The Story of Oregon's Planning Program
& 1000 Friends of Oregon

The Beginning: Oregon Adopts the Nation's Strongest Land Use Laws
In 1973, Oregonians decided that we would govern our growth rather than be governed by it.

Led by Republican Governor Tom McCall, a bi-partisan coalition in the Legislature passed Senate Bill 100. This landmark legislation created a new agency—the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC)—and empowered it to adopt statewide planning goals to guide the state's growth. Every city and county was required to adopt land use plans that would carry out the Goals.

The Goals protected farmlands, forestlands and natural resources in rural areas and encouraged compact development within existing cities and towns, where it is less costly to provide services. The Goals eliminated obstacles to the construction of a wider variety of housing, affordable to more Oregonians, and promoted urban design and public investments that reduced our dependence on automobiles.

The Goals provide something for everyone and a place for everything - but without the sprawl rampant in the rest of America.

The Founding of 1000 Friends of Oregon
Governor McCall knew that it would take more than government action for SB 100 to succeed. It would take the support and vigilance of Oregon's citizens.

So when a young attorney, Henry Richmond, asked for his help in forming "a statewide, full-time, professionally staffed citizen organization whose sole purpose is to urge state and local bodies of government to make good land use planning decisions," McCall enthusiastically agreed. 1000 Friends of Oregon was incorporated in January 8, 1975.

The Watchdog Years
In our early years, we were the watchdog that Senate Bill 100 needed. We made sure powerful local interests and political pressures didn't undermine the law.

Our staff undertook the laborious task of reading hundreds of pages of draft zoning regulations, plan policies, and subdivision controls to make sure these rules carried out the letter and spirit of the law. We wrote the letters and collected the information showing why these draft plans needed to be improved.

And we filed the appeals that defined the meaning of the law: that counties could not approve houses on the farmland they were supposed to protect for agriculture, that cities were required to establish urban growth boundaries based on land needs not on city limits, that the natural areas in our estuaries must be protected and that cities could not use home rule arguments to block the construction of low-cost housing.

It was technical, time consuming, and absolutely essential.

Our watchdog role was appropriate for this phase of Oregon's planning effort.
By 1986, the last local land use plan had been adopted and approved. The politics of planning was changing and it was time for our work to change, too.

1000 Friends Today

Evaluating our Progress and Finding Solutions to the Problems Caused by Growth
In the 1980s, it became clear that Oregon's planning laws were not working as well as they could. We had to do more than watch existing laws and development; we had to monitor the system as a whole and find ways of improving the laws and devise better ways of developing. 1000 Friends expanded its role beyond enforcement and implementation to include monitoring performance and proposing new policies and programs.

In the mid-1980s, we initiated studies that revealed serious problems with the counties' administration of the land use laws protecting farm, range and forest lands. The concerns raised in the studies led the Legislature to require annual reporting by each county and later to commission its own research, which ultimately lead to changes in the land use laws intended to provide better protections to the most productive lands.

In 1989, 1000 Friends teamed up with the Home Builders of Metropolitan Portland to evaluate how well the Portland region had done in meeting state goals to promote more compact and lower-cost housing. We found that Oregon had achieved an important success in this area and made recommendations for additional steps that would make it easier to build more needed housing in the future.

In 1990, state and local governments were moving forward with plans to build a major bypass highway through Washington County. When we began our exploration of alternatives, everyone felt that the bypass was a foregone conclusion. But by 1997 1000 Friends's alternative was adopted by the Oregon Department of Transportation and regional and local governments.

In 1996, 1000 Friends conceived the idea and raised the money for a major research project to examine what current development trends would mean for farmers, timber producers, taxpayers and to explore a better alternative that would save land and money.

1000 Friends of Oregon has become the "R & D" department for Oregon's planning program.