By David S. Broder Post
Sunday, June 19, 2005;
B07
SNOQUALMIE, Wash. -- When summer visitors come to the viewing
platform to see Snoqualmie Falls, one of Washington's main tourist attractions,
few of them realize they are also looking at an example of a unique and
successful land management and planning exercise.
The falls are backed
by more than 100 acres of lush and unscarred green forest, once destined for
commercial and housing development by Puget Western Inc. and the city of
Snoqualmie. But the Cascade Land Conservancy, a private nonprofit, stepped in
and bought the property for $13.3 million.
It was something of a
gamble, said the conservancy president's, Gene Duvernoy, because the sum was
twice the net worth of his organization. "We were a little over our skis," he
said. But having nursed the organization through its first four years from its
start in 1989, working out of the attic of his house, the former New Yorker was
accustomed to improvising.
His strategy was to "solve the problem by
enlarging it." He first approached Weyerhaeuser Co., which had recently built
3,000 homes on a nearby tract but had agreed with the city, as a condition for
that construction, to defer building Phase 2 of the project, where sewer lines
had already been installed, for 20 years.
Duvernoy struck a deal. The
conservancy went to the city fathers and persuaded them to let Weyerhaeuser
build Phase 2 now, rather than wait 20 years, in return for the company's
financing 90 percent of the purchase price of the tract behind the falls. He
then went to King County officials and got them to transfer development rights
on 3,000 acres of land along Highway 18 that the county wanted to protect to
the Phase 2 land, allowing more density of housing. The county in turn
transferred the 3,000 acres to the conservancy for safekeeping.
When
Duvernoy walked me through the transaction on a recent visit to the falls, he
called it a "win-win-win-win deal" for the city, the county, the company and
his own organization. It reflected "the unbridled strain of civic commitment in
our region, with progressive business leaders, talented elected leadership and
engaged citizens," he said.
Now the conservancy is testing that
commitment with an enormously ambitious plan, made public last month, called
the Cascade Agenda. The plan, looking ahead to a century of growth expected to
double the population in a four-county region, aims to make almost 1.3 million
acres of forests, farms and stream beds in the Cascades foothills -- an area 24
times the size of Seattle -- permanently off limits to developers. And it aims
to foster the healthy growth of the cities and towns within the region.
The agenda, hammered out in a year-long series of community forums,
relies less on regulation than on market-based tools, notably swaps of
development rights of the kind exemplified by the Snoqualmie transactions. The
project is expensive -- about $7 billion in current dollars -- because it
requires compensating landowners who give up development rights on their
property. But the creators of the blueprint say it can be financed in phases by
boosting the annual local and state government expenditures for conservation,
now estimated at $50 million a year, to $70 million.
Because the
acquisition of development rights would ideally come in the early stages of the
process, the conservancy is backing legislation in Congress that would allow
groups like itself to issue tax-exempt bonds. Bills for that purpose have
passed both the House and Senate, but never reached the president's desk.
While the emphasis is on preserving the natural environment that
accounts for the region's appeal, and the farms and orchards that were there
long before such industries as Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp. appeared on the
scene, the agenda recognizes its essential urban component.
"We can
only succeed at this conservation vision if our cities and towns really become
magnets for our region's future population growth," Duvernoy wrote in a recent
newspaper op-ed. "If cities and towns truly become family-friendly, with good
roads and schools and nearby jobs so that we want to live within them and not
outside them, the pressure on our critical landscapes will be at a level our
market-based strategies can manage."
The scale and ambition of this
project make it nationally significant. That it has even the possibility of
success speaks volumes about the character of this region and its leadership.
davidbroder@washpost.com C
2005 The Washington Post Company
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