OREGON GOVERNOR ACKNOWLEDGES LIMITS TO GROWTH

The following are excerpts from Oregon Governor Kitzhaber's speech at the Fourth Annual Chattaqua of the Mark O. Hatfield Institute for International Understanding, Southwest Oregon Community College, August 28, 2000.

"I think rapid population growth is probably the single most important contributing factor to both the overburdened infrastructure and the growing traffic problems....

"Growth is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can be associated with a strong economy. On the other hand it can erode livability by contributing to congestion, sprawl and pollution. There are ways that growth can be slowed or even reversed. One way is to put the economy in the tank. Another way would be to destroy our livability so that Oregon is no longer such a nice place to live.

"I'm assuming that none of us are going to advocate either of those approaches and that leaves us with two other options: one is to stop subsidizing growth and the other is to do a better job of managing growth....

"The fact is, we are doing just that [subsidizing growth], in our social policies, tax policies and our zoning policies. My Task Force on Growth pointed out that growth actually exacerbates local government revenue problems. It doesn't relieve them.

"Now in addition, our tax policy encourages growth by subsidizing business and by subsidizing larger families rather than smaller families. I appreciate that the proposition of changing the policies by which we implicitly subsidize growth is a very controversial one. And perhaps we're not ready to deal with those things yet.

"I believe that ultimately if we want to have it all we're going to have to come to terms with these issues. Because Oregon does have a finite carrying capacity. We can't forever absorb the increase of 40,000 to 50,000 people a year without losing something that's very critical about what makes Oregon a special place to live. So we may not be ready to tackle these issues in the year 2000, but let's not forget the immortal words of the late southwestern American writer Edward Abbey, who wrote, 'growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.'"

Sent to us by our friends at Alternatives to Growth Oregon (AGO). Their President, Andy Kerr, also spoke at the conference.