PORT ANGELES — Initiative 933 either will preserve property rights or saddle Washington taxpayers with a $1,000-per-payer burden.

It either will loosen government regulations on land or will cripple laws that protect water quality.

It’s either “open governance,” as Norman MacLeod of Port Townsend called it, or an idea that might have worked if this were 1955, as Christine Llewellyn of Quilcene said.

MacLeod and Llewellyn debated the initiative Monday at the midday meeting of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce at the Port Angeles CrabHouse Restaurant.

The initiative would:

* Make governments compensate property owners for value lost to environmental regulations.

* “Waive or pay” them; that is, waive the regulations or pay the owner the difference.

* Forbid new regulations that would prohibit currently legal uses.

Moreover, it would apply to regulations adopted since 1996.

Initiative 933’s main proponent is the Washington Farm Bureau, which Llewellyn called “big agribusiness” but which MacLeod said represents 34,000 farming families.

‘Galloping goal posts’

MacLeod cited what he called “the galloping goal posts,” meaning that when a property owner has met all of government’s land-use regulations, the government would add more regulations.

He also described a man whose property was bisected by a creek he was barred from bridging because he could take a circuitous route from one side to the other.

“The case went through five levels of appeal before he could build his bridge,” MacLeod said.

Llewellyn countered that on her 46-acre organic farm, regulations protect a creek that flows into Quilcene Bay and safeguard 20 homes that border her land.

“What goes on our property does affect our neighbors,” she said.

“It’s what we hold in common that makes this a special place.”

Whereas MacLeod said the 10-year retroactive scope of the initiative would “target the more egregious regulations that have taken place in the last 10 years or so,” Llewellyn said it would cost taxpayers $8 billion — $1,000 per payer — to compensate owners for property rights.

She said it took a baby-and-bath-water approach to regulations that would be “bad for governments, bad for communities, bad for farmers.”