
'Unfortunately,' she said, 'the articles from back then aren't
computerized, so you're going to have to do it by hand.' She led me to
a table in another corner that contained the old microfilm machines,
pulled a couple of notebooks from a nearby shelf, and explained they
were the indexes of Oregonian articles from 1980 through 1981. If I
made a list of the ones I wanted to see, she'd pull the rolls of
microfilm I needed.
If it involved making a list, I could handle it.
Brigg was no stranger to the press. Some of the articles appeared to
concern the growth legislation, but most seemed campaign-related. It
must have been a reelection year.
I requested all the articles that looked like they might relate to the
growth boundary and a handful of the ones about the campaign.
My new best friend had the rolls of film in just a few minutes. After
a quick refresher course on how to use the machine, I jumped in,
turning first to the stories on the growth legislation.
Most of the articles were brief, containing competing sound bites from
developers and environmentalists, with a few remarks from legislators
thrown in for flavor. But a longer feature offered a good overview of
the debate and Brigg's role in it.
The first section of the article described the rapid growth that was
swallowing rural land along the 1-5 corridor from Salem to Seattle.
Although the last decade had seen only an 8 percent increase in the
population of the Willamette Valley, the geography of the urban area
had sprawled 22 percent.
The article explained the Smart Growth Act and the general policy
arguments on each side of the debate. Planned growth versus the free
market, environmental preservation versus human use of land, the
collective good versus individual choice, open space versus affordable
housing, blah blah blah.
Then the writer got to Brigg:
