One of the major thrusts of the Growth Management Act was the imposition of "impact fees" that would make developers directly responsible for the infrastructure costs of new construction. A major tax subsidy for development and land speculation was threatened. If developers couldn't buy cheap land, put up large projects that counties hadn't included in the long-term budget forecasts, and then stick the taxpayers with the tab, a whole industry would have to restructure itself around the real cost of doing business. Suddenly, Wise Use in Washington discovered the "property-rights" movement.
It was a marriage made in hell, but the happy couple of rural people and city-based developers were willing to overlook that. It was also a godsend to Gottlieb's faction of the Wise Use Movement. Gottlieb and Arnold had failed to cash in on the big bucks now flowing from timber, mining and other industries to Wise Use operations like People For the West!, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, Putting People First, and Alliance for America. The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise was handed a literally golden opportunity with the advent of land-use planning laws like the Growth Management Act.
The key to the development industry's agenda and a mainstay issue for many of the property rights groups that the industry created is the issue of "takings." The phrase has all sorts of resonances, since it implies expropriation. Many of the Wise Use participants share the right-wing belief that rights are a dispensation granted by the powerful. This is most clearly seen in the oft-repeated catch-phrase, "they are taking our rights." The takings issue was first set forth by economist Richard Epstein. The use of the work "taking" comes from the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which states in part, "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Epstein argues that most regulatory actions are a "taking" and thus require compensation.
The notion of easy money from the government has great appeal. Chuck Cushman frequently leads crowds in chanting, "Compensation. Compensation. Compensation." The phrase "property rights" has become a codeword for the takings issue. The issues that property rights groups put forward often revolve around the issue of paying compensation to anyone who complies with a regulation under protest. The alternative to payment is to waive the regulation. This is actually the agenda for industry; they have found an argument by which the government must either pay the cost of regulatory compliance or forgo the regulation. In law, the practice is usually called extortion.
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