Population Projections, Dueling Experts and Competition for Growth: The Oregon Experience

In those places where plans are binding and are required to be coherent, the factual foundations of those plans, on which allocation of lands needed for housing, commerce and employment, are critical. Population projections are one foundation for determining needed lands and are necessary for consideration of alternative growth scenarios, rates of growth and selection of areas to be developed. Population projections are even more important in a system that purports to coordinate local and regional plans. As more jurisdictions undertake coordinated planning, a credible and uniform method of growth projections, including population projections, is necessary. Already, there are federal coordination expectations for housing and transportation grants in the United States. Such uniformity and coordination is standard fare in most European jurisdictions.This paper will present population projections as a symbol of the transition that most American states must deal with in providing a coherent coordinated growth program out of a system that left planning and regulation of land use almost entirely to local governments. Left to their own devices, local governments will often be guided by parochial considerations in undertaking growth projections. Experts can always be found to support almost any view. Growth-demanding governments will hire experts with rose-colored glasses while no-growth governments will stress physical and environmental constraints, pessimistic business projections and the like. Even when there is agreement in a multi-jurisdictional area, allocation of population (and thus of growth) is often hard fought.Most public agency projections will receive judicial deference if challenged. However while individual projections may be defensible, they may not always mesh to form a coherent whole.Moreover, when inconsistent projections are made by jurisdictions competing for growth, the planning system is faced with “dueling experts” and the result is confusion in the absence of an entity that is able to resolve conflicts. Even where there is such an entity, it is often caught in the middle and attempts to avoid controversy, to the detriment of coordinated planning. Related conflicts occur over competition among municipalities for planning, annexing, and urbanizing current rural lands. Without a clear, respected and authoritative process, conflict will continue.This paper will present the resolution of this conflict in Oregon, where coordinated planning has been in place for over forty years. One of the compromises necessary to achieve the establishment of the state system was to allow local governments to make population projections and for counties to “coordinate” population for the cities within the county and for its unincorporated areas. The result was unsatisfactory. First, there was no obligation for counties to justify their own population figures with overall state projections. Secondly, counties found it politically difficult to make hard decisions when the projections of the county and its cities did not match overall population projections for the county as a whole.After much strife and some stopgap solutions, the Oregon legislature adopted a dual solution. In the Portland Metropolitan Area, which has an elected regional governing body, a politically responsible body, the Metro Council, makes future population and growth allocations for the cities and counties in the region. The paper explains the peculiar dynamics of the Portland Metro Area, which lends itself to this approach.For the remainder of the state, cities and counties must accept those population projections made by Portland State University’s Population Research Center, which has expertise and now the political responsibility to make binding projections. The decennial census required by the United States Constitution provides a reality check on state projections. Administrative rules now govern the specifics of projections made by the Center.Disputes over responsibility for population projections and the role of those projections on growth in a region or state over different visions of growth among local governments are not unique. As other states move to a model of coordinated state planning, attention to those issues will be helpful to a more expeditious resolution of these conflicts.