I-933 tractor parade to hit town

OLYMPIA – Local farmers and ranchers, calling on voters to approve Initiative 933, plan a fairgrounds rally and a “tractorcade” through downtown Spokane today.

“This initiative is about fairness,” said Mark Klicker, Eastern Washington regional director for the state Farm Bureau. “We want to make a statement: that the majority of the farmers and ranchers want to protect their property rights.”

Critics call the measure costly and full of pro-development loopholes.

“A dozen tractors clogging up traffic in downtown Spokane doesn’t change the fact that Initiative 933 will cost taxpayers billions,” said Aaron Toso, spokesman for the No on 933 campaign.

The tractor rally follows one last week in Seattle, where tractors and trucks rumbled through the downtown shopping district. Another is slated for next Wednesday in Ellensburg.

I-933 – which is similar to Idaho’s Proposition 2 – would require state and local government to compensate owners for property value lost to some types of regulation. If taxpayers can’t afford to pay the costs of such restrictions, then those rules would have to be waived or, under Idaho’s version, repealed. Washington’s version covers regulations dating back to at least 1996. Idaho’s applies only to new rules.

Klicker and other proponents say such measures will protect them from government “takings,” such as requiring natural buffer zones around streams.

Critics of I-933 – who launched TV ads in the Spokane market on Wednesday – predict that it will make it much easier to turn farmland into subdivisions and strip malls.

“We think it costs too much and goes too far,” said Toso.

He and other opponents point to Oregon, which passed a similar measure two years ago. Landowners there have so far filed more than $1 billion in compensation claims. Among the projects seeking waivers from development restrictions: a gravel mine, a vacation-homes subdivision in a volcanic caldera, and hundreds of applications to subdivide rural land into smaller home lots.

At a recent Gonzaga University forum on I-933, Spokane attorney Timothy Lawlor predicted that the measure, if it passes, will pit neighbor against neighbor. Noting that the city of Spokane Valley didn’t even exist in 1996, he said the measure would effectively wipe out the city’s entire zoning code.

“It’s Wild, Wild West,” he said.

Former Spokane County Commissioner John Roskelley has similar concerns. He cited the critical areas ordinance, the county’s ban on billboards and a law regulating locations of cellular phone towers as some recently passed land-use laws that could be undone by I-933.

Instead of being able to deny proposals like a recent one to put a convenience store at the corner of Bigelow Gulch and Argonne roads, Roskelley said, the county would have to pay property owners not to put in such projects.

“It’s not going to be pretty if they (voters) pass it,” he said, “because we’re not going to have the money to pay these people.”

The state Farm Bureau, which wrote I-933, pooh-poohs such objections. It says that “pay or waive” measures restrain government from passing too many restrictions.

“This will bring some accountability to government process,” said Farm Bureau spokesman John Stuhlmiller. “It will protect private property and cause government to think before it takes action.”