The Case Against Spot Zoning
Oregon’s Land Use Legacy: Protecting Farm and Forest Lands From Spot Zoning and Sprawl
An application to rezone 710 acres of exclusive farm use (EFU) land in Lower Bridge Valley and make way for 71 residential plots was submitted to Deschutes County in the spring of 2022.
A coalition including LandWatch, Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development, Oregon’s Department of Agriculture, neighboring farmers and ranchers, and rural community members organized in opposition to this proposed conversion, citing concerns over groundwater use, loss of farmland, infrastructure strain, and impacts on wildlife.
Photo: Ryder Redfield
It's a brisk winter morning, with sunlight spilling over a patchwork of farm fields and juniper-dotted hills, all glistening with frost. Just beyond this pastoral scene, a stark contrast emerges: the silhouette of a sprawling luxury neighborhood, with massive mansions, a web of roads fragmenting the landscape, and dozens of new wells sucking up an already-strained desert aquifer.
Decades ago, the community-members here bought their land believing they were investing in a quiet farming lifestyle. Today, they contend with weekend traffic jams, new wealthy neighbors who don’t like the noises and smells of farming, and the sense that the Oregon they once knew is slipping away.
Map of the proposed 710-acre spot zone of EFU land in Lower Bridge Valley.
This clash of expectations underscores a deeper struggle brewing across the state, as spot zoning threatens the legacy of Oregon's visionary land use planning system, unraveling the protections designed to preserve its iconic farm and forest lands.
Oregon’s land use planning system is hailed as a model for preserving its unique agricultural and forest landscapes while fostering sustainable growth. At the heart of this system is a vision grounded in protecting farm and forest lands, reducing urban sprawl, and ensuring that future generations can benefit from these resources.
Passed in 1973, Senate Bill 100 (SB 100) was the result of a broad bi-partisan effort to establish a new, visionary land use planning system for Oregon to curb low-density sprawl and preserve natural resources. SB 100 established the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) and introduced statewide planning goals designed to safeguard these critical resources. These goals include definitions of farmland and forest land and require counties to zone those lands with EFU (“Exclusive Farm Use”) and Forest zoning.
Yet, despite these protections, a troubling trend has emerged in recent years: spot zoning of farm and forest lands. This practice, which involves rezoning individual properties in a way that conflicts with a community’s long-term vision, is undermining the principles that SB 100 sought to protect.
The Origins of Oregon’s Farm and Forest Land Preservation
In 1973, Governor Tom McCall made an impassioned plea to the Oregon legislature to enact a statewide land use planning program to protect Oregon's threatened agricultural and forest industries.
Oregon’s commitment to preserving its farmlands and forests is enshrined in the state's land use planning system. Central to this effort are the definitions of "farmland" and "forest land" in Goal 3 and Goal 4, respectively. These definitions are multi-faceted, designed to protect not just high-quality agricultural lands, but also those that contribute to the broader agricultural economy.
According to the Oregon Administrative Rules (OAR 660-033-0020(1)), farmland includes:
High-Quality Soil: Lands with U.S. NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) soil ratings that indicate soil suitable for agriculture, such as Class I-IV soils in western Oregon and Class I-VI in eastern Oregon.
Lands Suitable for Farming: Based on seven additional factors, these lands may not have the best soil but are still vital to agricultural use.
Lands Supporting Adjacent Agricultural Operations: This category includes lands that facilitate farm practices on nearby agricultural lands.
Lower-Quality Soils Intermingled with Better Soil: Even lands with lower-quality soils may be considered farmland if they are part of a larger farming unit with higher-quality soil.
These protections, coupled with zoning regulations like Exclusive Farm Use (EFU) zoning, have made Oregon a leader in preventing the loss of farmland. The result is a state where family-owned farms thrive, rural landscapes and wildlife habitat remain undeveloped, and where the conversion of agricultural land to non-farm uses is far less common than in other states.
A proposed spot zone conversion of EFU land in Deschutes County.
A Growing Threat to Farmland and Forests
Spot zoning occurs when a single parcel of land is rezoned for uses inconsistent with the surrounding land use regulations. This often happens in rural areas where individual landowners seek to change the zoning of their properties to allow for residential or industrial development, despite those lands being designated for agricultural or forest use.
In Oregon, spot zoning fragments farmland and forest land, disrupting the continuity of agricultural operations and the natural environment. It can result in sprawl, wildlife habitat loss, new unpermitted groundwater wells, and greater risks of wildfire.
Spot zoning is widely considered detrimental to the integrity of comprehensive land use plans. Applicant-driven spot zoning of single properties allows an individual property owner’s desires to supersede the collective community vision embodied in the comprehensive plan, and the process usually follows a similar recipe:
The land is usually sold at some point to a development interest or speculator.
The new owner commissions a soil scientist to survey the land and produce a report that contradicts the objective, nationwide soil capability ratings provided by the NRCS.
The property owner hires a private land use attorney who applies to a county to rezone the property out of an EFU or Forest zone to a residential or industrial zone.
Across the state, multiple counties have approved applications to spot zone farm and forest land. In just the last 15 years, over 5,000 acres of land have been spot-zoned for residential and industrial sprawl in rural county areas.
The Consequences of Spot Zoning
The impacts of spot zoning are far-reaching:
Undermining Comprehensive Planning: Spot zoning undermines the public, long-term vision for land use by prioritizing the interests of well-resourced private individuals over community goals.
Sprawl and Fragmentation: As rural lands are rezoned, large, contiguous blocks of agricultural and forest land are broken up into smaller parcels. This leads to suburban sprawl, which consumes valuable farm and forest land and diminishes the ability of local governments to plan for sustainable growth.
Impacts on Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs): As lands adjacent to UGBs are rezoned for low-density residential use, the possibility of efficient future urban development is constrained. This complicates efforts to build affordable housing and complete communities in cities already struggling to accommodate growth.
Wildfire Risk: The development of rural areas can introduce significant wildfire risks, as new homes and businesses are built in fire-prone zones. Without proper planning, spot zoning can worsen these dangers.
Groundwater impacts: New rural residential development relies on new wells to pump groundwater. Many groundwater aquifers across the state are already strained, and new residential wells are exempt from any permitting or regulation.
Loss of Farmland: Converting agricultural land to non-agricultural uses not only reduces the state’s productive farmland base but also drives up land prices, making it more difficult for new farmers to access land.
Deschutes County: Rampant Spot Zoning
Rezoning farmland and approving nonfarm uses make farming harder in Deschutes County by creating conflicts with farm operations and raising land prices through real estate speculation.
In Deschutes County, spot zoning is a persistent issue. The County has approved 24 spot zoning applications since 2007, with several more in the pipeline, totaling around 3,000 acres of land.
This rampant conversion of farm and forest land to residential and industrial sprawl in Deschutes County creates two equally concerning categories of impact.
1. Impact to farm communities and the regional agricultural economy.
Spot-zoning of agricultural land to facilitate residential development breaks up the large blocks of land that are necessary to maintain the agricultural economy of the state, as declared in ORS 215.243(2). Spot-zoning of farmland for residential development introduces unneeded conflicts to farmers in these EFU zones. It causes market speculation of these lands for residential, commercial, or industrial development, which drives up the cost of farmland, making it harder for would-be farmers to begin, or existing farms to expand their farm operations.
One of the more contentious recent spot zoning efforts involves the proposed rezoning of 710 acres in the heart of the Lower Bridge Valley farming community. The proposal would allow the construction of 71 luxury rural homes on previously protected EFU land. LandWatch objected, and, alongside the local farming community, raised alarms over the potential impacts, including groundwater depletion, increased traffic, and loss of wildlife habitat. This is the largest single rezone we have seen in Central Oregon, signaling the growing pressure to convert agricultural lands for residential use. Litigation is ongoing at this time as LandWatch continues our opposition in front of the Land Use Board of Appeals.
2. Impact to efficient future urbanization for housing and growth
Several of Deschutes County’s problematic spot zoning decisions have occurred on properties adjacent to Bend’s UGB. When formerly large blocks of EFU land near UGBs are rezoned and divided into smaller residential lots of 5 or 10 acres and protected open space, potential future urbanization of those lands with needed housing is frustrated. As cities expand, the availability of adjacent land for development becomes critical for accommodating housing needs. When farmland near UGBs is rezoned for residential use, it frustrates urban planning, raising costs and making it harder to create complete, livable communities.
A recent County decision to rezone 59 acres of irrigated EFU land adjacent to Bend’s UGB is emblematic of the creep of rural residential development that can prohibit the proper expansion of cities and prevent smart growth of urban areas.
These two specific instances of spot zoning and other examples throughout Deschutes County fly in the face of the spirit and intention of Oregon’s land use planning system.
A Pro-Farming, Pro-Housing, Anti-Sprawl Solution
Central Oregon’s rural lands offer iconic scenic vistas, sustain complex high desert ecosystems, and enable a thriving regional agricultural economy. Photo: Wasim Muklashy
The good news is that a possible solution to spot-zoning is on the horizon. LandWatch has long advocated for policies that protect farmland while supporting responsible growth.
In Oregon’s 2025 legislative session, we’re proposing a new bill that would prohibit the rezoning of individual agricultural or forest tracts unless the rezoning is part of a comprehensive, county or regional-level planning process. This would preserve our opportunities to add new housing efficiently and ensure that land use decisions are made with the broader community’s future in mind, rather than allowing for piecemeal development driven by private interests.
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Our bill would add a new section to ORS 215.788 Agricultural Land, clarifying that rezoning individual tracts of land designated for agriculture or forest use must be done as part of either a larger county- or region-wide legislative review of all lands zoned for farm and forest use, as provided in ORS 215.788, or if an exception to the goals is justified under ORS 197.732. Requiring rezonings to occur as part of a larger county or regional planning process would preserve opportunities for efficient future urbanization of lands near existing UGBs and would prevent the haphazard breaking up of large blocks of agricultural and forest land further away from UGBs into smaller parcels. It would incentivize urban reserve planning under OAR Chapter 660 Division 21, where cities and counties can consider EFU- and Forest-zoned lands at the same priority as rural residential-zoned lands for long-term urbanization planning. Finally, eliminating this spot-zoning loophole would protect existing rural communities from further wildfire risk, reduce groundwater depletion, and protect critical wildlife habitat and migration corridors from low-density rural-residential sprawl. The longstanding goal exception pathway to allow uses not allowed by the goals would also still be available.
Help Us Uphold Sound Land Use Planning
In Deschutes County’s Lower Bridge Valley, the County approved an application to rezone 710 acres of agricultural land for luxury residential development. LandWatch and our partners successfully challenged this rezoning, won at both the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) and the Court of Appeals, and the land remains zoned for exclusive farm use. However, the County’s brazen attempt to rezone this land speaks to its unswerving penchant for developing farmlands and open space.
Photo: Ryder Redfield
As we continue to face the challenges of a growing population, it’s crucial that we remain committed to this vision. The land use planning system has worked for decades to protect Oregon’s natural resources, and with continued vigilance, it can ensure that future generations inherit a state that values its farms, forests, and communities.
Register now for our 2025 Legislative Session Preview and tune in on January 29. Watch your inbox for legislative updates and opportunities to contact your legislators and help us advocate for solutions to spot zoning. We’ll need people to join us for lobby days in Salem, too!
You can also take action now and send a message to your legislator expressing support for the legislature’s first positive action on farm and forest land protection policies in decades.
Oregon’s land use planning system is a model of forward-thinking conservation and development. By closing the loopholes that allow for spot zoning, we can preserve Oregon’s iconic farm and forest lands, support a vibrant agricultural economy, and ensure that our communities grow in a way that benefits all Oregonians.
