Oregon’s land use agency recommends ways to mitigate wildfire risk

Wildfires in Oregon and the West routinely force evacuations, threatening human life and homes. Now, the state’s Department of Land Conservation and Development has made new draft recommendations for how communities can respond to these increasing threats, including mitigation measures for new developments. The DLCD has also released new draft recommendations for how to address housing needs. The public comment period for the wildfire recommendations is now open. The housing comment period opens Wednesday. The agency will be presenting final recommendations to Oregon lawmakers in the fall. Brenda Ortigoza Bateman directs the Department of Land Conservation and Development. We talk with her about responding to wildfire risks, the housing crisis and the department’s priorities more broadly as the 50th anniversary of the state’s land use system approaches.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Almost 50 years ago, Senate Bill 100 created the Land Use System that we in Oregon have to this day; that includes the Department of Land Conservation and Development or the DLCD. As the agency enters its second half century, it has a new leader Brenda Ortigoza Bateman and it’s trying to address some of the state’s most pressing concerns including wildfires and a housing shortage. Brenda Ortigoza Bateman joins us now to talk about how statewide land use goals can be used to tackle these problems. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Brenda Ortigoza Bateman: Hi Dave, good to be here.

Miller: It’s good to have you on. I want to start with the big picture, because unlike, say, the Oregon Health Authority, which has obviously been very much in the news over the last 2.5 years, or the Department of Human Services which manages the foster care system, your agency is a lot less well known. Can you explain what the DLCD actually does?

Ortigoza Bateman: Yes, certainly. So the Department of Land Conservation and Development is the steward of Oregon’s land use system in partnership with many other state and local agencies. And if you’ve ever taken a look around Oregon and thought, ‘This looks and feels different than other states,’ you’d be right. Fifty years ago Governor Mccall and the Legislature had the forethought to set up the system with the thought that as Oregon grows in population and its economy that they wanted us to do so thoughtfully and deliberately, specifically protecting our productive farm and forest lands along the way as well as protecting other features that make Oregon special, like our coastal resources and estuaries, our cultural and historic and scenic areas. So 2023 will be our 50th anniversary of the originating legislation, as you mentioned a few moments ago, Senate Bill 100, and also the launching of our agency. And I just wanted to invite folks to visit our website where we have a banner underneath our department name and we’re inviting input from the public on what they think has gone well and where they think we need more work with regard to our land use system. We want to take this opportunity at the 50th anniversary to do some reflection and figure out what we want to celebrate as well as some things that have changed and that we need to maybe work on or strengthen or change moving forward in the next 50 years.

Miller: If I understand correctly, local governments, whether at the county or the city level have a lot of leeway when it comes to land use and planning. So what are your real levers of power as a state agency?

Ortigoza Bateman:That’s a good question. We have laid out a number of rules and in those, particularly recently, we’ve tried to be to provide some flexibility so that if folks are very short staffed and low on capacity, they can just pick up language that we, provided as a sample and they can run with it in their local regulations and zoning and codes or they can suggest to us another way that they can get to those same outcomes and we can provide them flexibility. It does require a conversation. So along the way, we do have a lot of rules, we were known for our rule writing, but we also have some incentives and some help that we can provide in the form of grant funding, technical assistance, mentoring, and then some model codes as I mentioned, we can often provide sample language that folks can use and make their own as they move through the planning process.

Miller: So that’s some of the general background. Let’s turn to some specifics, starting with wildfires. What did lawmakers task you with last year when they passed Senate Bill 762?

Ortigoza Bateman: As our communities grow in Oregon, they’re supposed to consider natural hazards that they may encounter along the way. And that includes wildfire. In 2020 as you know, Oregon lost nine lives, 4,000 homes. We had a million acres of land burn and a billion dollars spent on firefighting. So in 2021 in the aftermath of that, the legislature tasked us with writing a set of recommendations. Basically they were asking how should we be using or developing our land, given what we know about wildfire and its risks and its impact. So last year, sorry, last week our agency published a draft report. Its draft only. And at this point we are asking for input and review and comment from the public. It’s actually up on our website under the banner ‘latest news,’ and we would love folks to read that and provide their feedback by September 16th.  We’re also offering a couple of listening sessions if folks want to hear more information about it. But basically this recommendation report contains half a dozen recommendations that we wanted to put out there for communities to consider as they are continuing their development journey. One that we felt very strongly about was that folks engage with their communities and provide information and provide a two way communication, feedback so that people have a chance to participate in the development of local regulation and policy. Other things that are in there include safe evacuation routes. There are a couple of recommendations that note, you know, in our recent wildfires it became apparent that we need multiple ways to exit a community and adequate access for firefighters to get in and connectivity of our streets so that folks can move around and not get pinned into a corner. Other things you’ll find in there are some suggestions about new development communities might want to consider, not placing vulnerable populations in some of the most risky areas for wildfire and I’m talking about schools and hospitals and senior care centers there, we’ve also asked them to make sure that they’ve got adequate firefighting capability and infrastructure in place if a new development goes in.

[Voices overlap]

Miller: There’s a lot here. So let’s let’s dig into some of those because there’s more, but because I do have questions about some of the things you’ve already mentioned, So, focusing for a second on the new development, you’re recommending that in areas of the greatest wildfire risk, cities and counties change their, zoning and codes and other things to take into account that risk. What could that look like in practice? How could zoning or codes actually change in places of the highest risk?

Ortigoza Bateman: I think every community certainly has a unique situation in terms of how they’re currently structured, where their infrastructure, meaning their water and other utilities currently reach. But one of the things that we wanted them to consider or discuss as part of their planning was, where these community centers and facilities would go and whether there were other alternatives. And if there are not, we’ve also provided for, you know, waivers and the ability for folks to signal ‘This is our only alternative,’ and we’re putting it here and this is why, but we’re really trying to spark a community conversation and make sure that folks have really agreed upon where they’re going to place some of these structures, this is the beginning of a process. And so I think it can play out a number of different ways depending on what communities want to do moving forward.

Miller: So in other words, for the facilities with concentrated vulnerable populations, I think that’s the language that I saw in the report, schools, hospitals, assisted living facilities, clean air shelters and prisons, if they can’t cite these facilities in places that are not at high risk to fire because there are no places like that, no low risk places in their communities, you’re saying they should be able to just put them there with a waiver?

Ortigoza Bateman: That would be one possibility. Another one could be partnering with a neighboring community and looking more broadly across the region, for other spaces and other alternatives. That might be a way to take care of it as well.

Miller: But going back to new development in terms of residential homes or commercial buildings, how much do you think at the state level, codes should change for what kinds of buildings people can put up in places of the highest fire risk. How big a change should we be looking at?

Ortigoza Bateman: I would want to point out that our agency is one of many that are working in this space. So our recommendations are specifically about land use and land development. Now, when you want to talk more about buildings, the materials that are used to construct, the codes, they’re our partner agency, Department of Consumer and Business Services is working on that, we call it hardening, that those structures and those buildings, and then if you’re talking about the defensible space that is around a structure, around the community, the Fire Marshal’s Office is working on that. So we’re in partnership at the table working on bits and pieces of this whole equation.

Miller: But for the parts that your agency does have jurisdiction over in this draft recommendation, there are basically two pathways that are very different. One would involve statewide rulemaking, that if I understand this correctly, would basically force cities and counties to amend their codes in various ways. The other would just be voluntary; local governments could make those changes if they chose. Who is going to decide which path you’ll take?

Ortigoza Bateman: Oh, that’s a great question, and it goes back to the toolbox we were mentioning at the top of the show in terms of different routes that we can take. So we’ve provided a menu of options in this report and this report will ultimately go to the Oregon Legislature for them to consider when they convene in Salem in 2023. So we’re actually quite a bit of ways from knowing how all of this is going to play out. We’ve set forth some of these outcomes with, for instance, evacuation, areas of new development etcetera. They’ll look at those and they can decide how they want to get to those outcomes and what role they want us to play. So we’ve laid out a spectrum of tools everywhere from mandatory tools, you know, regulatory, rulemaking to things that are more voluntary, including incentives, grants, funding, technical assistance and that end of the spectrum. They are going to choose, pick and choose from amongst those. They can, they can choose anywhere along there, or maybe they’ve got other options we haven’t even thought of, and at the end of their legislative session, so this is a year from now, June 2023, they will tell us. Hopefully they’ll pass a Bill that can clarify for us what approach they want us to take, what role they want us to take in order to get to some of these outcomes. So the decision belongs to the legislature and we’re still many months away from knowing where they’ll land.

Miller: Many of your recommendations talk about land at the greatest risk of wildfire. If I understand this correctly those designations are based on mapping done by the Oregon Department of Forestry and folks at Oregon State University. But at the beginning of this month, just about five weeks after ODF put out a full searchable map of wildfire risks around the state, they rescinded the map because thousands of Oregonians complained and many of them who live in in rural or wildland urban interface areas, they said that they were misclassified as being in high risk zones essentially. So if the map is significantly changed to remove many of those areas from being in high risk categories, could that undercut the usefulness of everything we’re talking about?

Ortigoza Bateman: No, not at all. The way we’ve set this report up, there’s a common sense element to it and it really poses it this way: If you are concerned about the safety and health of your families and your communities, here are some outcomes and some techniques that you could consider, and we’ve left it there because the map is not ready yet to cross reference to, or to refer to. So here at some point when version number two of the map comes out and it’s been adjusted based on ground truth thing and more public input, then we may be able to match up those products a little bit better, but for now it’s… we’re comfortable to say these are some common sense things that families and communities should be considering regardless of where you are, classified or not, on the future map.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in. We’re talking right now with Brenda Ortigoza Bateman, the new Director of Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, and I should note that the public comment period for both the agency’s wildfire recommendations, which we’ve been talking about, and the housing recommendations, which we are about to turn to, they are now open. So Oregonians can comment on these draft recommendations. So let’s turn to housing. Why put out recommendations in the first place? What is the particular issue that your agency is being asked to weigh in on?

Ortigoza Bateman: As Oregon’s communities develop, there are a number of moving parts that they need to consider and that need to work in concert with each other. So it’s not just land and housing, but also water and jobs and transportation. There are a lot of pieces that need to work well together for us to have healthy communities, and currently Oregon is fourth in the nation for its housing shortage. We are only better in that regard than California, Colorado and Utah. And we’re about, we’re more than 110,000 housing units short right now, and that will worsen in future years if we don’t take action. So, in 2019, the Oregon legislature directed us to look at this housing crisis in partnership with the Oregon Housing and Community Agency, which specializes in access to stable housing. So it’s a very thin slice of the housing need, the housing crisis, and that’s stable housing. So, the two agencies together were asked to look at this housing crisis which has grown and which is very apparent in what we call middle housing – that’s really workforce housing, that’s affordable for a workforce. And usually involves multi-family housing or duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, that those sorts of structures. So we do have a draft report that’s coming out later this afternoon, and again, that will be on our website, under ‘Latest News,’ it should be out this evening. And again, we’re inviting folks to provide their feedback and we’re offering three listening sessions around that, but this report includes more than a dozen recommendations in the report itself and in the appendix, and it’s re focused on how do we define ‘housing need’ accurately across the state? And then how do we get to actual production? Because all of this research and analysis doesn’t mean anything if we don’t end up with actual houses available for folks.

[Voices overlap]

Miller: It seems like the kind of situation where really diagnosing the problem could give you a great deal of insight in terms of solutions. Do you have an answer as to why it is that, even though states all across the country are dealing with different levels of a lack of housing, that Oregon is the fourth worst in the country. Why is that?

Ortigoza Bateman: There are a number of factors that come to play and crash together here. They’re laid out really nicely in the report and that’s why we have as many recommendations as we do – because they really focused on providing assistance to communities so that they can identify zones and prepare the land itself. Then there’s a funding aspect in terms of getting public infrastructure, particularly water and wastewater infrastructure in place. And then I think, just as importantly, there are factors about helping to pay for this housing and make sure that we don’t displace any populations along the way. One of the interesting things that I find in these recommendations is a discussion about governance, because there’s currently no state agency that is responsible for this specific type of housing work. As I mentioned earlier, our housing agency across the street from us, Housing and Community Services, specializes in stable housing, but not ‘middle housing.’ So there’s really no one that is responsible for making this production happen, currently.

Miller: Folks may remember the phrase ‘missing middle’ from the debates, the conversations we had a couple of years ago when at the state level, zoning changed in almost every city… city of any, you know, even medium sized, certainly all the large ones to make it possible to to get rid of of bans on anything but single family homes in cities in Oregon. But as we heard at that time, enabling it wasn’t the same as actually making it happen. Getting rid of the prohibition on it wasn’t the same as actually having developers say, ‘Yes, this will pencil out.’ What would work to increase, what would it take to increase production of this kind of home?

Ortigoza Bateman: Well, this is the follow on piece to that. This is diving deeper and actually laying out some of the problems that we’ve discovered by talking to some of our advisory groups and some of our partners in state, local agencies and throughout the state. So we do have lined out here a number of techniques with regard to governance, to funding, to zoning, to public infrastructure development, that will greatly help. But again, as I mentioned at the outset of all of this, our agency, Department of Land Conservation and Development, doesn’t do this work by itself. This is a partnership with many other state and local agencies.

Miller: Earlier in your career, you worked as a Science Chief with Oregon Water Resources Department. You mentioned water, briefly, as one of many things that your agency has to take into account in terms of land use and planning. I’m curious how that earlier experience of yours informs the way you think about water specifically going forward in Oregon?

Ortigoza Bateman: It is so important to me to make sure that these items, these issues are connected. It’s kind of funny, we’re often criticized for working in…working in silos and yet our budgets and sort of how we’re asked to tell our story to the legislature are in silos, that we appear in front of different committees oftentimes. We’re not in the same room together. So, we need to work harder at collaborating and coordinating what we’re doing. But, you know, I’ve heard so many stories about folks who have a success in setting up one piece of this, this equation, you know, setting up a school or setting up an industry, and yet the rest of the infrastructure, the rest of the conversation hasn’t taken place. And so the families that move in to lead in education and lead in industry and jobs end up moving back out again because the rest of the puzzle hasn’t been put in place with regard to clean and accessible water or adequate transportation or schools for their kids. There’s just so much more that we could be doing to keep an integrated approach to this on the table.

Miller: I ask this because I’m really focused specifically on water scarcity. We’ve been hearing a lot about lower snowpack and less surface water and diminishing groundwater and aquifers as a kind of response to that, as people just dig ever deeper and more wells, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem in Oregon and all across the west. What could that mean in terms of statewide land use planning?

Ortigoza Bateman: I think the implications are great, and you can find much more detailed background on this specific topic in the State’s Integrated Water Resources Strategy. In it, lays out some of our projections for precipitation in the future and the primary takeaway there is that we’re expecting the same amount of precipitation as the climate warms, but it will arrive as rain instead of snow. So you think of all the implications to land use that might come with that, you’re no longer going to have a snowpack sitting there for as long, so you’re not going to have groundwater recharge that’s going to flow off more quickly early in the season. And so you’re gonna start to experience flooding and then it’s gonna be dry in the summer when you used to have run off. And that’s where you get your drought. And so there are a lot of implications for changing climate, its effect on water and then that ripple effect on the land and our industry and the health and safety of our people. There’s so much work to be done, but I tell you what, it’s complicated and it’s messy and I love it and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Miller: I want to go back to the beginning. You’d said that as your agency and Oregon’s land use system infrastructure enters its 2nd 50 years, you want to hear from Oregonians about what they want. But I’m curious just for you personally, what it means to you to be in charge of this one piece of Oregon’s Land Use Infrastructure, now?

Ortigoza Bateman: Well being here is a really good fit for me. As you mentioned, I previously was with the Water Resources Department, really focused on natural resources protection. And then after that I was with Business Oregon, focused on economic development and so I have both. And I think that the balancing act here, at Department of Land Conservation and Development, is taking care of both the Economic Development piece and the resource conservation piece. It’s in our name and it’s in our mission. We’re supposed to be doing both. I wouldn’t want to pursue one to the exclusion of the other. It makes the work really interesting but we have to be strategic about it, so that…so that we can accomplish both.

Miller: Brenda Ortigoza Bateman, Thanks very much.

Ortigoza Bateman: Thank you so much. It’s good to be here.

Miller: Brenda Ortigoza Bateman is a new Director of Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development. If you want to hear a lot more about the history and the impact, the current impact of Oregon’s pioneering land use system, you should check out OPB’s new six part podcast and multimedia project. It’s called Growing Oregon. It’s hosted by our Senior Political Reporter, Jeff Mapes.

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