Editorial: Let counties decide wedding venue rules for farms

Our bet: No one noticed, not even the folks on neighboring farms.

Yet the prospect of a farm hosting weddings has some folks concerned that the state’s agriculture will in some way be eroded. They have gone to the Oregon Legislature in an effort to stop what they see as a disaster in the making.

That, of course, assumes a worst-case scenario, in which wedding venues masquerade as farms as a way to get a property tax break, disrupting neighboring farmers and causing traffic and parking problems.

Now before the legislature is a compromise bill that would outright allow on-farm weddings east of the Cascade Range as long as the county population is less than 85,000. Only Deschutes County in eastern Oregon has a larger population.

All of which is fine, but it takes little imagination see that even in sparsely populated areas a constant procession of weddings might cause problems.

Conversely, a farm in a county west of the Cascades may pose no problems hosting weddings, as long as the facilities and parking are adequate and neighbors’ concerns are addressed.

Our point is this: a state law aimed at regulating weddings on every one of the 37,200 farms in Oregon will be, almost by definition, inadequate. By slicing the state into two parts, it’s also clear that the two-sizes-fit-all approach won’t work as well as hoped.

We have a suggestion: Oregon has 36 counties, each of which is governed by elected officials who intimately know their area. The state should delegate to the counties the responsibility of overseeing wedding venues. They are fully capable of making sure hosting weddings is a side hustle to farming, and not vice versa. This in many ways is the current regulatory situation.

Parking and adequate facilities can easily be checked by the county, which can then make a determination about whether hosting a wedding once in a while would be a big deal and how it might impact the farm’s tax status.

House Bill 2487 is not terrible. It’s probably better than nothing. Unfortunately, it is barely adequate in how it addresses the wedding venues on farms in western Oregon at the same time it relieves most eastern Oregon farms of any accountability.

Mary Kyle McCurdy, deputy director of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a farmland conservation nonprofit, warns that “the exclusive farm use zone is not a party zone.”

We agree with her, but it should be up to county officials, not a blanket state law, to decide what is appropriate for any given farm.