Isaac Laquedem

SW Highland Road doesn't meet city standards, but it might meet the city double standards

One of the firm principles of the road department of the City of Portland is that it will maintain city streets only after a developer or the neighbors bring them up to city standards.  This is why southwest Portland has so many dirt and gravel roads -- they're old county roads that were brought into the city without having been properly widened and paved, and it's up to the adjoining owners to maintain them until they're willing to dip into their pockets, form a local improvement district, and pay to add the curbs, sidewalks, and storm drains.

One of the substandard streets of southwest Portland is SW Highland Road.  It's a curious street that runs from SW Canyon Court near the Children's Museum north up the hill to SW Fairview Boulevard, near Hoyt Arboretum.  Most of the houses on Highland Road are in unincorporated Multnomah County and aren't assessed city property taxes, but most of the road itself has been annexed by the City. Willamette Week ran a story on this curious city street in December 2006.

I recall reading not long ago that the City is about to repave Highland Road.  What I don't know is whether the City ever accepted Highland Road as being improved to city standards.  If the City isn't maintaining SW Alice (say) or SW Primrose because the neighbors haven't paid to bring them up to city standards, then it shouldn't be maintaining Highland Road until the residents pay to widen the road and bring it up to city standards -- not unless there's a double standard for the roads of the rich.

Landslide closes Canyon Road westbound

A landslide east of the Portland Zoo today has closed Canyon Road westbound.  ODOT's road camera shows Highway 26 near the Zoo with the rare condition of having no traffic at all. 

To the east, ODOT's camera shows that help is on the way, with trucks working to remove the dirt from the highway:

I'm reminded of one of the reasons that OMSI moved from its Canyon Road location some years back, which was that the geotechnical engineers said that the hillside couldn't support any more weight there, so OMSI couldn't expand.  I think some of them weren't sure how the hillside was supporting OMSI at that time.  This slide appears to have happened away from any buildings and, judging from the picture, it gives us another reason to use the fast lane when going to Beaverton.

The McMinnville schoolboys, Shaquanda Cotton, and the judgment of Paris

The case of the two McMinnville schoolboys who are facing juvenile charges for slapping the rears of their female classmates has sparked a fair amount of discussion.  Some think that the school, not the court, should be handling the matter; others think that the serious adult response is the right one. 

It's instructive to compare McMinnville's decision with a recent case in Paris, Texas, in which a 14-year-old girl was accused of shoving a hall monitor when she wanted to get into the school building before the school day started.  Although the good people of Paris were known for being soft on crime outside the schoolhouse -- a man convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the deaths of two persons got probation, and a 14-year-old who burnt down the family home also got probation -- the same Lamar County judge, Chuck Superville, who handed down those two sentences of probation gave the 14-year-old who shoved the hall monitor 7 years in prison.  She'll be locked up until she's 21.

Why do the arsonist and the killer get probation while the hall monitor shover gets 7 years in prison?  Oh -- I forgot to mention that the arsonist and the killer are white (the killer's victims were black), and the shover (whose name is Shaquanda Cotton) is black.  But that couldn't have had anything to do with Judge Superville's decision in these three cases, could it?  Of course not -- not even in Texas. 

Senator Gary George proposes firing on Fort Sumter

At least, that's how I read Senate Bill 916 (in PDF, here), introduced by Senator Gary George (R-McMinnville) in this year's session of the Oregon Legislature.  The bill, if adopted (and I think that's a big if) directs the Oregon State Forestry Department to go out and reclaim the federal lands in Oregon for the state.  It's short enough that I'll quote it in full:

                        A BILL FOR AN ACT

Relating to state lands.

Be It Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon:

SECTION 1.  The Legislative Assembly finds that, based on
the Oregon Admission Acts (1859) and other legal and historical
documents, all lands claimed by the federal government in the
State of Oregon are property of this state. The State Forestry
Department shall take all steps necessary to reclaim those lands
for state use.

A similar issue came up in another state, in 1861, and wasn't settled until 1865.  I have visions of armed state foresters proudly seizing Government Camp.

The myth of urban sprawl, or why the Oregonian's editorial board needs a 10-key calculator

I love numbers.  Mrs. Laquedem sometimes says that they dance across my fingertips, like trained fleas.  One number in the Oregonian's editorial on Measure 37 struck me.  Possibly taking its cue from the American Land Institute, the Oregonian said that from 1950 to 1974, the Willamette Valley "lost a third of its farmland, nearly a million acres."

How big is a million acres?  One square mile is 640 acres, so 1000 square miles is 640,000 acres.  A million acres is a little more than 1500 square miles.

Where did the million acres come from?  The United States Geological Survey says that the Willamette Basin (the area drained by the Willamette River, sometimes incorrectly called the Willamette River watershed) includes about 12,000 square miles.  The Willamette Basin includes more than the Willamette Valley, as the river drains not just its eponymous valley but also the Tualatin Valley, the west side of the Cascades from about Three Sisters northward, and the east side of the Coast Ranges from about Eugene northward.  The USGS says that in 1991 (when the report I cite was written), about 70% of the basin was forested, 22% was farmed, and 8% was in other uses, mainly urban uses.

Eight percent of 12,000 square miles is about 1000 square miles.  That is, the USGS thought that in 1991 the entire Willamette Basin (not just the valley itself) had only about 1000 square miles of urban uses. Yet the Oregonian blandly reports that from 1950 to 1974 the valley lost 1500 square miles of farmland, with the implication being that it fell victim to urbanization and suburban sprawl.

National Geographic says that the Willamette Valley proper is about 5800 square miles in area.  Did 1500 square miles of it really become urbanized from 1950 to 1974?  (That's an area more than three times the size of Multnomah County, and about 40% larger than Rhode Island.)  If the Oregonian's numbers are correct, then about 30% of the entire valley (not just the farmland that the Oregonian discusses) stopped being farmed between 1950 and 1974. 

I'd like to think that the Whimperer did its own analysis before publishing this editorial, but the numbers it quotes suggest that it didn't.

The Laquedem Plan to beat the pants off the Burnside-Couch couplet scheme

Having laid into the screwball idea of making a one-way couplet out of West Burnside and Northwest Couch and letting the transportation people funnel traffic up a street that the planning people want to promote for pedestrians, it occurred to me that the least I could do is offer an alternative.

There's no question that West Burnside is a problem.  Because it has no signalized left turns (except for buses turning south onto 5th Avenue), westbound drivers heading to Southwest Portland, and eastbound drivers heading to Northwest Portland, have to do all sorts of convoluted maneuvers to get where they're going, quite often blocking traffic as they wait to turn left at an unsignalized intersection.  So here is at least a partial solution, which I've scraped up from Burnside's history.

It's a little-known fact that Burnside originally ran only from the river to about 15th Avenue, where it joined Washington Street.  (The construction of the Stadium Freeway cut off the connection.)  West of 15th Avenue, it was actually Washington Road that ran through Uptown and into the West Hills, where it became Barnes Road.  (The peculiar relationship between West Bunrside Road and NW/SW Barnes Road dates only from World War II and is another story altogether.)  When the Burnside Bridge was built the flow of traffic was redirected to Burnside Street and the bridge, and the name was changed to Burnside.

When the one-way grid was imposed downtown, Washington Street became a westbound street and Alder Street became eastbound.  In 1957 when the new Morrison Bridge opened, it was connected to Washington and Alder instead of to SW Morrison, where the old bridge ran.  Although Washington Street doesn't connect to Burnside (the stub that exists at 15th is meaningless), Alder Street has a good connection at 19th Avenue, and it's one-way eastbound.  The city could remove parking from one side of Alder Street and relocate the bicycle lane, making it a three-lane eastbound street from 19th to the river.  Between 3rd and 2nd Avenue, remove the other lane of parking so that Alder becomes a 4-lane street.  Allow two lanes to go straight to the Morrison Bridge and have the other two lanes turn left (north) onto 2nd Avenue, which crosses Burnside about 6 blocks to the north.  Then make Burnside a one-way westbound street from 2nd Avenue west to 18th Avenue, which will open up room for street parking on one side and maybe both.  Westbound drivers could then make easy left turns without any opposing traffic to SW 3rd, Broadway, 11th, 13th, and 15th. 

Eastbound drivers would either turn right (south) on SW 19th to go toward the Multnomah Club and Lincoln High School, or go straight onto SW Alder to get downtown or to the Morrison or Burnside Bridges, or make a left turn onto NW 18th to get into northwest Portland.

Under the Burnside-Couch scheme, an eastbound driver would make no turns to go straight through, but a westbound driver on Burnside would have to make four turns to go through downtown.  Under the Laquedem plan, a westbound driver would make no turns, and an eastbound driver would have to make only two turns (going from Burnside to Alder isn't really a turn).  Far superior, I think, and a lot easier to design and build.

Burnside-Couch shows that the land use system has failed

Two years ago I thought that Oregon's land use system had some problems, but was mostly working. 

I'm changing my mind.

The controversy over whether to convert West Burnside and Northwest Couch Streets into a one-way couplet is to me some evidence that our land use system has failed.  Downtown Portland is likely the most intensively planned area in the entire state, being as it is the focal point of the largest planning department in the state, and being subject to more regulation than likely any other urban area in the state.  If any area should have sensible and consistent planning, it is the central city.

Yet take a look at the last 10 years or so of development in the core.  First, the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT) cheerfully installed stop signs and belly curbs (there's a better name for those peninsulas of sidewalk that stick into the road at intersections, but I don't know what it is) throughout Northwest Portland, and cut in half the capacity of the main avenues in and out (5th, 6th, 14th, 16th, 18th, and 19th).  Next, the planning people upzoned a good chunk of the industrial area to allow high-traffic stores, apartments, and condominiums to be built from Burnside northward.  Then, the design review folks required the developers to put in street improvements to make the streets even narrower, and more friendly to pedestrians but less useful for cars.  After one department cut traffic capacity and another increased demand, PDOT gets the idea of undoing Planning's work on Couch so that it can reduce the capacity of Burnside.

I can understand this mess happening in a small town that doesn't have the level of sophistication of Portland's planning and transportation staff.  Well, no, actually I can't, because I think that a town that had one planner and one transportation engineer would never have gone this far down the road (tramway?) of having two departments push competing visions for a street.  In a small town, the planner would have told the transportation maven about the proposed development, and the transportation maven would have told the planner, "Don't narrow that street; we need to make it wider."  Problem avoided.

To my mind the Burnside-Couch question was settled 40 years ago, when the City Council (guided, if I recall rightly, by an astute question from Commissioner Stanley Earl) voted down a similar proposal, though without a trolley.   It's long past time to let the old Burnside-Couch couplet idea drop.

The Oregonian muddles up Measure 37 and our property tax system, all in one editorial

The Oregonian passed along a new argument against Measure 37 in an editorial piece today.  In brief, the Whimperer (citing a study by the American Land Institute, see below) says that farmers and foresters have already been compensated, through special property tax assessments, for living under the restrictions of Oregon's land use laws.  Let's take a look at that.

The editorial describes as a "myth" the idea that farmers and foresters were never compensated for being made subject to the statewide land use restrictions; in fact (says the editorial, citing the ALI study) rural landowners "reaped $4.9 billion in property tax reductions" over the 30 years from 1974 to 2004.  They're being disingenuous.

The editorial correctly states that when Oregon adopted the statewide land use planning bill in 1971, Senate Bill 100, it adopted a companion bill, Senate Bill 101, to give a property tax break to owners of farm and forest land.  But the editorial doesn't describe the tax break.  You could read the article (as I did) and go away thinking that in 1971 the legislature cut property taxes for farmers and foresters to make up for restricting what they could do with their land.

That's not exactly right.

The "property tax break" is a special assessment program, part of state law but administered by the county tax assessors.  It says (and I'm simplifying the details a bit) that the owner of farm or forest land outside an urban growth boundary may elect to have it taxed based on its value as farmland or forest land, instead of on its value for its highest and best use.  So if you own 100 acres of farmland outside the UGB that has development potential, and you're farming it, you can pay taxes on it based on its value as farmland, instead of on its value as homesites.  Let's say that in your area farmland is worth $5,000/acre and five-acre homesites are worth $200,000.  You could elect to have your land assessed as farmland (a value of $500,000) instead of as building sites ($4,000,000), knocking 7/8 off of your property tax bill.

Here are the two points the Oregonian missed when it blindly copied the analysis of ALI.  First, the special assessment program assumes that you can do something with your land besides farm it.  If all you can do with your land is to farm it because land use laws prevent you from building anything, then you don't get any benefit from the special assessment program -- the highest and best legal use of your property is farmland, so it's assessed at $500,000 with or without the special assessment program.

Put another way, SB 101 and the special assessment program didn't compensate people who had their development potential taken away; rather, it offered an incentive to people who could develop not to do so.  Measure 37 provides compensation to people who lost their development rights under SB 100 and who didn't benefit from SB 101.

Second, if you sign up for the special assessment program and some years later you take your property out of special assessment, you have to repay the last 5 or 10 years of property tax savings.  (Whether it's 5 years' worth or 10 years' worth depends on whether you're inside the UGB.)  It's a loan, not a gift.

Incidentally, the Oregonian said nothing about the American Land Institute, not even where it's based or who runs it, except to say that it is a non-profit organization.  Is it an academic think tank from a national city?  Not exactly.  In fact, it is based here in Portland, Oregon, and its key personnel are Henry Richmond (long active in 1000 Friends of Oregon) and Bowen Blair (the first director of the Friends of the Columbia River Gorge).  It was first formed in 1995, dissolved in 1997 (apparently for not filing its annual report with the state), and then re-formed in 2003.  (It filed tax returns throughout this period, and the organizers may not have known that it ceased to exist.)  Why didn't the editors give a little background about the American Land Institute?  Because they didn't know, or because they did?

[Update:  Amanda Fritz has a more positive view of the editorial, which you can read here.]

Switzerland joins the axis of evil, invades Liechtenstein

A company of 170 Swiss soldiers on a training exercise got lost and marched about a mile into the neighboring principality of Liechtenstein before they realized they were in the wrong nation.  So reports the Swiss newspaper Blick, and the Times passes the report along.

The interesting thing about the Swiss invasion is that no one in Liechtenstein noticed it.  A spokesman for its Interior Ministry said, "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something."

Liechtenstein has no army and doesn't patrol its borders.  Its defense policy is similar to that of Andorra, which in 1961 spent about $5/year on its military, to buy blank rounds to shoot off on national holidays.  Malvina Reynolds sang 45 years ago, "They spent four dollars and ninety cents / On armaments for their defense / Did you ever hear of such confidence?"  And confident they must be; in 1996 Andorra signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, no doubt to the relief of Spain and France.  The Swiss invasion is unlikely to push Liechtenstein into becoming a nuclear power itself.

Who's responsible for Walter Reed? Surprise: the man in charge

It's gratifying to see that on Friday the Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, essentially fired the Secretary of the Army, Francis J. Harvey, in response to the reports that Walter Reed Army Hospital, which treats wounded veterans, isn't run very well.  Six years into its service is a little late for a presidential administration to get the hang of making its senior staff responsible for not doing their jobs, but better late than never.  The New York Times article that I link to above includes this intriguing snippet: "Mr. Gates's aggressiveness in addressing the problem [of the poor conditions at Walter Reed] has surprised many Pentagon officials who are still getting used to his style more than two months into his service." 

"His style" is apparently a coded reference to Mr. Gates not dithering: he made the decision to fire Mr. Harvey (more politely, to ask for his immediate resignation) after he heard on Thursday that Mr. Harvey had filled a vacancy at the top of Walter Reed by appointing Lt. General Kevin Kiley, to take charge of Walter Reed temporarily.  General Kiley had been in charge of Walter Reed until 2004 and Mr. Gates didn't see him as a person to solve problems that had lasted through his watch.

Mr. Gates was equally prompt to replace General Kiley.  No search committees for Mr. Gates: he told the Army to get a new commander in place by the end of the day, and the Army complied.

Congratulations, Mr. Gates, on your action.  Let's hope your methods rub off on some others in the administration.