Smart growth is a way of designing cities that combines fiscal responsibility, livability, affordability, and conservation of natural resources. Smart Growth includes:

• Good governance and public engagement in designing the future of our communities

• Responsibly stewarding tax dollars by building infrastructure that we need and can afford

• Using land efficiently inside of cities before expanding onto greenfields

• Prioritizing communities that are livable, safe, and walkable and that have needed services

• Incentivizing businesses and industries that give back to the community in jobs, goods and services, tax revenue, and community engagement

• Building the types of housing that people need at all stages of life and sizes of family instead of housing that creates the biggest margin for developers

At their meeting on June 15, 2026, City Council accepted the resignation of City Manager Bill Reid. In our viewpoint, that it was the right decision for many, many reasons. Mr. Reid:

• Had no prior experience in city management. His background before coming to North Plains was as a real estate economist for developers.

• Continued to plan an excessively large expansion for data centers and warehouses next to the homes and elementary school in Sunset Ridge, despite the city's strong opposition

• Wasted an estimated $866,000 on planning for expansion. We don't know how much because he...

• Hadn't completed an audit of the city budget for 4 years

• Hadn't addressed the 30 serious findings in the 2022 audit alone

• Hadn't completed an audit of the Urban Renewal Area (URA) since 2019.

• Denied URA grants to downtown businesses that the funding was intended for

• Consolidated city power and prevents oversight by appointing himself as Acting Finance, Acting Planning Director, and URA Executive Director, as well as City Manager

For these reasons and more, City Council did the necessary thing by accepting Mr. Reid’s resignation.

Following Reid’s departure, City Council appointed an interim City Manager in a process led only by former Mayor Dumbrow and the city attorney. That Interim City Manager left citing vague reasons, and City Council appointed a new Interim City Manager on July 31, 2026, who has since been working to restore function to the city administration that Mr. Reid left behind.

Council turnover is common in small towns where volunteer councilors have high obligations. Both pro-sprawl and smart growth councilors departed in recent years for health, family, and work reasons.

It is unclear why some staff members left, but staff turnover is common when a top executive leaves. Staff turnover was more likely in North Plains where the departing City Manager had built a flat staffing structure with an unusual amount of power vested in himself as Acting Finance Director, Acting Planning Director, and Urban Renewal Agency Executive Director in addition to his primary role as City Manager.

Oregon cities are required to do audits, and for good reasons. Audits tell a City Council what its starting balance is so it can responsibly budget for the years ahead. Audits show the public how their tax dollars, revenue, and grants are being spent. And they’re a necessary oversight tool. In 2008, a former court supervisor was accused of embezzling $211,000 from North Plains and pleaded guilty to aggravated first-degree theft.‍‍ This cannot happen again.

But in 2023, the legislature ended the fiscal penalty for cities that are delinquent in filing financial reports. The state recognized that many small cities do not have the resources to undertake audits nor the staff to manage the process and didn’t want to penalize underfunded jurisdictions.

But North Plains has the resources to perform audits. Since that legislation passed, North Plains has failed to file an audit (2022-2025).

However, progress is being made. In the month since the former City Manager resigned, the city has made great progress on resolving this backlog, and we expect the 2022 audit to be released shortly. Sign up to our newsletter to hear when it’s issued.

Local governments can designate Urban Renewal Areas (URAs) where they can use tax incentives to stimulate private economic development and jobs. URA projects include upgrading public services and funding building renovations. These projects are often funded by “tax increment financing”, where the existing property tax revenue level is frozen as a baseline, and then new tax revenue (the "increment") pays for these public projects to help businesses thrive. 

North Plains has had a URA along Commercial and Glencoe since 2006. It's overseen by an Urban Renewal Agency and is required by state law to be separate from city government.

North Plains has failed to perform required audits of its URA since 2022. The lack of audits is concerning because it appears that the URA does not have its own bank account, as is required by law. It’s also concerning because the former City Manager, as the URA’s Executive Director, authorized large transfers from the URA budget to city community development and administration budgets. This was done without specifically accounting how it was used for urban renewal projects. Available evidence shows that URA expenditures for staff and consulting for some years  exceeded funding spent on actual capital projects. The exception has been property purchases on which there has been no significant progress for several years. These properties include the five-acre Glencoe opportunity site and parcels in downtown.

One of the functions of North Plains' URA is to make grants to local businesses in the district to do things like building upgrades. We hear reports from local businesses that the program had been inconsistently applied. To address this , Councilors recently in their role as the URA Board have retained a consultant to professionally administer the program.

This information is from the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development.

No. The area to the southwest of North Plains is officially an Undesignated Area (see Washington County map).

Hillsboro is in Metro; like all Metro cities, Hillsboro does not have its own UGB and has no ability to annex land unless it is brought into the Metro UGB. Metro is responsible for bringing in land to the Metro UGB that its member jurisdictions (such as Hillsboro) then urbanize. State law requires that when it identifies a need for UGB expansion, Metro must look first to the land designated Urban Reserve before it considers undesignated land.

Metro currently has 26 Urban Reserves designated to meet the region’s long-term growth needs, totaling nearly 20,000 acres.

Even imagining some distant future where Metro has used up its urban reserves and would be looking at undesignated lands, it could not look to the area southwest of North Plains, most notably because North Plains is outside of Metro. North Plains and Washington County have a formal agreement (Washington County Ord. No. 637) stating that the area will be urbanized by North Plains. Accordingly, the specified land could not be brought into the Metro UGB.

A group calling itself the “real friends” of North Plains has been very active on social media and is sending expensive mailers to everyone in the 97133 zip code. We do not know who runs the organization or how they are funded. They are not officially organized as a business, nonprofit, or political action committee. Their objective is likely to try to expand the UGB again by hundreds of acres by electing city councilors who will do so.

In our opinion, the recall petition is just an extension of special interests trying to usurp power to try one more time to force the city to grow beyond its means. The recall petitions were submitted by a pro-sprawl former City Council President Russ Sheldon and an ally of that cause. The arguments that they lay out are specious, not the councilor’s fault, or the result of the petitioner’s own actions. For example, the city stopped performing audits while Russ Sheldon was on City Council, and the Urban Renewal Agency didn’t perform audits during the time that Mr. Sheldon was chair.

Unfortunately, it appears that the same special interests who are flooding people’s social media and mailboxes with aggressive and often inaccurate information are trying to get city residents to vote out councilors who are trying to fix the messes left by prior councilors. Most of the councilors in office before the 2024 election were trying to expand the city by more than twice its size to give a huge landfall profit to landowners, cheap land for sprawling subdivisions, and tax breaks to data centers and warehouses. That’s why the city voted for reform in 2024.

The City Councilors who joined after 2024 are working hard, but they entered a mine field left behind for them by the prior City Council who, in their last two months in office:

• Installed the architect of the massive expansion proposal, Bill Reid, as the new City Manager.

• Put a golden parachute in Mr. Reid’s employment contract so he’d get a big payment if he left.

• Passed new rules that gave the new City Manager sweeping power over council agendas, meetings, and councilor communications.

• Left all of the plans in place to reinstitute a massive urban growth boundary expansion again if they ever regained power.

All of this and more were attempts to stifle the new City Councilors you elected from fulfilling the job you directed them to do: increasing government transparency and only approving growth if it’s needed, desired, and within the City’s means.