Isaac Laquedem

Snethen on Ephron on Hillary Clinton

The Couv Operator, Chris Snethen, quoted part of an opinion piece by Nora Ephron that appeared in the Huffington Post.  Here's Mr. Snethen's post (and please click through to read it if you haven't seen it already).  Ms. Ephron is commenting on the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns, and in particular on the Clinton campaign's suggestion that Senator Obama return the $1.3 million that Hollywood figures David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg raised for him this week.  (Background: Mr. Geffen opened a lot of Hollywood doors and wallets for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.) 

The rest of her column is good.  This snippet (and thank you to Mr. Snethen for posting it), with her reaction to the Clinton campaign's suggestion, is priceless.

I love that suggestion. As far as I can tell, there is not a morsel of food that has crossed the Clintons' lips in the last twelve years that people have not paid $2300 a person to witness.

ODOT says rush hour on I-405 extends to midnight

Several years ago the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) installed ramp meters at most of the on-ramps to the Portland freeways.  These meters are traffic lights tied to sensors and shine steadily red, requiring all cars that enter the freeway to stop first and wait for a green light.  (In Los Angeles the lights shine green, then change to red for a few seconds after each car passes, so that a car that enters by itself will get a green light instead of a red light.  This says something about the attitude toward the automobile in these two cities.)

Mostly these meters operate only in the rush hours.  (They are not very sophisticated, and operate even on holidays such as Christmas Day when traffic is very light.)  Lately I've noticed that the one at the SW Broadway entrance to Interstate 405 is operating late into the night.  I saw it working at midnight a few days ago.  Maybe it's malfunctioning.  Or maybe someone at ODOT has an odd theory about how drivers should act late at night.  One result of the theory, if that's why this meter runs at night, is that cars enter the freeway at 30 or 40 miles per hour, instead of at 50 miles per hour, and those that need to change lanes to get to the Baldock Freeway (Interstate 5 southbound) have to dodge and swerve across the flow of traffic to get to the left lane.  If the meter is running because someone at ODOT has a theory about traffic, I'd love to know what it is.

Where exactly do the children play?

The former Cat Stevens might ask that question, if he were to descend on the Portland planning bureau.  This thought came to my mind as I read a book called Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv.  Mr. Louv argues that (1) children have become slaves to the electronic gadgets in their lives and don't get outdoors for unstructured play or direct contact with nature any more, and (2) government land use regulations and private developers' fear of lawsuits have destroyed or made inaccessible the spots where children used to build forts and splash about in creeks.  (He makes many other points, but these two are the ones that inspired this post.)

I thought he was overstating his argument -- he admits that he's not trying to say that "nature-deficit disorder," a phrase he coined, is a psychiatric syndrome, even though it sounds like one.  And at least in Portland (a city he compliments in his book) the city planners encourage and require open space. 

But what kind of open space?  A few years ago one of my friends designed and built a planned community with a mix of houses, apartments, shops, and offices.  The City of Portland made him set aside about 8 acres as greenspace, a requirement imposed by the planning bureau.  There's the space for children, no?

No.  The conditions of approval required my friend to fence off almost all the greenspace so that the residents can't use it, and to post signs to warn the residents (who in fact own the greenspace) that they can't go in.  I like to think that the children who live there have found their way under the fence.

The Laquedem Plan to solve the Interstate Bridge problem

"I can improve on the I-5 / Interstate Bridge committee," I thought confidently as I read today's article.  It seems silly to me to remove the two existing bridges just because they might fall down in an earthquake -- we've known for years that the county courthouse has been unsafe and are only just now getting around to picking a site for its replacement -- but the leading alternative seems to be to build a new bridge next to the existing bridges and then tear the old bridges down.  The cost of doing this is estimated at $2.2 billion.

So I got out my map and looked for alternatives.  A bridge to the east?  Difficult, because the farther east the bridge, the lower it has to be, to avoid interfering with planes landing at the airport.  But if the bridge is too low, then it blocks barge traffic on the river.  A bridge to the west?  Easy enough from Hayden Island to Vancouver, but from Portland to Hayden Island the bypass road would likely run through wetlands.

And how should we design and build the bridge, surely a point that the public relations folks at ODOT must have in mind after watching Portland's tram project balloon from $12 million to $55+ million.

Then it hit me.  ("Oh, no," said Mrs. Laquedem.)  The distance from Hayden Island to Vancouver is about the same as from North Macadam to Pill Hill.  And while $55 million is expensive for a tram, it's cheap for a bridge. 

I think you see where I'm going with this one.  For $2.2 billion, we could build 40 trams at $55 million each to ferry people across, or rather over, the Columbia River.  Doppelmayr would likely give us a bulk discount.  Each tram has two cars, and each car can hold about 30 people.  With a trip time including loading and unloading of about 5 minutes, the trams could carry 1200 people (40 cars times 30 people/car) each way every five minutes, or twelve times that in an hour.  That's 14,400 people per hour each way -- 28,000 people per hour total.  At 1.5 people per car, that's equal to about 18,000 cars per hour, or 9000 cars each way every hour.

A modest improvement is to reduce the number of trams but to cover a longer distance.  The ideal southern terminus is at the Expo Center transit station, so riders of light rail can connect seamlessly to the interstate tram.  I can envision commuters entering the parking lot at the Vancouver end, following the signs that will say "Park and Glide."

And, because we know that the $55 million tram at North Macadam has spurred umpteen hundreds of millions of new development (PDC says so), the $2.2 billion megatram should spur $billions.  Let's build it!   

Puzzling bumper sticker of the week

I saw this bumper sticker (a sign, actually) in the rear window of a small truck this week:

Q:  Why did Governor Kulongoski cross the road?
A:  To tax the chicken.

I gathered that the truck's owner opposes new taxes generally, but I couldn't tell whether he or she opposes sales taxes, gasoline taxes, property taxes, or excise taxes to be named later.  As far as I know, the governor hasn't looked to balance the budget on the backs of periambulatory fowl.  But then, the year is young.

Measure 37, affordable housing, mobile home parks, and Wilsonville

When the longtime owner of a Wilsonville, Oregon mobile home park announced in the summer of 2005 that he was going to close the park, the City of Wilsonville rushed through an ordinance that prohibited owners of mobile home parks from closing their parks unless they first (a) obtained a permit from the City, (b) prepared a statement of the impact of the closure on the tenants, and (c) hired people to help the tenants move to new locations and paid all the costs to relocate the tenants.  The owner sued the city to declare the ordinance unconstitutional, and a few months ago a Clackamas County judge agreed with the owner.

In the meantime Metro and local governments struggle with providing "needed housing," meaning affordable housing.  And an interesting question has arisen about Measure 37, the land use initiative adopted in 2004.  Measure 37 requires local governments to waive certain land use regulations adopted after landowners acquired their property, or to pay compensation in lieu of waiving the rules.  The question is how to interpret this sentence from Measure 37:  "In lieu of payment of just compensation under this act, the governing body * * * may modify, remove, or not apply the land use regulation or land use regulations to allow the owner to use the property for a use permitted at the time the owner acquired the property."  What does "a use" mean?  Does it mean a use chosen by the owner (i.e., any use), or does it mean a use chosen by the government?

Here's why it matters.  Old Farmer applies for Measure 37 relief and says that when he bought his acreage in the forest back in 1963, no rules prevented him from subdividing it into 100 lots.  "Let me subdivide," he says, "or pay me $X millions."  Can the county say, "Mr. Farmer, we won't let you subdivide, but we will let you build an office building," knowing that no one would build an office building on Old Farmer's acreage.  Or does the county have to go along with Mr. Farmer's chosen use?

Here's how to combine mobile home parks, affordable housing, and Measure 37.  Let a few local governments grant Measure 37 waivers that allow, not a 50- or 100-lot subdivision, but a 100- or 200-unit mobile home park.  Have Metro cooperate by extending sewer and water to the mobile home parks, and provide that the Measure 37 allows the mobile home park but not a large-lot subdivision.  "You can come into the Urban Growth Boundary and get services," Metro might tell a claimant, "only if you use your property to provide affordable housing."   

Cities could even do this without waiting for a Measure 37 claimant to show up.  Wilsonville, for example, could tell a few landowners on its fringe that it will annex their land and provide urban services, if they agree to build a mobile home park on the land and operate it for the next 40 or 50 years.  That is, of course, assuming that the Wilsonville City Council wants to preserve mobile homes in the city, the goal they said they had when they passed their ordinance.

Fill in the blank, articulately

Senator Biden is catching some flak for describing Senator Obama as "articulate," a term sometimes used by white Americans to describe black Americans who speak English better than they do.  The two common reactions are: (a) would Senator Biden describe white politicians such as (say) Senators Clinton or McCain as being "articulate"?, and (b) why would Senator Biden, or anyone else, be surprised that the holder of a Harvard graduate degree is articulate and uses the language well?  The real surprise would be if the person made it through graduate school and still couldn't articulate his thoughts.

Like Senator Obama, our president holds a graduate degree from Harvard, as well as a college degree from an established school of some repute.  This leads me to today's fill-in-the-blank question.  If Senator Biden had also said "President Bush is articulate," it would show that Senator Biden is _______________________. 

A thought on Portland charter reform

As the City of Portland ponders whether to change its charter and the duties of the city councilors, a thought occurred to me.  It's said that the Constitutional Convention assigned powers to the President under the laudable if improbable belief that George Washington would forever be the President and be fair and reasoned.  He was fair and reasoned, but he wasn't President forever.  His successor, more prone to fits of temper, quickly brought us the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Similarly, when a local Fine Institution was drawing plans to rejigger its campus in the late 1980s, management said that the caretaker's house should be at a central point, because the resident caretaker was a genial man who got on well with the students and faculty.  "All very well," said one committee member, "but his predecessor was a cranky old coot who wanted nothing to do with the students.  You can't build the campus on the assumption that the current fellow will be here forever."

So it is with charter reform.  Should the mayor be a strong mayor or merely primus inter pares?  Should the councilors continue to be in charge of the bureaux (i.e., continue to be commissioners also) or be reduced to being debaters and voters on the council?  As I think these things through, I'd like to suggest that the test is not whether Mayor Potter should be given more or less power vis-a-vis Commissioners Adams, Leonard, Saltzman, and Sten.  That's the same trap that the framers fell into: designing the constitution around a particular person.  The form of government that we end up with should be one where we would think that the mayor's powers are reasonable regardless of whether the mayor is Tom Potter, or Sam Adams, or Randy Leonard, or Dan Saltzman, or Erik Sten -- or even Emilie Boyles.