Friends of Clark County President Ann Foster is concerned that agricultural and other natural resource land will be lost in Clark County during the comprehensive plan updates to the Growth Management Act.
Late last year, city leaders from Ridgefield and La Center argued for the inclusion of a study to assess whether some agricultural lands should be reclassified for future development. The County Council newly approved a study on July 15 that will analyze land in unincorporated areas of the county outside current urban growth boundaries to determine whether it should be retained with agricultural protections.
Under the Growth Management Act (GMA), cities and counties are required to update their comprehensive plans by year’s end to accommodate 20 years of projected population and job growth. Cities are required to identify enough land for future housing and employment. Although the GMA does not require an agricultural lands study, state law prohibits cities from expanding urban growth boundaries onto designated resource lands, such as farmland, unless the county first reviews and potentially undesignates them.
Foster said the Friends of Clark County (FOCC) has been misinterpreted in the past regarding the ag study.
“Friends of Clark County got misinterpreted by saying we were opposed to the ag study. That’s not the case,” Foster said. “We have never been opposed to an ag study. We’ve never been opposed to a resource study, and it’s a matter of fact, we’re the champions of the resource plan study that would give us this information so we could make decisions going forward that are based upon good knowledge. But it didn’t turn out that way, so we’re not opposing it, it’s just that it has forced county planning to be in a position of cutting short timelines.”
Foster added that FOCC is deeply concerned about the potential loss of public engagement in the process over the next few months due to the shortened timeline. She said the ag study has put the county in a vulnerable position, potentially leading to non-compliance.
The study is now expected to delay the comprehensive plan update until May 2026, which may lead to the Growth Management Hearings Board determining non-compliance with state law. This may lead to the county becoming ineligible for certain state short-term loans and grants next year.
Clark County is noncompliant with state law, as previously reported by The Reflector, due to a 2022-approved surface mining overlay that lacked an Environmental Impact Statement.
For Ridgefield Mayor Matt Cole, seeking to add agricultural land in the city’s urban growth boundary doesn’t mean axing active farmland.
“First and foremost, Ridgefield was basically built off of ag land, you know,” he said. “This is an area for generations that has been a lot of farmland and as the city has grown, there’s been a demand for growth and as a lot of farmers have, I think, evaluated the viability of agriculture production here in Ridgefield.”
Cole pointed out that many acres of designated agricultural land are not even actively being farmed, and some have not been active for decades.
But for Foster, some of the land actively being farmed isn’t even designated as agricultural land. This leads Foster to question exactly how many acres of farmland Clark County has — a truly unknown number, she added. Foster also added that a major threat to agricultural land in Clark County is posed by landowners who sell their property to developers instead of maintaining the farming industry.
“So the Growth Management Act came about, I think in 1990, and there was a … for a lack of a better word, land grabbing as a result, while things were being put in place,” Foster said, explaining FOCC’s origins. “And that’s essentially what motivated this group of citizens to form an organization that would advocate for the legislation in protecting lands from the land grabbing and in particular the partialization, and that still goes on to a certain extent.”
Foster said today that, in 2025, the need to advocate for resource land and open space is greater than ever, particularly in the farming industry, forests, and carbon sequestration, as well as the quality of life threatened by climate change.
“The threat of the land will just continue to increase because of the need for housing,” Foster said. “That’s not a problem that’s going to be easily resolved or go away at the end of 2025.”
Cole expressed his tremendous respect for FOCC and their efforts to preserve agricultural and other natural resource lands, adding that at the end of the day once the ag land is gone, it’s never coming back.
“And so preserve it where you can, but do so in a way that makes sense also,” he said, highlighting the fact that a lot of acreage that is designated for agriculture production is not actively in use, besides some being utilized for hay production. “But otherwise, we should protect farmland, I agree with that …”
Cole added that the entire essence of what a city is, is growth and urbanization. He also said Ridgefield intends not to take away farmland and not to create urban sprawl.
“And so we’re looking at that as, yeah, we have to look at farmland, we have to look at growth areas for commercial and residential development,” Cole said. “We have to look at the whole picture, and that’s a much trickier job than just being focused exclusively on farmland.”
