City and county officials are getting close to selecting a plan that will outline where Bend grows in the next two decades — but with a state review and possible legal challenges ahead, the city’s urban growth boundary expansion process is far from over.

Last week, after more than a year and dozens of meetings, the Bend City Council and Deschutes County Commission wrapped up a major portion of work on Bend’s UGB with a joint public hearing that drew nearly 200 people. Today, the City Council is scheduled to deliberate on a UGB proposal and will likely forward its recommendation to the County Commission by early January.

But from there, the UGB’s future is a bit less clear.

First, the City Council and County Commission will need to agree on a single map before they can send it on to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development for review. After reviewing the piles of paperwork that come with the plan, the director of that department could approve the UGB right away, send it on to yet another state commission for review or back to the city of Bend for more work.

Either way, the department’s decision could be appealed and if the challenges are significant, the UGB could potentially be tied up in the courts for months or even years.

Damien Syrnyk, a senior planner with the city of Bend, said it’s tough to guess just how long it will be before a UGB is approved.

But in the meantime, he said officials are working to tie up as many loose ends as they can so legal challenges from property owners or others will be less likely.

Justification

Planners will provide explanations, or findings, for each aspect of the map so state officials will see why particular areas were added and why others were left out. Before DLCD approves the map, it will need to make sure the city can justify why it added some properties and left others out in accordance with state planning regulations — and successfully explain why Bend will need so much additional land in the next 20 years.

“We don’t know all the objections that might be filed, but we have some idea of what those objections might be,” Syrnyk said. “We’re trying to address a lot of those issues in the findings that go to the City Council and the Board of County Commissioners.”

The current plan, called Alternative 4, covers about 6,000 acres of land, including space for a university at Juniper Ridge, in the northeast section of the city; a large employment area near U.S. Highway 20 and Hamby Road; and medical facilities on the east side of U.S. Highway 97 in south Bend, west of Knott Road.

The city is required by the state to maintain a 20-year supply of buildable land inside the UGB for future housing, employment and other uses. Properties that get included in the UGB could see their values increase dramatically.

Alternative 4 was endorsed by both the Bend and Deschutes County planning commissions, but both groups also sent along separate lists of modifications they’d like to see made to the map.

In recent meetings, members of the City Council and County Commission have expressed general support for the plan, but some have had differences of opinion on including or excluding particular properties from the UGB.

Deschutes County Commissioner Dennis Luke and Mayor Bruce Abernethy said they left last week’s public hearing feeling that the city and county would be able to come to an agreement on most of the issues still up for discussion, though the inclusion or exclusion of a few properties is still up for discussion.

The council is under a time crunch to make its decision; if it wants to avoid passing the issue on to a council that includes five newly elected or appointed members, it will need to vote on a final UGB map by the first week of January.

Possible challenges

Once the City Council and County Commission make a decision, officials will have to notify the dozens of people who have submitted testimony in writing or at public hearings and provide a 21-day window for people to submit objections to the proposal, said Rob Hallyburton, DLCD’s planning services division manager.

Then, the director of the department will have 120 days to approve the map, send it on to the Land Conservation and Development Commission for a decision, or send it back to the city to have particular sections or the entire map reworked.

Hallyburton said many UGB maps are approved fairly quickly, without being remanded for review — but most of those plans have been much smaller than Bend’s. In recent years, he said just two cities’ UGB plans, McMinnville and Woodburn, have been sent to the LCDC instead of being directly approved. Woodburn’s 950-acre expansion was submitted in 2006 and is still tied up in appeals and McMinnville’s 1,500-acre plan was submitted in 2003 and finally approved in 2006.

Bend’s UGB — and all the others that come to the state for review — can be challenged at every step in the process by property owners or other groups concerned about property being included or excluded or the process used to make the final map. The map can also be rejected outright or in part by the state, which might object to the city needing so much additional land or its decisions to include or exclude particular areas.

Hallyburton said it’s tough to guess what will happen with Bend’s plan, but he said it wouldn’t be unusual if it comes up against some objections.

“The bigger the city, the more contentious they tend to be,” he said.

If the proposal gets sent back to local officials or ends up with LCDC or the Oregon Court of Appeals, Syrnyk said the city — not the county — will be responsible for defending its plan.

Those arguments will likely have to do with highly technical and specific elements of land use planning but will basically boil down to a few key points: How the city chose the boundary it did, how it divided up the land and why it will need the exact amount of land to account for future growth.

“The two fundamental components are how much land do you need and where do you need to accommodate it,” Hallyburton said.

The City Council will discuss the issue tonight and could take a preliminary vote on a UGB map as soon as Dec. 17.