Jefferson County’s commissioners decided to summon the lawyers this week in their battle with state land use officials. The state responded in condescending fashion. Said Richard Whitman, the director of the Department of Land Conservation and Development:

“We tried very hard to work with Jefferson County with this, but for whatever reason, Jefferson County has simply continued to resist the whole notion of an area of critical statewide concern, and I think that’s unfortunate. … If the county had been willing to engage in the process, we might have been able to include in the recommendation to the Legislature provisions that could have benefited the county.”

The notion that Jefferson County officials are “for whatever reason” spurning the state’s efforts to help them is ludicrous. So, too, is the suggestion that they’re somehow averse to engaging in the land use process.

Whitman is referring specifically to the obscure piece of land use law allowing the creation of an Area of Critical State Concern. Should the Legislature apply this designation to the area around the Metolius River, as the state’s land use commission recently recommended, it would preclude the development of two controversial destination resorts.

That would please many of those who already own property on or near the Metolius River, including powerful state Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, who maintains expansive holdings and a vacation cabin near the river’s headwaters. In 2007, Johnson co-sponsored legislation that would have killed the resorts.

The designation, however, would culminate in a thinly disguised attack on local land use authority, which is why Jefferson County leaders are fuming. The process Whitman criticizes county commissioners for resisting is nothing more than a hasty repudiation of the real and extensive land use process by which they made property in the Metolius basin eligible for destination resorts. As directed by state law, the county spent years revising its comprehensive plan and related ordinances before approving the changes in late 2006.

Last December, even while acknowledging Jefferson County’s “long and careful process,” Gov. Ted Kulongoski asked the DLCD and the Land Conservation and Development Commission to, in effect, undo the county’s work within a mere three months. Why in the world would Jefferson County’s commissioners be mad?

For a better sense of how particular and agonizing this “long and careful process” was, and why the state’s actions now are so maddening, it helps to look at the grounds on which the county’s work was appealed to Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals. One of the appellants was none other than Betsy Johnson. Among the good senator’s claims:

• The county failed to provide two separate readings of the ordinances at least 13 days apart, as required by law. The second reading, if one occurred, happened only six days after the first.

• By repealing the old comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance on Dec. 27, 2006, and not making the amended versions effective until Jan. 1, 2007, the county “impermissibly created a four-day gap in which the county had no plan or zoning ordinance.”

• The county failed to provide the 45-day notice to the DLCD for the destination resort ordinances, as required by law. To be sure, Johnson “concedes that the county provided the required 45-day notice,” but argues that “it did not specifically include notice of the county’s later bifurcation of the destination resort amendments from the balance of the amendments” to the comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance.

Talk about splitting hairs.

LUBA rejected these claims, pointing out that the last, even if true, would have amounted to a harmless procedural error.

As you can see, the “long and careful process” Jefferson County undertook requires meticulous attention to a mountain of bureaucratic details that opportunistic opponents inevitably sift for the slightest irregularities. It is the process the state itself created and one Jefferson County appears to have negotiated with few errors. LUBA’s opinion has been appealed to the state courts.

Whitman assigns to “whatever reason” the county’s resistance to the state’s new “process.” We’ll go way out on a limb and guess that the reason goes something like this: Having conducted an exhaustive process that has largely withstood microscopic examination by bureaucratic nit-pickers, county officials resent the state’s cynical and slapdash attempt to invalidate their work. How dare they?