Friends of Bull Mountain

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The Friends of Bull Mountain (FOBM) is a grassroots community organization in the U.S. state of Oregon acting as local advocates for meaningful citizen involvement and responsible land use planning in keeping with the vision of the Bull Mountain Community Plan.^[1]

1 Tigard effort to annex Bull Mountain
2 Changes to Oregon state land use laws
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Tigard effort to annex Bull Mountain

The FOBM group played a key role^[2]^[3] in defeating the attempt by city of Tigard to annex Bull Mountain.

In 2004 Tigard proposed to annex the entire area under Oregon Revised Statutes Or. Rev. Stat. § 195.205 (2005)^[4] (Urban Service Provider Annexation method) instead of the more common^{[citation needed]} Or. Rev. Stat. § 222.125 (2005) method.^[5] At the time, Or. Rev. Stat. § 195.205 was ambiguous regarding the method of counting votes, and Tigard had planned to use a single combined voting method where the unincorporated votes would be counted with the votes of the city voters, and thus the unincorporated voters would be heavily outnumbered. This variation of "gerrymandering" outraged ^[2]^[3] many of the residents of the unincorporated area, and triggered a campaign against the annexation. Friends of Bull Mountain was then formed. The group retained legal counsel Larry Derr and challenged the combined voting method under the provisions of Or. Rev. Stat. § 268.??? (2005) requiring separate double majority vote counting for annexations within the Portland Metro Urban Growth Boundary.^[6]

In the face of this legal challenge Tigard relented and allowed the double majority vote counting method.^[7] As a result, the annexation measure [34-98] failed, a majority of city voters (64.71%)^[8] favored the annexation, but 88.62% of unincorporated voters rejected the annexation.^[8]

[edit] Changes to Oregon state land use laws

After the 2004 annexation defeat, FOBM worked closely with Oregon House Representative Jerry Krummel who successfully introduced legislation based on ideas and testimony provided by FOBM.^[9] Notable changes in the 2005 legislature included House Bill 2484 which codified double-majority vote for all "Service Provider" annexations under ORS-195. Also, HB-2477 eliminated the three-mile veto which allowed cities to prevent incorporation of a new city within three miles. The enactment of HB-2477 allowed the Bull Mountain community to attempt incorporation.