There are 269 unincorporated communities in Oregon, and Lane County has 35 of them. Places such as Dexter and Marcola, Culp Creek and Dorena, Alvadore, Cheshire, Nimrod and Walterville, Rainbow… .

These rural enclaves may have a small store, gas station or cafe, perhaps a post office located in the store. They might be remnants, such as Fall Creek that once had a post office and store, then a post office in the store, but now has only a restaurant. These are distinctly rural settlements, whose services may include a grange or community center, a feed store and a farm stand, tailored to the needs and occupations, the history and culture, of the local populace. Housing is generally spread out in the surrounding countryside and often associated with farm and forest management.

As the population of Oregon has increased, most of these outlying communities have been able to retain their identities and boundaries, because in the 1960s a far-sighted Republican governor, Tom McCall, realized that, if he didn’t do something to stop it, urban sprawl would engulf them the way it had the countryside in other states. 

Out of his vision, passion and commitment, and the hard work of many others, Senate Bill 100 was born in 1973. Among other strengths, its program of land use goals and regulations established urban growth boundaries (UGBs) around cities that have been largely successful in preventing sprawl.

From its inception, however, our land use program has been under relentless and effective assault from private property rights zealots and development interests who have weakened the program at both the local and state level, even, as in the last two legislative sessions, when Democrats have held a supermajority and a Democrat sits in the governor’s chair.

Omnipresent in the 2025 long session and in this year’s short session, Gov. Tina Kotek has done everything in her power to urbanize land outside UGBs to meet the alleged “need” for half a million new houses by 2030. It should not be surprising then — except to those blinded by her social liberalism — to learn that Kotek has directed the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) to initiate rulemaking amendments that could engorge all of the state’s 269 unincorporated communities with urban type housing and associated structures and infrastructure. 

To serve this influx of housing, her order also allows commercial and industrial development and boundary expansions. Not least, it provides development interests free passage through urban growth boundaries to convert cheaper farm and forest land in rural communities into unaffordable bedroom communities and massive profits. As a consequence, while traffic, fire danger and taxes increase, wildlife habitat and groundwater will decrease.

The governor is pursuing this environmental travesty regardless of research that shows there is more than enough land, and existing buildings that could be repurposed within UGBs to meet the housing need she alleges.

In tandem with her desire to urbanize our rural communities and satisfy her housing agenda, Kotek has also appointed a business-led “Prosperity Council” with the mission to free up more land for industrial development, reduce or eliminate permitting regulations and add land to urban growth boundaries for housing.

In short, Kotek has demonstrated that she is our land use program’s biggest enemy. And her order to initiate rulemaking amendments that impose urbanizing development on the state’s unincorporated communities is the biggest threat to statewide land use protection since Measure 37 passed in 2004 and almost destroyed the land use program. 

If you are grateful to Kotek, as I am, for her stance against the Trump administration, but are unhappy with her hostility to land use regulation, please send her an email or give her a call asap expressing your concern. Request that she withdraw her order to DLCD and keep our unincorporated communities and other land outside urban growth boundaries rural. 

Republican governor McCall understood the absurdity of unlimited population growth on his finite state billions of people ago and welcomed travelers to visit Oregon, but not to stay. His charge to himself was a charge to all of us: “Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it’s my responsibility to make it better.”

Robert Emmons is president of local land-use nonprofit LandWatch Lane County.