Isaac Laquedem

If the City is looking for a safe street to rename

Then it should look no further than SW Isabella, which is the shortest uniquely-named through street in the city. It connects SW Vista Avenue with SW Montgomery Drive. It is so short that it has no driveways, and thus no residents or businesses who would need to change their stationery or notify their friends.

Isaac Laquedem Boulevard?

As Professor Bogdanski noted yesterday, the Portland City Council is taking what he called the "spectacular train wreck" of Cesar Chavez Boulevard from bad to worse.   Item 1394 on tomorrow's agenda is a proposal by Commissioner Saltzman to add a new provision to the City Code to allow the City Council to rename streets after, well, whomever they like.  Here's the new language:

B. Alternatively, Council may initiate renaming of a street as provided in this Subsection. For purposes of this Subsection, "street" means an entire street or any portion or portions of a street. If Council initiates renaming of a street under this Subsection, the provisions of 17.93.010 through 17.93.040 do not apply. This Subsection may be used to rename a street after a person.

1. The Council shall adopt a resolution proposing to rename a street. The resolution shall direct the Planning Commission to consider the proposed renaming and make a recommendation to Council. The resolution may specify a date by which the Planning Commission must make its recommendation to the City Council.

2. After adoption of the resolution, the Planning Commission shall consider the proposed renaming and make a recommendation to the City Council whether the renaming is in the best interest of the City and the area within six miles of the City limits in accordance with ORS 227.120.

3. The Auditor shall schedule a public hearing before Council on the proposed renaming for a date and time after the Planning Commission’s recommendation to Council. Notice of the hearing shall be published in a newspaper of general circulation not less than once within the week prior to the week within which the hearing is to be held and shall identify the time and place of the hearing.

4. The Council shall hold a hearing on the proposed renaming and shall afford persons particularly interested and the general public the opportunity to be heard on the proposed renaming.

5. If after the public hearing, the Council determines that the renaming is in the best interests of the City and the area within six miles of the City limits, the Council shall adopt an ordinance renaming the street. If the Council declines to rename the street, the Council shall adopt a resolution rejecting the name change. If Council approves the street renaming, certified copies of the enabling Ordinance shall be filed with the County Recorder, County Assessor, and County Surveyor.

The key element of this change is that it allows the Council to rename a street after a person (including apparently a fictitious or pseudonymous person) without having to wait for its citizens to collect 2,500 signatures in support of the renaming.  The purpose for this change is to allow the Council to rename a street after Cesar Chavez without waiting for someone to satisfy the current requirements.  A secondary purpose may be to allow the Council to rename North Interstate Avenue after Mr. Chavez, something the code now prohibits.

The Council will be making a mistake if it adopts this revision, and will be showing that it's forgotten its history and the reason that a prior Council adopted the current ordinance.  (Fans of George Santayana may sing along here.)  Let's go back in history.

Many Portland streets have been renamed for continuity.  For example, portions of West Burnside Street were once named Washington Street and Barnes Road.  The city didn't do these renamings to honor General or any other form of Burnside, but simply to give a continuous street a continuous name.  I'm aware of only two Portland streets that were renamed before 1989 to honor a specific person.  One is SE Hawthorne Boulevard (formerly Asylum Avenue), renamed to honor the first superintendent of the asylum for the insane, located on that thoroughfare.  The other is SW Wright Avenue near Washington Park, originally platted as Edison Street in 1909 and later renamed, possibly after the Wright brothers.

The City had no particular renaming process in place in 1990 when the Council voted to rename SE/NE Union Avenue after Martin Luther King.  A large protest resulted, capped by a petition drive that amassed 50,000 signatures in opposition to the renaming.  The protest and a court challenge failed, and in the meantime the City adopted its current street renaming code as a means of requiring proponents of street renaming to demonstrate some public support before the Council would take up the issue.

Fast-forward to 1996.  Shortly after civic leader and downtown developer William S. Naito died (May 8, 1996), Mayor Katz and the Council voted to rename the downtown portion of Front Avenue after him, as Naito Parkway.  The Council did not wait until five years after Mr. Naito's death as required by the code, nor did it wait for citizens to submit a petition, also as required by the code.  The City also did not rename all of Front Avenue, but only the portion south of the Fremont Bridge.  The renaming provoked some grumbling from Front Avenue businesses, but not from the city at large.  The grumbling was enough, however, to keep the Council out of the street-renaming business until 2006, when it renamed Portland Avenue after Rosa Parks, who had died in 2005.  As with Naito Parkway, the Council did not follow Code.

The Code, however, seemed to be serving its intended function by keeping down the demands for street renaming and thus keeping the Council from being called bad names for not renaming streets on demand. It's time for the Council to follow the Code, not amend it out of existence.  If it adopts this proposal, how does it treat the next set of renaming requests fairly?  I'm too modest to imagine an Isaac Laquedem Boulevard (unless I become a developer and get to name the new streets myself), but I can envision a lot of other requests to rename streets with proponents saying "You renamed a street after X, and Y was just as important to Portland and therefore deserves a street also."  That's a business that the Council should stay out of.   

Avenue, not Boulevard

And if the Council renames Fourth Avenue after Cesar Chavez, it should assign the name "Cesar Chavez Avenue" and not "Cesar Chavez Boulevard" to keep with the Portland rule (and national standard) that north-south thoroughfares should generally be called avenues.

Before the Council changes 4th Avenue to Chavez Avenue

The Oregonian reports today that Dan Saltzman fashioned a better outcome for the Cesar Chavez Boulevard debacle.  He proposes to rename Fourth Avenue (the downtown stretch only, not the disconnected bits and pieces in the Southwest Hills) instead of N. Interstate Avenue.  He reportedly has the support of Commissioners Adams, Leonard, and Sten.

The Code prohibits renaming after a famous person a street whose name has historic significance.  Interstate Avenue's name has historic significance because it resulted from the act of a bygone City Council to commemorate the first bridge between Oregon and Washington.  Fourth Avenue's name doesn't.  So at least this street, unlike Interstate Avenue, is eligible to be renamed.

However, the City Council still shouldn't abandon the code or it will be taken to court, just by the downtown interests instead of by the Interstate Avenue neighborhood.  Here's what I suggest the Council does this afternoon:  State that it is willing to rename SW/NW Fourth Avenue to be SW/NW Cesar Chavez Avenue, if the proponents gather the 2500 signatures of Portland residents as required by code and obtain a letter in support from some member of Mr. Chavez's family.  (The proponents of renaming should be able to do both of these easily.)  The Council could commit the City to paying the cost of sending out the notifications.  The Council would take the other steps required by Chapter 17.93 of the Portland city code: convene the historic review committee, which will easily find that Mr. Chavez was a person of national signficance; hold the appropriate public hearing, and approve the renaming.

Why should the Council do this the long way (what we used to call the "legal way") instead of simply renaming Fourth Avenue today and being done with it?  Because sometime -- next year, the year after, certainly within Mayor-elect-apparent Adams's first term -- someone else is going to ask Council to rename a street, and it's a lot easier for the Council to tell the next group to follow the rules if the Council follows the rules itself.

Why the City Council shouldn't waive its hands at Mr. Chavez

One of the curiosities of the City Council agenda for Thursday, November 15 is that it contains not one, but three items relating to the Interstate Avenue / Cesar Chavez Boulevard controversy.

The first item, no. 1362, is a resolution to rename the street.  The second item, no. 1363, is an ordinance to authorize renaming the street.  These two were introduced by Mayor Potter.  The third item, no. 1326, is to be carried to Thursday from Wednesday, and declares the city's intent to name some major street after Mr. Chavez, with a suitable process for public input and a review committee.  It's being introduced by Commissioners Adams and Leonard.

In the order given on the agenda, the Adams-Leonard resolution will become moot if the Mayor's resolution and ordinance pass, because the City will already have renamed Interstate Avenue after Mr. Chavez -- unless, that is, the City is going to rename two streets after him.

To me, though, the interesting thing about the Mayor's ordinance (no. 1362) is this little passage: 

The provisions of Municipal Code chapter 17.93, renaming City Streets, shall be waived, except for the following sections: Subsections (G) and (H) of 17.93.040; 17.93.060.

Some parts of the City Code contemplate that the Council can waive them.  For example, in land use matters the City is authorized to grant variances and adjustments to relax how the regulations affect specific properties, in each case only if the properties satisfy the code requirements.  And in the case of land use, the City is releasing other people from the requirements of the Code; in this case the Mayor proposes to release the City Council itself from the requirements of the Code.  This is a dangerous step.

The street naming ordinance (which I've posted in the continuation below) doesn't allow the Council to grant exemptions, and it says specifically that the Council can't itself initiate action to rename a street to honor a deceased person without someone going through the hoops.  (The City itself could be the one to go through the hoops.)  The hoops include collecting 2500 signatures from legal residents or at least 75% of the abutting property owners, trying to get a letter of concurrence from the deceased person's family, submitting a biography to be reviewed by a committee of historians, and paying the costs of sending out the mailings and notices.  I understand that there was some effort to get signatures, but that it didn't get 2500 signatures or the concurrence of the abutting property owners, but that the rest of the process mostly didn't happen.

The puckish thought occurred to me: if the City Council can waive regulations on itself that it doesn't want to follow, and that don't specifically allow for waiver, could it waive other parts of the City Code?  For example, if some day Mayor Potter and two of the commissioners all stalked out of City Hall, could the remaining two councilors vote to waive the absence of a quorum and proceed to finish up the day's work?   Could it waive the requirement of Section 2.04.150 that to pass, a city ballot measure has to receive more than 50% of the vote?  There's no logical reason to distinguish one refusal to follow the rules from another.

What was Interstate Avenue named (actually, renamed) after?

Some digging around through the online records of the Multnomah County Surveyor showed that Interstate Avenue hasn't always been Interstate Avenue.  Interstate Avenue jogs to the west at about N. Mason Street.  North of that jog, Interstate Avenue was named Patton Street in 1887 (see the plat of Riverside Addition) and Patton Avenue in 1909 (see the plat of Havelock).  By 1919 it had been renamed Interstate Avenue (see the plat of Principle Addition).

South of the Mason Street jog, it had been named Maryland Avenue, and what is now Massachusetts Avenue, a block to the west, was originally named Patton, after Matthew and Catherine Patton, who owned land along that street in the 19th century.  (It's the street that's now in line with the northern part of Interstate Avenue.)  The Pattons modestly called the street "A Street" when they platted some of their land in 1887.

What happened between 1909 and 1919 to cause the City Council to rename Maryland and Patton Avenues to be Interstate Avenue?  The answer is that in 1916, the eastern of the Interstate Bridges opened to connect Portland and Vancouver, and the highway people condemned bits and pieces of additional land (including the Mason Street jog in Interstate) to make Interstate Avenue the main road between central Portland and Vancouver.  (This bridge was the first bridge between Oregon and Washington.)  So there is a certain historic significance to the existing name, and that presents a problem for the City Council, which is being asked to decide next week whether to rename Interstate Avenue for the late Cesar Chavez.

What's the problem?  The problem is that Chapter 17.93 of the City Code sets out stringent criteria that must be met before the City can rename a street to honor a deceased person.  One of the criteria is that the City cannot rename the street if the existing name is of historical significance.  In this case the existing name is of historical significance, representing not the whim of a defunct developer but (I surmise) the decision of a long-ago mayor (likely Mayor George L. Baker, whose term started in 1917) and his Council to commemorate the opening of the first bridge between Oregon and Washington by renaming the street leading to the bridge in celebration. 

A random post-election thought on Measure 49 and the farm tax break

One of the arguments used by the supporters of Measure 49 (about which more later) was that owners of Oregon farmland shouldn't complain about being downzoned for exclusive farm use, because they got the benefit of special assessment of their farms for property tax purposes in exchange for being downzoned.  The argument had one big flaw, which is that if the land is zoned for exclusive farm use and used for farming, then farming is likely its highest and best use and therefore fixes the value at which it will be assessed, special use program or no.

The argument intrigued me, however, because it suggested that the special assessment for farm use (currently in ORS Chapter 308A) was a quid pro quo for the limitations of the statewide land use program, so I did a little digging into the history of the special assessment program.

Actually, Oregon gave a tax break to farmland years before we had statewide land use planning.  This 1999 paper (PDF) by David R. Brooks, then a candidate for a master's degree in planning at Portland State University, gives some useful history.  According to Mr. Brooks, Oregon first considered specially assessing farmland in the 1920s, and enacted its first statute to that effect in 1961.  (He says that all states have similar programs.)  The purpose of the statute was to preserve farmland by offering farmers a reduction in their property taxes if they kept their land in farming.  People who wanted farmland for non-farm purposes (whether martini farms, industry, or urban sprawl) would pay more for the land than it was worth to farmers, and the farms were being tax-assessed at that higher value.  So the statute said that if the owner of land in an exclusive farm use zone used it for farming, the land would be assessed at its true cash value if used for farming, without regard to other possible uses.  (But see below for an exception.)  The program was substantially revised in 1963 and 1967, in each case before Oregon had statewide land use planning.  (Mr. Brooks notes that one reason the 1961 program failed is that it applied only to land in an EFU zone, but because Oregon did not require counties to adopt zoning, much farmland wasn't zoned at all and therefore didn't qualify for the tax break.)

The exception I referred to above is that farmland that's near the edge of town (in 1963) or close to the Urban Growth Boundary in an urban reserve (in 2007) has a speculative value higher than its farm value.  The tax break means something there, but a good share of the benefits go to land investors rather than to actual farmers.  (As you move from entrenched farming areas closer to the UGB, the percentage of land held by speculators, investors, and potential developers goes up.)

I don't think that this argument ultimately affected many votes on Measure 49.  The "yes" voters weren't voting to punish those greedy tax-evading farmers, and the "no" voters weren't wrapped up in the philosophical flaws of this particular "yes" argument.  Rather, Measure 37 passed because the excessive regulations of a few cities and counties produced enough outrage across the state, and Measure 49 passed because the excessive claims of a few lucky landowners also produced enough outrage across the state.

The Laquedem plan to give everyone in Lake Oswego a place to swim and make five lucky real estate agents very happy

One thought occurred to me about Lake Oswego's purchase of the Safeco building. If the council's purpose was really to have a recreation center for the city, for the same $20 million it could have bought five adjoining lakefront mansions ($2 million each, let's say) and spent the remaining $10 million on combining them into a proper suburban clubhouse. Much more respectable, really, and it would provide employment for our local builders and designers and gratify five desperate homeowners and their real estate agents.

Mark and Dave notice Isaac

Mark and Dave, of KEX 1190 radio, were kind enough to notice and link to my tongue-in-cheek legal theory about whether the manufacturer of Samuel Adams (the beer) violates Oregon's election laws by having the beer on display in the homes of Portland voters when Sam Adams (the candidate) is on the ballot, and to invite me to their turn-over-the-domain celebration on Tuesday. I'm flattered that they noticed, and am looking forward to being there tomorrow night, in one guise or another.

$20 million buys a headache for Lake Oswego

The most interesting ballot measure this week is reserved to the voters of Lake Oswego. (We get the best of everything.) A few years ago the city council opened the public wallet and paid $20 million to buy the former Safeco Insurance building, near the east end of Kruse Way. Their idea was to turn it into a city office building, or maybe into a city recreational center, or possibly a community hall. So far nothing's happened to the building, because as the council found out, the remodeling will end up costing more than the building itself. (It's reminiscent of Metro buying the old Sears store on NE Grand Avenue, rehabbing it into their offices, and discovering that it cost more to do that than it would have just to build from scratch.)
Some of the good citizens of the town took offense that the City spent $20 million on an office building without asking them, and they got together an initiative which, if passed, will prohibit the City from paying more than $2 million for real estate without getting approval from the voters first. (There are some exceptions for emergencies and public health concerns.) A companion measure asks for permission for the City to keep the Safeco building.
Lake Oswego's not that big a city, and for it to spend $20 million on a building is like the City of Portland spending $200 million on a building. (Mr. Williams and OHSU shouldn't get any bright ideas here.) The measure has been the subject of hot debate in the Lake Oswego Review. Most (maybe all) of the City councilors have written opinion pieces for the Review, with the common theme, "If you don't like us buying that building, the answer isn't to tie the hands of future councils, but to vote us out when we're up for election." That won't happen until the 2008 election, which may be as exciting in Lake Oswego as the presidential race is for the rest of the nation.