Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg’s sense of urgency when it comes to preserving the county’s agricultural, timber and recreational lands is smart.
Sending a related tax measure to the November ballot might not be.
Ladenburg is asking the Pierce County Council to ask voters whether they want to pay higher property taxes to save some of the county’s open spaces from development.
The tax would help fund the innovative transfer-of-development rights program that represented a major milestone in the county’s growth management efforts when it passed last year.
The program allows property owners to profit from their land without having to give it up for development. Developers, in turn, can buy the right to build more densely in urban areas by tapping the county’s bank of development rights.
Ladenburg’s proposal would allow the county to borrow as much as $80 million to buy development rights. Once that amount might have bought a lot of land. These days, it’s more likely to be a good start.
Pierce County is having to play catch-up for the years it abdicated land use planning to development pressures. Making up for lost time keeps getting more expensive. Ladenburg agues that land won’t get any cheaper, and borrowing rates are lower than they’ve been in a while.
But standing between him and the ballot are concerns that he is in too big of a hurry, that this is not the year that voters will agree to tax themselves for something as abstract as land conservation.
More significant than the concern over timing is the source of that concern: environmentalists who would be expected to be the driving force behind a campaign to pass an open space tax. A significant portion of the environmental community has warned Ladenburg that there isn’t enough time to round up foot soldiers or money to win, and that a failed ballot measure might set them back years.
But for Ladenburg, it’s now or never. He’s term-limited and seeking to move on to the state attorney general’s post. It’s taken a long time to get Pierce County to this point; Ladenburg clearly wants to ensure all the hard work is not undone.
Open space proponents could be rolling the dice on the next executive and County Council being as supportive of conservation as the current bunch. But they also might be right that the timeline is too short to do Ladenburg’s proposal justice.
Handicapping the race falls to the County Council, far from an impartial arbiter given that all of its members are up for election this year and might not want to share the ballot with a tax measure they put there.
They should hear out those who caution against a rush job. But if Ladenburg can prove his measure has a real shot, council members should give voters the chance to decide.
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