Public comment: Lane County has produced 2/3 of all Oregon legal lot cases

Presenter: Is Lane County clogging up the Land Use Board of Appeals? One attorney estimates that our one county by itself is producing twice as many legal lot cases as the other 35 Oregon counties combined. During public comment before the commissioners July 29, Bill Kloos:

Bill Kloos: I’m Bill Kloos. You have a staff memo on this afternoon’s agenda relating to legal lots — recurrent theme. It lists about a half a dozen reasons why there’s so much legal lot litigation in Lane County. Looking at those, none of them really strikes me as being particularly unique to Lane County.

[00:00:38] But the problem is real. Lane County was involved in two-thirds of all of the legal lot litigation in LUBA over the last four years. The rest of the state was the other one-third, so there’s something different about Lane County.

[00:00:53] Your housing report from 2024 is right that something is broken here. There’s no magic wand to fix it. You are stuck with the basics of legal lots. It’s just involved looking at date history and historic regulations.

[00:01:07] But there is a lot you can do to improve the situation. You can improve the process, you can change the burdens of proof, and you can limit the people who are involved.

[00:01:17] The bones of reform are stated in your 2024 housing report. There’s just a handful of most significant suggestions, I think.

[00:01:28] The first is: Change the process. The current process sends the message to property owners, ‘You have the burden of proof that your patch of dirt is a legal lot standing alone. If you guess wrong, reapply and guess again.’

[00:01:44] The message should be, from the county, ‘Let’s figure out what legal lot your patch of ground is a part of, and if it’s not a legal lot standing alone, here’s how you can make it so.’ Those are two different attitudes. The second one’s better.

[00:02:00] Second, confirm common sense presumptions to be applied to legal lot decisions. Here’s probably the most important one. ‘Real estate transactions are regarded as legal if that is technically and legally possible.’

[00:02:15] Sound common sense—that’s your presumption stated in 1998 from the Tarjoto case and affirmed by LUBA. The director doesn’t apply it. The hearings official doesn’t apply it. I don’t understand why. It kind of has a hint of insubordination about it. So you need to put that presumption and other common-sense presumptions into the code to get their attention.

[00:02:37] Number three, restrict the notice of the process to actual stakeholders. For gosh sakes, who are the stakeholders? The real stakeholders in legal law proceedings, it’s the property owner and it’s the neighbors. Nobody else has a real stake.

[00:02:52] So if you’re going to amend the code, the instruction to staff should be crank the participation down for legal law proceedings absolutely as far as state law allows. Thank you very much.

[00:03:04] Daniel Basaraba: Hi there, Daniel Basaraba. Most of you are familiar with my long-winded emails regarding my case with the legal lot verification process. I wanted to echo what Bill Kloos said earlier, the process is broken. There’s a process in place that allows administrators to ignore legal precedent, statute, county code, or law.

[00:03:32] Their errors cost me about $75,000 in extra legal fees only to be later remanded by LUBA. So I’m one of the two-thirds cases that was sent to LUBA and won, but at a great expense. I’m, $75,000 could go a long ways towards a lot of other things. I’m not saying that I’m a poor or destitute, but if I had your money, I’d throw mine away.

[00:04:05] This is an extreme case. I can’t imagine other people having to go to this level on a regular basis, but what Bill said, two-thirds of the state’s LUBA cases come from this county and this staff, this director. There were numerous times throughout my case that my attorney asked for the director to elevate my case to the board. You all know I came and begged the board to come and hear my case and hear my appeal.

[00:04:39] I think that had you guys been willing to do something on a citizen’s behalf maybe my bill would have been $20,000 instead of $75 (thousand). It’s shameful what’s going on, you know. For me to file a lawsuit, it would be again my property tax money being used against me with attorney’s fees, you know. It’s a crazy process.

[00:05:10] This is broken. I hope you guys do something to really dig into this. Thank you.

[00:05:17] Mike Reeder: My name is Mike Reeder and I come before you today to echo the sentiments that were conveyed by Mr. Kloos and Mr. Basaraba regarding Lane County’s legal lot verification process improvements…

[00:05:31] …to seek board review of two hearings official decisions that we think were incorrectly decided. Those two are the CSC Holdings, LLC hearings official decision and the Jones-McCann non-farm dwelling decision…that applies the Rural Comprehensive Plan, Policy 11, Big Game Range, to non-farm dwellings. Inappropriately, we believe.

[00:05:57] We believe that this has countywide significance and should be elevated to the board. And I am at this time seeking to have the planning director seek review by the board.

[00:06:10] Presenter: Public comments July 29 note that Lane County is producing two-thirds of all legal lot cases in the state of Oregon, as residents continue asking commissioners for help.