Why Not New Jersey?

An Essay on Fire at Eden’s Gate, Tom Mccall

and The Oregon Story, by Brent Walth

It has been said, without addition or further explanation, by a senior conservation hand, that "New Jersey is not Oregon." This was in response to my repeated inquiry as to why New Jersey can’t duplicate Oregon’s statewide land-use model, generally recognized as the nation’s toughest and most effective in controlling sprawl. It should be added, for those not following the New Jersey land use "discussion" (notice I did not say land use debate), that New Jersey’s State Plan, voluntary and ineffective, self-consciously styles itself as the not Oregon model. Failing to receive a satisfying answer, I decided to search outside New Jersey, and in Brent Walth’s fine political biography of Oregon’s beloved two-term Republican Governor Tom McCall (1967-1975), Fire at Eden’s Gate, Tom McCall and the Oregon Story (Oregon Historical Society, 1998), I think I’ve found at least a fuller explanation for what has transpired in both states.

People who make excuses for New Jersey’s current failures in land-use protections, despite our good tradition (we passed the nation’s toughest regional regulatory land-use plan for the 1,000,000 acres Pinelands in 1979, and the nation’s strongest freshwater wetlands law in 1987) tend to emphasize how unique Oregon’s political culture is – the implication being that Oregon is either innately or by selective immigration, filled with rapid conservation voters who demanded and got their tough protections. While Fire at Eden’s Gate is primarily a political biography of the once famous governor, it also provides a sketch of Oregon’s political culture. While Oregon does not have the racial and ethnic diversity of New Jersey, the broad outlines of its political forces left me feeling I was still on "native ground." For NJ’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries, substitute Oregon’s energy and timber interests. And, like the rest of American political culture, powerful private economic forces take a strong interest in what is going on at the Statehouse. The personification of that abiding interest was none other than Glenn Jackson, a.k.a. known as "Mr. Oregon," but also fittingly entitled by Tom McCall himself as "The General." Jackson, a self-made millionaire who "controlled the state’s largest utility and sat on the boards of the state’s biggest bank, its biggest retailer and its biggest insurance company … also held controlling interests in newspapers, timber, real estate, mining, airlines, railroads, cattle ranching, farming, tourist resorts and a country club." You get the picture. I’m not sure NJ has ever quite seen that type of breadth in just one businessman – we’re a lot more specialized. But I’m sure our NJ readers will appreciate "the General’s" instinct for placing himself at the crossroads of economic power, for Mr. Jackson also managed to run the Oregon Highway Commission for twenty years.

Oregon, like NJ once did, has a vigorous agricultural sector. Also a strong union influence, and a genuine two party system with unpredictable state and national races. And of course, a famous coastline which has seen many of the same development pressures as New Jersey’s much older coast, but with far happier environmental outcomes. When Governor McCall proposed very tough land-use bills in 1969, a familiar list of opponents rose to oppose them: timber companies, such as Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhaeuser, the general industry lobby group, Associated Oregon Industries, city and county governments (League of Oregon Cities), power companies such as Portland General Electric and Pacific Power and Light, and, of course, the Oregon Home Builders Association. However, Oregon farm interests either did not oppose or were supporters of McCall’s land use reforms. Just why that’s the case is not made clear in the book. Walth spends some time describing a land-use reform ally, Hector Macpherson, a dairy farmer turned planner and legislator from rural Linn County who, we are told, often said: "`Scratch a farmer and you’ll find a subdivider.’" Sounds just like a good part of the rural home turf, doesn’t it?

In New Jersey in 1999, many close to our toothless State Plan are fond of describing its "bottom-up" participatory process, called cross-acceptance, eager in the ideological climate of this recent era (there are signs of a "thaw" at the national level – witness the rise of anti-sprawl sentiments) to remind people again and again that it’s not "top down, command and control." It’s time we moved beyond the superficial nature of such descriptions. If by bottom-up in New Jersey, we mean environmental leadership and innovation at the municipal and county level, then by all means keep looking, for most of New Jersey’s historical success came from state regulatory programs, in the case of Pinelands aided by federal legislation. In Oregon, Governor McCall was able to gain city and county support when he went on the road in 1972-73. In New Jersey, the League of Municipalities might as well be renamed the League of Medieviality as far as effective statewide land-use controls are concerned. In an ideal model of democracy, American style, grassroots advocacy from civic groups would meet and support innovative, risk- taking leadership halfway. Very often, to achieve significant changes, a price must be paid, the implication being that some powerful interests will be made unhappy, and exact a price, maybe even the withdrawal of campaign contributions, for the disruption of their status quo. Chances are, after legislation, if it’s a lovefest by all sides, gesture has been substituted for genuine change. That’s partly how we know that Oregon got the real thing, by adding up the list of powerful interests, including a good chunk of his own Republican Party, that fought Tom McCall and stayed mad at him. So how did Oregon do it, enact the nation’s toughest land-use law, the equivalent of putting regulatory teeth in NJ’s State Plan? The answer, as far as I can judge from this book, and a recent conversation with the author, is by bold gubernatorial leadership, with citizens and environmentalists following and supporting that leadership. For those who think that’s too "command and control" for their ideological tastes, the last time I looked, Governors with visions like McCall’s still have to get their visions enacted by the Legislature. Given the powerful hold special interests have there, no Governor gets a tough land-use law through that political minefield without organizing and enjoying the genuine support of a majority of the citizens. Implicit in this view, of course, is the premise that the Legislature does not always, at any given time, and on any given issue, represent the views of the majority of a state’s citizens.

Ironically, Oregon started out much like New Jersey, delegating land-use powers to counties and cites in 1947. They had the authority to create comprehensive plans, but, by the mid-sixties, the state-wide result was "overloaded sewer systems, patchwork zoning and writhing road schemes… the legacy of development-happy local officials." In the fabled Willamette Valley, home to 2.5 million acres of rich farmland in the 1950’s, almost 20%, some 500,000 acres, had been lost to residential and commercial development by 1970, despite the state’s enactment of a tax break for agricultural land, passed in 1961. Sound familiar? So what made the difference? It seems to me that the difference lay in both the substance and the temperament of Tom McCall’s style of leadership, as well as the times in which he acted, times which, arguably, gave him more room to find creative public solutions than some more recent decades might have.

First, McCall was not a market worshipper, as most mainstream elected officials are in the late 1990’s. His brand of liberal Republicanism, as well as public style, placed him at odds with Ronald Reagan’s rising star in California. A Washington County Commissioner and land use reformer is quoted as saying that McCall "… didn’t believe the market system should work when it came to land. He thought land was too valuable for that." Now that’s heresy today, but true; even attempts to harness market forces in a new way, after regulations have put a new pattern on growth and protection, such as with Transfer of Development Rights (TDR’s), meet fierce ideological resistance from the right and organized development interests. Yet McCall was not primarily ideological in his land-use approach. It was grounded far more in what works and doesn’t work, and his candid appraisal of the pressures development interests could bring to bear upon local officials. And on the personal level, McCall, deep in his gut-self, believed in saving Oregon’s natural resources from a helter skelter fate, even if he wanted to keep the forests primarily for the use of the timber industry. He began his crusade in 1969, but the state-wide zoning law that first passed was vague on standards and still left it up to local governments to work up their protections (growth boundaries and zoning protections) by 1971. Of course the legislature did not supply the funds and very few locals complied. So McCall came back in 1972 with a much stronger version. McCall’s assessment of leaving land use entirely to local officials rings as true for New Jersey in 1999 as it did for the Oregon of the early ‘70’s: "I knew nothing would get done at the local level even if the local officials were top notch…I could take the heat, I could push for preservation of farm lands and urban growth boundaries to stop sprawl, where 80 percent of the locals would be bounced out on their fannies for trying to do this."

Now if Oregon were truly possessed of a unique environmental culture, and if, like the excuses heard in New Jersey in the late 1990’s, McCAll had not acted until he found a citizen grassroots wave to ride, probably not much would have happened to control sprawl. But early on in his biography, Walth gives prominence to an important political trait of McCall: "When faced with opposition to environmental proposals, (he would) take the idea to the public – or at least threaten to." In mounting his land use crusade, McCall really had no choice. He recognized, as we note above, the strength and breadth of the forces arrayed against him, and he also recognized that even in Oregon, land-use is not an issue that is easily placed on the front burners of citizens’ political agendas. When junior high and high school students are introduced to the workings of our civic and political system, the notion that they as future citizens might shape and determine the physical character of their communities through a deliberate plan is usually nowhere to be found. So Governor McCall had a lot of ground to make up. He used all of 1972 and a good part of 1973 to spread the message, through "Project Foresight," essentially a "build-out," disaster-versus-planning road show depicting the before and after affects of development pressures in the Willamette Valley. He also launched a personal speaking tour, which ended in November, 1972, with a land use Congress. In other words, in a way no New Jersey Governor of either party ever has, McCall put tough land-use reform at the top of his political agenda and stayed with it in a way not seen before or since, in Oregon or New Jersey. And if organized environmental groups in Oregon played a leading role in this campaign, the evidence for their leadership is nowhere to be found in this book. The much-publicized group, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, was founded just as Tom McCall was leaving office in 1974, and so it played no role in passing the tough law in 1972-73. Conversely, the author makes it clear that McCall was a follower and then champion of Oregon’s famous Bottle Bill (first in the nation) only after a very talented citizen activist, Richard Chambers, had laid the conceptual and tactical groundwork.

This essay-review began with a basic question: Why Not New Jersey? We return to it now. Are the people of Oregon really that much different than those in New Jersey? Not as revealed in Fire At Eden’s Gate. The closest we get to a unique Oregon theory is in the prologue where an imagined bonding process takes places: "Oregonians believed theirs was still a land largely unsullied; McCall was the one person who had told them how to keep it that way." Hence the title and the invocation of Eden. About as far as you can get from New Jersey’s self image, one might say. But what are we saying about ourselves, then? After all, we still call ourselves the Garden State, and still have more than a quarter of our total land base receiving substantial farmland tax breaks, even if half or more of it is owned by developers. And polling done for the last Green Acres bond act showed that images of farmland were still the most powerful and motivating image of open space for citizens. Perhaps it’s true that New Jerseyans don’t view their land with the idealism of Oregonians – but up until the 1990’s we were still ranked in the top three or four states in terms of environmental innovation, especially in land-use. So in historical terms, this explanation doesn’t wash. But why then, have we stalled out at that last great land-use hurdle, an effective State Plan with powers to control sprawl, especially now that the national news increasingly talks about "smart growth" and reigning in sprawl, and conservative think tanks feel compelled to weigh in lest too much of the playing field for 2000 be left to Vice President Gore, and even the Georgia legislature has put teeth in a regional growth management agency for the Atlanta area?

Could the reason lie partly in the nature of the environmental movement in New Jersey? There has evolved here over the years a pronounced difference in policy emphasis between the larger groups devoted primarily to water and anti-toxic issues and land-use groups. The land-use groups themselves are conflicted between regulatory and non-regulatory land-use means. And specialization, do we have specialization, at the coast, at the canal, at the river, stream and watershed level. Many of these smaller, local groups have chosen consciously not to look at the big picture, to work instead, hands on, parcel-by-parcel in their own backyards. The environmental community has been unable, given these realities, even to make a tough State Plan its own priority agenda item. And senior leaders openly scoff at the idea that sometimes, tactically, when faced with a very large and difficult policy goal, there would be the need for smaller groups to sacrifice, even for just a portion of their time, some of their narrower agendas to achieve the big picture – even if its achievement would solve, in one fell swoop, many of the local battles they fight one at a time. In other words, no tough choices, everybody can continue to work on what they want and everything turns out fine. As the Oregon-McCall story shows, even when a popular and talented Governor makes state-wide land use his number one priority and gives it his emotional and political all, it was a very, very difficult task and he spent his last dying days fending off a referendum challenge to it in 1982, seven years after he had left office. So specialized groups, especially ones not focused on land-use, ask themselves whether they can afford to take such a big policy risk on something so difficult (they would say impossible) knowing full well that Governors and Legislatures rarely take up more than one or two consuming issue campaigns simultaneously. And with specialization, there’s never a shortage of less sweeping, more focused issues to work on.

That’s the generous version of events. A less flattering analysis might raise the question of whether there’s a greater tendency now for environmental groups to ask their policy allies in each political party what they’re comfortable with… not what needs to be done…in turn, the political parties say, before they embark upon anything as risky as state-wide land use reform: "show me the winning coalition you’ve built for us." "After you…no, after you," as the expression goes… Whatever the ultimate internal cause, we conservationists in New Jersey ought to admit that our failure to achieve an effective State Plan is one our greatest historical setbacks in a state that has done some very remarkable environmental things. Future citizens and the natural world will pay a very high price indeed for our failure.

Nonetheless, Tom McCall and Oregon did it between 1969 and 1973, and New Jersey is still kidding itself with its paper pussycat of a State Plan. New Jersey environmental groups have to take some of the blame, for their failure to see the moment and to unite and make state-wide land-use their main campaign of the late 1990’s, especially since the State Plan was up for its five year review in 1997. In this, they appear to be missing a national trend. But McCall was able to do it from the Governor’s office, without a statewide movement pressuring him. Was there something special about him that made this possible? This writer has already been accused of setting Mr. McCall up to be a hero – the implication being NJ doesn’t need heroes/heroines – we’re the "cross acceptance state" and we do it ourselves, from the bottom up. How’s that for a new state name: The Cross Acceptance State? The new state seal can show Stakeholders seated around a table, led by the official "Facilitator." McCall, it is true, had some unique gifts. He stood almost six feet six inches tall, and truly was one of the last of the old "Progressives" from the Woodrow Wilson era, which produced Republican independents like his grandfather Samuel Walker McCall of Massachusetts. He also was a reporter, radio talk show host in the 1950’s, successful TV broadcaster and Chief of Staff for another Oregon Governor before being elected in 1967. But more than anything else of a personal and unique nature, it was McCall’s gift of direct talk to the citizens, his willingness to speak bluntly and take policy risks, to lead and not be a "finger to the winds (polls today)" politician, that sets him apart from so many of today’s elected officials. This trait and his background in journalism gave him unprecedented favorable press coverage, which may have been a decisive factor in his full court press to push through the state wide land-use reforms in 1972-73.

What placed McCall and Oregon at the forefront of national news in the early seventies was a CBS evening news interview with Terry Drinkwater in January of 1971. McCall was saying that "he was determined Oregon would not be overrun like California, or become the victim of pollution and decay found in eastern states." Drinkwater asked him how he could stop people from coming. The famous answer was: "Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live." Of course, the business community took the statement at full face value and reacted with horror. The practical effect, however, was to drive the national interest in Oregon up, and people flocked to live there. In truth, McCall was never "no growth," as any fair analysis of his land-use proposals will show. But McCall’s detractors got their revenge, making him, long after he was out of office, the scapegoat for the high unemployment Oregon suffered under the Reagan recession of the early 1980’s – the nation’s worst since the Great Depression.

The final question posed for New Jerseyans by the McCall legacy is: is it too late for us to get an effective state land-use policy? This writer can’t help but notice the lack of urgency surrounding the supporters of the NJ State Plan; they seem to act as if there were no subdivision clock ticking, no point in land-use chronology where the see-saw pattern of "save/build" so fragments the rural landscape that it is tipped beyond corrective policy help, in a practical and political sense. In May of 1979, then private citizen McCall was invited by Colorado environmental groups to look over the situation in their state. At that time, Colorado’s Governor Richard Lamm was scrambling to meet the citizen protest over Denver’s sprawl. Walth describes McCall’s reaction:

In New Jersey at the end of the 1990’s, we have chosen open space purchases instead of predictable legal protections and boundaries. We will have some good open space. However, we may not have long-term ecological viability if the "islands" we have saved are too small for the genetic needs of the wildlife. And it looks as if our rural and semi-rural highway corridors will repeat the Route 1 experience, with all that implies for the continued absence of private sector office ratables from our neediest urban areas, and commuters stuck in traffic. The mere hint of something stronger, of a closer focus, even if it really doesn’t promise anything more than a new "stakeholder" process, is enough to set the Counties howling in fear and opposition. That’s what happened recently when the Highlands Coalition presented its request to create a set of State Plan policies to give some meaning to the designation of the Highlands as an "Area of Critical State Concern" (heard in front of the Plan Development Committee of the State Planning Commission at Schooley’s Mountain Park, Morris County, on May 12, 1999). Despite the fact that they were sent copies of the proposal way back in mid-March, 1999, there was no Governor Whitman, DEP Commissioner Robert Shinn, or Dept. of Community Affairs Commissioner Jane Kenny, or any other administration official present to support this restrained proposal for more process. Of course there was no Democratic Party presence either, to at least support what was on the table, let alone something stronger. As the saying goes, the first time through this in the late 1980’s, there was a sad feeling about settling for a weak State Plan; this time, a decade later, it’s been reduced to a farce. New Jersey Audubon is not going to sit silently and turn our heads away and pretend we didn’t notice. That’s the least we can do to honor former Governor Tom McCall, a leader from a different time, a different coast, and a different public sensibility, who set a benchmark too dangerous to even talk about today, but that as a very simple matter, works.