Potential disaster

I'm not generally one of those people who sends out exhortations to vote in a particular way. This election, though, there's one issue that I feel quite passionately about--enough so that I'm breaking with tradition and asking all of my friends who vote in Washington State to vote against Initiative 933.

So far as I'm concerned, there's a lot not to like about I-933, but the crux of the problem is summed up nicely in one short sentence in Section 3:

An agency that decides to enforce or apply any ordinance, regulation or rule to private property that would result in damaging the use or value of private property shall first pay the property owner compensation as defined in Section 2 of this Act.

This "pay or waive" clause essentially makes it impossible to limit growth or legislate sensible development of land; the cost of doing so would be prohibitive. As the Washington chapter of the American Planning Association puts it,

Section 3 of the Initiative would effectively gut the vast majority of our state's land use regulations, including those that assure that as more intensive development occurs in urban areas, those communities remain livable, and laws that protect environmentally critical areas like lakes, streams, and wetlands; conserve natural resource industries like agricultural and forestry lands; and help maintain rural livelihoods and lifestyles.

And because I-933 is retroactive to 1996, we'd have to start choosing between putting state funds to other uses and protecting the quality of life in our region pretty much immediately. It's impossible, of course, to tell how much money we'd need to spend to enforce our current environmental and land use regulations, let alone anything else we might want to put in place, but the concept scares me a lot--and at least one analysis suggests that the costs would be quite high.

So, please, if you're a Washington voter, do a little research into Initiative 933. Here are some great (if biased, in what I think is the proper direction) resources to get you started:

• The Washington Chapter of the APA, in addition to the analysis quoted above, has listed the top ten reasons to vote NO on 933.
  
• The No on 933! website has a wealth of information; I particularly like the annotated version of the initiative text.
  
• You'll find the executive summary of the costs study mentioned above here.
  
• The Seattle Times published a pithy editorial against I-933.
  
• The Sightline Institute has a bunch of resources online, including capsule descriptions of I-933 and five similar "pay or waive" initiatives on the ballot in other states this autumn.
  
• In a Seattle Times article, Joe Tovar imagines the consequences of enacting I-933.