BIAW takes it in the shorts

http://www.cascadiaweekly.com/currents/opinion/the_winter_of_our_discontent

The reversals and reprisals serve as reminders of the long and costly damage the reactionary warfare against reasoned land-use and environmental policy has done—and continues to do—to communities across the state like Whatcom County.

The war is financed by deep pockets like the BIAW and Realtors PACs; organized into shadow movements like Wise Use and the Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights (CAPR). Its footsoldiers are the aggrieved moms-and-pops, elderly property owners with a “nest egg” to protect, their retirement bound up in some ill-advised property purchase with an upzone understood as trigger to the “investment.” These footsoldiers are essential, lending a sweet face to a realm that is frequently bitterly at odds with public opinion. Its dual weapons are the upzone and the vesting privilege—the first, imposed by political mischief, creates artificial wealth where none existed; the second, protected by the courts, locks in the wealth, so that fraud granted in political heat and election backlash cannot be ungranted.

The weapons yield the illusion of permanence, that “it’s always been this way,” and that the hardheaded response of county policymakers to the state’s 20-year-old growth management laws represent somehow a principled and sacrosanct natural order. No; 90 percent of the compliance issues have come into focus since that law has passed, were introduced in defiance of that law, and violations need to be rolled back in accordance with that law.

It’s what prompted Kathy Kershner, president of the Whatcom County Council, in an otherwise intelligent inter­view on KGMI a few weekends back, to mourn the loss of property value as investments to people who had no expectation of an upzone under current law. They had, in other words, no right or reason to expect that county government would violate state law to grant them personal wealth.

It’s what prompted Kershner’s dimwitted amateur host to afterward read from Mein Kampf, the screed of tyrant Adolf Hitler, as though that provided insight or parallel to Whatcom County. Better, perhaps, might’ve yielded Richard III:

“And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stolen out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”