Tom McCall's Oregon: The Beach, the Bottle, and the Line Around the City

Tom McCall served two terms as governor of Oregon from nineteen sixty-seven to nineteen seventy-five, and in those eight years he signed a set of laws that remade what the state was willing to do with its own landscape. He was a Republican who governed like someone who had read the land and decided it was worth protecting. What he built, in law, outlasted him by decades and still shapes Oregon today.

The first and most visible act came in nineteen sixty-seven, in the first year of his first term. The Oregon Beach Bill declared that the wet sand and dry sand beaches of Oregon's entire three hundred sixty-mile coastline were public property, accessible to every Oregonian and every visitor, with no exceptions for private landowners. Oregon's beaches had been technically public since a nineteen thirteen executive order, but the legal basis was uncertain, and developers had been quietly testing the edges. The nineteen sixty-seven law ended the uncertainty. It drew a line at the vegetation line and said: everything seaward of here belongs to everyone.

The context was a specific confrontation. A motel owner in Cannon Beach named William Hay had been trying to block public beach access across the sand in front of his property. McCall, then a television journalist, had made a documentary about it. When he became governor, the first item on his legislative agenda was making sure no one could do what Hay had tried to do. The Beach Bill passed the legislature and McCall signed it. It has never been successfully challenged.

In nineteen seventy-one, McCall signed the Oregon Bottle Bill, the first law of its kind in the United States. It required a deposit on carbonated beverage containers, redeemable when returned. The litter problem on Oregon's highways and in its parks and on its beaches had been building for twenty years of postwar consumer culture and disposable packaging. The bottle bill addressed it directly. It also created an economic incentive for return that actually worked: Oregon's return rate for covered containers has historically exceeded eighty percent. Within a decade, bottle deposit laws had been adopted in nine other states, most of them modeled closely on Oregon's version.

The most consequential act, in terms of lasting land-use impact, came in nineteen seventy-three. Senate Bill one hundred, signed by McCall that year, created Oregon's statewide land-use planning system, requiring every city and county in Oregon to establish an urban growth boundary separating land available for development from agricultural and forest land that would be protected from sprawl. No other state had done anything like it. The urban growth boundaries around Portland, Eugene, Salem, Bend, and every other Oregon city trace their legal origins to that single bill.

McCall did not survive politically. He lost a primary challenge in nineteen seventy-eight and died of cancer in nineteen eighty-three, at sixty-nine. He had spent his last years defending the land-use system from ballot measure attacks. The system survived his death. It survives still, imperfect and contested, but intact.

He once told Californians and tourists, only half-jokingly, that Oregon was a fine place to visit but that he hoped they would not stay. The remark was controversial. The intention behind it, a state that took its own landscape seriously enough to say no to some things, was not entirely a joke.