This November, vote no on Initiative 933, which would fundamentally change the balance between private rights and the public interest in regulating property use.
I-933 corrects a few regulatory abuses. It also abolishes our traditional limits on land use. The gains from correcting the abuses are greatly outweighed by the loss of land use control. On net, it’s a bad deal for the public.
Perhaps you live in a nice residential area. One day, your next door neighbor announces he’s decided to invest in pig manure – a 30-foot-high pile of pig manure. You go to the zoning board or county council and ask for a rule against pig manure piles in residential areas. A new regulation is created and you get to breathe easier.
That’s how the system works now. If I-933 passes, your neighbor could go to court and demand cash compensation from the taxpayer for the lost potential income from not being able to build a pig-poo pile. In fact, neighbors who would never have thought of building a manure pile can also claim compensation from the taxpayer. All they’d need to demand a payment is to show that the market value of their property has dropped because the regulation prevents a potential buyer from storing manure.
It gets worse. Suppose your neighborhood already has anti-pig manure zoning. If the zoning was put in place in the last decade, your neighbor is entitled to an exemption or a payment from the taxpayer even if the zoning in your subdivision was in place before anyone moved in.
I-933 requires (with some very limited exceptions) that taxpayers compensate property owners for every regulation that limits the use of their property. Even though it’s a terrible plan, there is a reason why a small group of people are pushing the initiative.
Let’s amend the story line above. Suppose that the “nice residential area” is a subdivision of three fancy houses built among farms that have been operating for a hundred years. And the neighbor who wants to store pig manure is the third generation farming his land. Still feel that the government should be able to make the farmer give up his manure pile without compensation? It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the farmer, even though I-933 goes much too far.
We do have some “regulations without compensation” that have gone overboard. A prime example is limiting the ability to farm rural land – which is why the Washington Farm Bureau sponsored the initiative. Keeping land open is good for the environment, but while the government can legally take land from an owner to be left fallow, it’s required to pay fair market value. When rules were passed requiring that large amounts of rural land remain unplowed – but not actually taking the land away – the owners got not a cent to compensate for loss of use of their land. That’s not fair.
Unfortunately, as is true with many initiatives, I-933 takes a sledgehammer approach, smashing a wide range of sensible and fair property use regulations along with the unreasonable ones.
I-933 effectively wipes out most zoning and land use changes made in the last 10 years. If your neighborhood was zoned residential in the last decade, someone will be able to build a bar next door or demand compensation.
Because I-933 applies to all property, not just land, the localities won’t be able restrict noise or odor nuisances such as boom boxes on buses, air horns outside hospitals, and yes, even manure piles, unless the nuisance reaches the level of a health hazard.
And I-933 does include one glaring loophole, albeit one which was doubtlessly well-intended. Regulations are exempt if they apply to all property in a jurisdiction. So, a county can ban piles of pig manure – but only if the ban applies to farms as well as established residential neighborhoods.
There’s enough manure in politics without adding I-933. Vote no.
Dick Startz is Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. He can be reached at econcol@u.washington.edu.
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