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.
This article by Derek H. Alderman gives a lot of background information about America's renaming of streets after Dr. King, including a mention of the controversy in Portland.