Oops. Who knew?

     "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

        Attributed to Yogi Berra and others

Forty years ago I was a Jackson County Commissioner.

I was elected just after I turned 31. I can see how things turned out--so far. I was wrong about some things.

Jails are built to deal with both present and future. I was on the jail-size citizen's advisory committee. I got onto TV saying bigger was better. I said bigger was more humane--less crowded. We knew the county would grow, but underestimated how fast growth came. Ours is not an earthquake zone, but in 1993 buildings shook here and fell down in Klamath County, 70 miles away. The jail wasn't designed for earthquakes.  Oops.

We put enormous attention on Southern Oregon's air quality. In winter we had thick particle-rich fog that put a film of gunk onto car windshields and routinely brought visibility down to a few feet. In the summers we had hazardous yellow ozone haze. Air quality was a major negative for Medford. It turns out that the problems we knew about mostly got solved--but only indirectly by what we did.

The lumber mills complained bitterly about being required to install pollution scrubbers. We made slow progress forcing pollution controls onto them. Environmental regulations to protect the spotted owl meant timber harvests in surrounding forests plummeted. A few mills remained and made the investments to install large air-filtering scrubbers, but most local mills closed. They didn't have lumber to mill. That cleaned up the winter air.

We county commissioners addressed summer air by supporting inspection and maintenance of auto exhausts. It turns out that nearly all the problem got fixed because newer cars won't run if the carburetors aren't working well. The former problem of people intentionally removing catalytic converters is long past. Now the concern is that people steal catalytic converters.  

We have a summer air problem in the different direction, and it is worse. The under-managed, unharvested forests catch fire and fill the valley with smoke. That didn't happen back in 1982.

We tried to plan ahead to protect farm land by forbidding division of farm blocks into smaller parcels and forbidding new homesites on farm land. Our assumption was that keeping parcel sizes large would help commercial pear operations--our trademark agricultural use--buy and hold land at farm prices--not homesite prices. The county ended up defining and zoning as farmable some star-thistle-covered areas that were worthless as farm land. That seemed crazy to us, but the law required it.

Surprise. Our expectations were backwards. It turns out that by 2022 some of those hillsides are now in intensive agriculture as prime vineyards. Meanwhile, the pear orchards are being torn out. They aren't worth farming for pears. Some may be replaced by vineyards, but most have turned into--of all things--cannabis farms. That was unexpected. In 1982 people went to prison for growing cannabis.  

In 1982 we assumed that houses on farmland would hurt the ability to farm. I had it backwards. Cannabis farming requires workers to be on site, both for convenience of a labor-intensive crop, and for security. Neighbors, journalists, and public officials complain about the about the inhumanity of workers living in tents or in plastic-clad shelters, and the lack of water and septic systems.  As yesterday's blog noted, it made Southern Oregon a supposed "hell-hole." This situation was the result of public policy I helped enact. We forbade permanent housing on farms. Oops.

As the county created its master plan in 1982, we had ten goals to consider. One was the "housing" goal. It occupied less than one percent of our attention. After all, housing wasn't a problem, except possibly for the fact that it was too easy to build too much of it, too inexpensively, where it was unwelcome. We saw the marketplace was working and assumed that it would continue to provide ample affordable housing. Oops.

The Greenway in flames

A major project for the county was the creation of a linear park of wild-land alongside Bear Creek, the creek that connects the cities of Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Medford, and Central Point. It is a lovely civic amenity. It became the zone for encampments of unhoused people. It was garbage-strewn, dangerous for park users, and a fire hazard. In the summer of 2020 it became path for the Almeda fire which torched the dry natural vegetation along with over 2,500 homes. We created a lovely park. We also created a difficult-to-manage hazard. Oops.

This is not an apology. We-the-people planned our future and I was part of it. We did our best. I write in humility. We plan. We plant seeds. We imagine the future and build for it. Some of it will turn out as we expect. Some will not. We need to plan for that, too.