The Seattle Times
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New movement wants to do more than slow growth

by Eric Pryne
Seattle Times staff reporter

Monday, August 14, 2000

PORTLAND - On the ninth floor of a downtown office building, in a suite it moved into so recently that the walls are still bare, a new nonprofit is working to change the course of Western civilization.

That's how founder and president Andy Kerr, in a typically provocative remark, describes the mission of Alternatives to Growth Oregon (AGO).

Its goal: to end growth in Oregon.

Not manage it. Not shape it. Not slow it down.

Stop it.

"This is a very radical concept," Kerr concedes. "The only thing that's more radical is continuing to grow."

Growth is something that Oregon, like Washington, has plenty of experience with. A hot economy and a spectacular setting combined to draw hundreds of thousands of newcomers to the state in the 1990s, pushing its population up 17 percent.

Oregon has a national reputation for managing its growth more gracefully than most - limiting sprawl, saving forests and farmland. The state's pioneering 1973 land-use-planning law provided the model for Washington's 1990 Growth Management Act.

But AGO contends that managing growth isn't enough, that traffic congestion and disappearing green places provide ample evidence that Oregon's vaunted quality of life is slipping away. Planning is fine, says Kerr, "but if all we do is plan, Oregon will just be a better-planned California."

So AGO is calling for dozens of changes in laws and personal behavior aimed at curbing not just population growth but the lifestyle choices - larger lots, bigger houses, more cars, more driving - that intensify its effects.

The group's proposals include making new development pay upfront the full cost of schools, roads and other public services it requires, cutting immigration 80 percent and changing tax laws to reward families that have just one child.

Most people assume growth is good or inevitable, or both. Public policy reflects those assumptions. In that context, a group such as AGO might seem as relevant as the Flat Earth Society.

But AGO is challenging those assumptions. It has already inspired a similar group to organize in Washington state. And it's being taken seriously in Oregon, largely because of Andy Kerr.

'Kiss my ax, Andy'

Kerr is probably the best-known environmental activist in the state, and the most controversial. He spent 20 years with the Oregon Natural Resources Council, emerging as one of the generals in the environmental movement's long and largely successful campaign to stop logging in federal old-growth forests. It was his organization that first recognized the spotted owl's value as a legal tool to achieve that goal.

Kerr, now 45, fought his war in the style of Patton or MacArthur: high-profile, confrontational, a lightning rod. He discovered and honed a gift for pithy one-liners, delighting supporters and the media, and infuriating foes.

A newspaper labeled him the most hated man in Oregon. He was burned in effigy at a property-rights rally in 1994. Loggers' trucks sported bumper stickers urging Kerr to "Kiss my ax, Andy." Rush Limbaugh cackled when Kerr moved to rural northeastern Oregon - and into a log house.

But no one accused Kerr of ineffectiveness.

Population isn't a new issue

Kerr says his move from the spotted-owl wars to the growth game reflects no epiphany. Overpopulation was one of the environmental movement's big concerns when he first got involved in high school in Creswell, Ore., in the early 1970s, he says. The first group he joined was Zero Population Growth.

After that, "the environmental movement dropped the ball and stopped talking about population," Kerr says. "Meanwhile, the forests needed to be saved . . . but I started out in high school thinking population was the ultimate environmental issue.

"What environmental problem couldn't be helped by addressing population and consumption?"

In the year since its founding, AGO has attracted about 1,000 members and more than $115,000 from foundations. Portland's city attorney chairs its board of directors.

AGO is looking ahead to the next session of the Oregon Legislature, when it intends to push a bill that would allow counties and cities to charge developers upfront the full cost of the new schools, roads and other public facilities their projects require. Not charging such fees effectively subsidizes growth, AGO reasons - and if growth weren't subsidized, there might be less of it.

Also on the group's legislative agenda: a bill permitting communities to stop growing if they choose, perhaps by changing the requirement in Oregon's growth-management law that all cities and counties maintain a 20-year supply of land open for development.

Kerr doesn't expect the Legislature will approve either bill. But if it fails, he says, AGO may take the measures directly to voters as initiatives.

But more than any legislation, Kerr says, AGO's priority for now is simply to raise the issue, "to give people permission to talk about the end of growth."

That may be happening. Later this month, for instance, Kerr will be a featured speaker in Coos Bay, Ore., along with Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber and former U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, at a conference Hatfield is sponsoring on Oregon's future and the tension between economic growth and quality of life.

"It's very much on everybody's mind," says Gerry Frank, the conference organizer and a former Hatfield aide.

This spring Salem Mayor Mike Swaim ran for re-election saying many of the same disparaging things about growth that AGO is saying. He won easily.

"It's not about me - it's about the issue," Swaim says. "It's a very, very potent issue here in our community, and AGO is a critical voice in the dialogue we're having."

Its influence already is extending into other states. An Alternatives to Growth Washington group has incorporated and expects to become more active this fall, says organizer Bill Elder, an Issaquah environmentalist and no-growth advocate.

The economic disconnect

Kerr is convinced a majority of Oregonians want growth to stop: It's simply a matter of convincing them it's possible, then mobilizing them. He points to polls that indicate most Oregonians think the state already has enough people, if not too many.

But Russ Dondero, a political-science professor at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., thinks Kerr may be miscalculating.

Growth is a potent issue, Dondero agrees, but much of Oregon's population growth has been fueled by job growth.

"Oregonians are of two minds," he says. "They want to preserve the quality of life, but they also want to see the economy continue to grow. If you ever put those two issues head to head, to a test vote, I'm not sure how it would come out. . . ."

"Oregonians want it both ways, which is typical of Americans."

Robert Liberty, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, which monitors growth management in the state, questions the efficacy of some of AGO's proposals for stopping growth. For instance, he says, charging developers for schools and roads may drive up housing prices but may not curb growth: "People are still moving to San Jose, where it costs $450,000 for a tract home."

Liberty agrees with Kerr that growth management in Oregon hasn't lived up to its promise. The solution, he says, is to plan better, to enforce the law more rigorously.

"We've been doing land-use planning in Oregon for 25 years," Kerr answers, "and I'm very glad we've done it . . . but why should we now presume that we will do a better job when we have 25 years of experience that suggests we won't?"

Growth itself is the problem, he says, not how it's managed: "If growth is so good, who's benefiting from it? Are you happier now?"