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Oregon has earned a reputation for maintaining one of the nation’s most extensive land use systems. But city, county and state officials all admit that the 37-year-old system, which has earned widespread admiration, is far from perfect.

The very thing that makes the state’s land use system effective is the same thing that creates the most frustration. The numerous steps required to obtain land use approval cost time and money, and municipalities are calling for the state to streamline the process.

The state says the concerns are valid but that it will need time to find a solution.

“I’ve heard from a number of communities that the costs of planning are too high, especially over the past few years,” said Richard Whitman, director of the Department of Land Conservation and Development. “The debate isn’t over the system itself, but rather the costs and time associated with working through the system.”

Each city and county in Oregon must go through a review periodically in order to update its comprehensive plan and make sure it has enough land in the urban growth boundary for the next two decades. The reviews formerly took place every seven to 10 years. Now, however, they occur every four to seven years. That means more work for cities and counties, even if they’re content with their current land totals.

That is Salem’s situation. The city – along with neighboring Keizer – has had an urban growth boundary since before it was required by law and has never expanded it. But the city still has to coordinate with Keizer and Marion and Polk counties every few years to update its plans and go through a periodic review, said Vickie Woods, director of community development with the city of Salem.

“Keizer is just now looking at a possible expansion, and to do so it has to get everyone else on board,” Woods said. “This means that we have to work together to conduct a new economic opportunities analysis and a land supply survey, even though we aren’t really looking into it here in Salem.

“With some smaller land use decisions each jurisdiction can make them separately, but not with a UGB expansion or this periodic review. The coordination to make these global decisions alone costs money, and that doesn’t take into account the staff time and consultant services.”

While the periodic review can be expensive, the costs of actually expanding the urban growth boundary are much higher.

During Bend’s periodic review in 2005, for example, the city’s planning department decided it needed to expand its urban growth boundary by 26 percent. The decision was based on the fact that the city’s population had grown 365 percent since its last expansion in 1981.

“Our request for more land is strictly based in necessity (and) nothing else,” said Brian Shetterly, long-range planning manager for the city of Bend. “We knew the process was going to be long, but we had no idea it would be this long.”

Bend has spent more than $4 million in the last five years paying for updated population estimates and an updated comprehensive plan. The expansion was remanded by the Department of Land Conservation and Development earlier this year, and Shetterly expects it to be at least another year before the city gets a final decision. And that’s without taking into account the possibility of an appeal to the state’s Land Use Board of Appeals.

“The problem is that it’s based on so many unknowns,” Shetterly said. “We’ve spent all this money and have used up all this staff time, and there is a real chance that the UGB might not be expanded.”

But Whitman said there’s a misperception that urban growth boundary expansions are increasingly being remanded.

“In the past two years, 80 percent of the UGB expansions that have been put in front of us have been approved,” Whitman said. “It’s not that we don’t want to expand them; we do. We just want to make sure that everyone works through the entire process.”

In recent years, the Department of Land Conservation and Development has set up a biannual, $2.5 million fund to help municipalities and regional governments pay for the studies needed to be conducted during a periodic review. But with 44 different government bodies tapping into it during the past two years, the money is spread thin.

Whitman understands the financial concerns about maintaining an up-to-date land use plan, especially during the recession. But he thinks the department will be making even more changes in the next year as it looks at some of the recommendations from the Big Look Task Force, a committee that spent three years reviewing the state’s land use process.

“We have been (looking), and will continue to look at ways of making it faster and cheaper to plan out the use of land into the future,” Whitman said. “But at the same time we don’t want to get away from what urban growth boundaries and our land use system have helped us accomplish: planning out better communities and making the cost of living cheaper.”