Farm Bureau launches attack on growth management

Yesterday, the Washington State Farm Bureau, (which represents agricultural businesses) announced its plans to draw up an initiative that it hopes to qualify for the November 2006 ballot.

The initiative would be similiar to Oregon's Measure 37, which was recently overturned for violating the Oregon and United States constitutions.

[It] would require landowners to be compensated by governments if an action damages either the use or value of private property, or would require governments to waive regulations on that land.

[...]

Environmentalist and growth management groups said there didn’t appear to be many differences between the Oregon initiative [Measure 37] and the Washington proposal.

“The basic thrust of it is the same,” said Aaron Ostrom, executive director of Futurewise in Seattle. “What it does is create giant loopholes that developers will exploit. The bottom line is it’s good for irresponsible developers, and it’s bad for our quality of life.”

The Farm Bureau and its allies will do everything in their power to put up a huge false front on this issue. They'll make deceptive claims and set themselves up to look like victims of an unjust government attack.

They must not be allowed to get away with their scare tactics. We'll be working together with groups like Futurewise to put a stop to the Farm Bureau's attempt to decrease our quality of life:

We will not let such an initiative pass in Washington, and recent polling suggests that there is no groundswell of support for this initiative. Not only would the effects on our state be devastating and a win in Washington, following the win in Oregon, would give the "property rights" movement the confidence to push such initiatives all over the country.

The proponents of Measure 37 are already said to be speaking with "property rights" activists and conservative campaigners in Washington, Florida, Wisconsin and South Carolina about how to emulate their success.

The good news is that a similar measure was defeated in Washington in 1995. The No on Referendum 48 campaign repealed a law passed by Washington’s Republican-held Legislature that required government compensation for any regulation that limited property use.

The vote was 59 percent to 41 percent to repeal the law. Our campaign has the advantage of both the Referendum 48 and the Measure 37 campaigns to learn from.

Washingtonians have a history of saying NO to this over-reaching idea, and we’ll say NO to it again.

Throughout the next year, we're going to be posting often on this topic, and we'll be working especially hard to defeat this initiative - just as we fought Initiative 912 and won.