THERE WAS A LAND USE ANGLE TO THE STORY OF THE BHAGWAN

Remember the saga of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh from back in the 1980s?  I remember it mostly because of the series of “Bloom County” comic strips about it that appeared shortly after the Bhagwan made headlines.  
It turns out that there was a land use angle to the story.  You may or may not recall that the Bhagwan started a commune on land that he and his followers (the “Rajneeshees”) purchased in a rural area in Oregon.  The land use angle is that government agencies and growth-control advocates used Oregon’s stringent land use controls to thwart the Rajneeshees’ efforts to build permanent housing on their land.  Their planned community supposedly would have housed several thousand people.
Antiplanner has more of the story, including a link to a documentary on the Rajneeshees that’s now out on Netflix.
We still have in our house the “Bloom County” comic book that includes that series of strips.  Now I’m going to have to find that series and read it again.