Isaac Laquedem

Where City Hall should stick the South Park Blocks

Portland Parks & Recreation (what old-timers call the "Parks Bureau") has proposed a master plan for the twelve South Park Blocks, the strip of greenery that stretches from Jackson Street north to Salmon Street, where the Mausoleum Club stops further northward progress.  The plan calls for replacing the stately elm trees that now define the Park Blocks with a mix of other trees. 

Critics (and there are many, including former Parks Commissioner Mike Lindberg, and Professor Bogdanski) differ on whether the Bureau wants to replace the elms over the next several decades as they age out, or intends to cut them down in short order and then replant.  The Bureau says that "many of them are reaching the end of their designed lifespans" (Master Plan, page 9), and it proposes a new design for the Park Blocks that it says "improves the park's resiliency to impacts of climate change; adds art, design elements, and planting treatments that reflect more diverse cultural histories and identities; addresses existing accessibility challenges; creates more flexible, safe, and inclusive spaces; and converts underused street space for park users."  (Master Plan, page 11).

The plan has drawn most of its fire for its proposal to remove many of the elms, whether by normal aging or with mechanical assistance.  The plan has two other failings, either of which will justify the City Council in sending the plan back to the Parks Bureau with an earnest plea to do better.  

The first failing is that under the guise of addressing "existing accessibility challenges" to what is, after all, a collection of flat and nearly level parks (the average grade from north to south is only 3%), all wheelchair-accessible, the Bureau proposes to add hardscape and reduce the earthen area.  The second failing, related to the first, is that the Bureau proposes to add clutter to the blocks.  I'm using "clutter" broadly to mean things that aren't related to any function of a greenspace park.  For example, the Bureau wants to add an interpretive display about Vanport (the temporary wartime city that occupied a site near Delta Park until the Vanport Flood of 1948) to the Park Blocks because Portland State University began in 1946 as the Vanport Extension Center in Vanport, moving to the former Lincoln High School building in 1952.  It's history worth commemorating, and Portland State University has done so on campus, but it doesn't have anything to do with the Park Blocks.

The Bureau estimates the project to cost $2 million to $4 million per block.  Consider whether the Bureau could do more to make greenery accessible to Portland, and resolve some equity issues that have festered for decades, if it devoted the money for even one block to adding street trees in the least-shaded and most neglected areas of Portland, for example, in St. Johns and outer Northeast.  If the Parks Bureau wants to be woke, it should start in the areas that need its help the most.

Endorsements 2: NO on the Metro transportation tax

Who has not had the temptation at an all-you-can-eat buffet (remember them?  They're a pre-Covid thing) to take some of everything, on the reasonable ground that once you've agreed to pay the fixed price for the meal, all the food is free.  The food is even more delicious when someone else has to pay for it.

A long time ago Metro's transportation wage tax proposal, Measure 26-218, started life with good intentions, and then its planners discovered the buffet line.  Metro proposes to tax private employers with more than 25 employees up to 0.75% of their payroll.  Metro put the measure on the ballot without committing to a specific tax rate.  At the maximum allowed rate, an employer with 26 employees who are paid an average of $50,000 each would pay $9,750/year in additional taxes.

Metro has designed its proposal to appeal to the voters as much as possible:  first, by scattering the gravy far and wide across the region, promising not just light rail to Tigard (the main consumer of the future revenues) but also to highway, bike, and sidewalk projects from Cornelius on the west to the near edge of Gresham on the east, and second, by designing the tax in the spirit of that old verse from the 1930s:  "Congress, Congress, don't tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree."  (Senator Russell Long later popularized a slightly different version of the idea.)

The measure's proponents boast about that feature, pointing with pride to the fact that "91% of our region's businesses are exempt from the tax."  What is not to like about a tax that provides goodies for nearly everyone and puts the bite on hardly anyone?

Well, for starters: 

1.    The tax marks Metro's entry into the field of big-ticket transportation, a new venture for the agency.  The field is already occupied by many other jurisdictions, including cities, counties, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and TriMet.  On a deep level Metro's request tacitly acknowledges that those units of government are failing at dealing with transportation issues, or that they have simply decided that issues other than transportation are more important to their citizens.

2.    Related to point 1, Metro plans to spend a significant part of the funds to remedy the deficiencies of those other units of government, for example, by building sidewalks for students that the City of Portland has not seen as a priority, by improving pedestrian crossings on state highways that ODOT has messed up, and by stepping into the minefield of reducing gentrification in Portland's Albina district.

3.    Metro won't say what the actual tax rate will be, nor how long it will keep the tax in effect.

A cynic (who, me?) might surmise that Metro included the other suburban projects in the measure as inducements to voters to make their bosses chip in to pay for a light rail line to serve a corridor that already has two major arterials, Interstate 5 and Barbur Boulevard.  The more fundamental reason that I'm voting against Measure 26-218 is that until Metro demonstrates a compelling reason for the voters to let it enter the field of big-concrete transportation, it should focus on improving its current services.

Vote NO on 26-218.

If people moving to Portland are causing our housing crisis, the city should take one simple step

... which is to instruct Prosper Portland to cease at once all efforts to attract new employers to Portland, and instead encourage job growth (if at all) only in Clark County.

Maybe it's time to move Tubman Middle School farther from the freeway

I've been amused watching the conniptions of our local politicos about the two most significant obsolete portions of our local freeway system: the Interstate Bridges and the Rose Quarter section of Interstate 5. I sense there's a lot of overlap between those who are pushing to replace the two three-lane Interstate Bridges with two new three-lane bridges (on the one hand) and those who oppose widening the two two-lane sections of Interstate 5 where the Rose Quarter has grown up around it. That section of Interstate 5 is the only urban section of Interstate 5 between Canada and Mexico that hasn't been widened to six lanes - even in Eugene, Salem, Ridgefield, and Castle Rock (population 2,234) this vital commercial link has six lanes.

I've read only one sound objection to improving the Rose Quarter section to match the rest of the urban freeway, which is that Harriet Tubman Middle School is next to the freeway and widening the freeway would make the air quality at the school even worse. I don't begrudge that objection - the school was built in 1952, 14 years before the freeway opened - but it's sometimes occurred to me that the school district might have noticed the freeway's presence before it put millions of dollars into remodeling the building a few years back, and perhaps even considered moving the school to a new location farther from the freeway.

Where have Portland's children gone? To Gresham

 

Portland Public Schools, the state's largest school district by enrollment, currently serves 49,000 students. The district proudly states that it's enjoyed seven straight years of enrollment growth, which it has.  It's not so forthcoming about its decades of enrollment shrinkage; today's PPS enrollment is lower than it was in 1923 -- the administration of Warren Harding! -- when the district enrolled 50,513 students.  The district hit its high point in 1963, with 79,571 students, and its low point in 2008, with 46,046 students.  No massive network of private schools has sprung up to siphon students away from PPS, and the city's population continues to grow (in the 1990s mainly by annexation, but since then through new construction), up 65% since 1963.  So where are the children?

The answer?  They're in Gresham.

After the 2010 census, Multnomah County remapped its four county commission districts to have equal population.  "Equal population" does not mean "equal voters," as children count toward population.  The four districts vary wildly in demographics: they average 121,000 voters each, but District 1 (the westside and inner southeast, entirely within PPS) has 137,000 voters and District 4 (Gresham, Fairview, and east county, nearly entirely outside PPS) has only 101,000 voters.  Turn this statistic around and you see where the children are: District 1 has about 16,000 fewer children and about 12,000 fewer school-age children than the county average.  District 4 has 20,000 more children and about 15,000 more school-age children than average.  District 2 (north and northeast Portland, north of the Banfield Freeway, mostly in PPS) is also missing its children: it has 130,000 voters, so about 9,000 fewer children than the county average.

One consequence of the 30,000 missing Portland children is that PPS is, on the Oregon scale, a rich district.  It receives the benefit of the property tax revenues from the city's growth without having the burden of educating more people.  (The PacWest Center, for example, built in 1988, pays about $1 million/year just in school taxes.)

Portland's missing children are in other places besides Gresham, for instance, in the David Douglas School District (roughly I-205 east to 142nd Avenue and from NE Halsey south to the county line), where enrollment increased by 16% from 2003 to 2013. From 1990 to 2010 the share of households with children in David Douglas increased from 34% to 36%; the share in the rest of Multnomah County fell from 30% to 26%. 

So that's where Portland's missing children are.  Why are they there?  That's a subject for another post; the short answer, I believe, is that Portland has priced and gentrified their parents out of the city.

Kesey Square: Sometimes the Eugene City Council needs a vacation, or a great notion

The center of Eugene features an small (4400 square foot) city-owned open space officially known as Broadway Plaza and commonly called Kesey Square, after the statue of Oregon author Ken Kesey that's prominent there. Kesey Square hosts films, performance art, and festivals; it also hosts, not so intentionally, transients and street people.  A Eugene group has proposed to buy the plaza and build a five-floor building with stores on the ground floor and 35 to 40 apartments above.  In response, the city council invited anyone interested to submit redevelopment proposals for the plaza, which were due on January 15.

The Eugene city council faces two small glitches in its redevelopment effort.  One is the combined political will of the Eugenians (?) who love the quirky plaza even with its problems.  The other is a clause in the deed by which the Eugene urban renewal agency gave the park to the city.  Eugene is no stranger to old deeds getting in the way of new projects, and those old cases are about to get some new company.

When the urban renewal agency gave the property to the city, it stated in the deed that it was dedicating the land to the public for a park.  The word "dedication" is a magic word not just for candidates and cornerstones, but also for conveyancing.  The street in front of your house was likely not just given, but dedicated, to the public by a long-gone developer.  Chapman Square and Lownsdale Square in downtown Portland were dedicated to the public.  The fun with dedication is that Oregon law regulates how cities can undedicate (the technical word is "vacate") dedicated public streets, avenues, boulevards, alleys, and plats -- and how to vacate "any public square or other public place."  ORS 271.080 allows a city to vacate a public place if enough neighbors petition to vacate the place.  ORS 271.130 allows a city to vacate a public place at a public hearing without a petition from the neighbors, unless -- and here's the hitch -- unless the owners of a majority of the nearby area object in writing.  The Knower of All Things says that some of the nearby property owners will object, and the city council won't find them to be merely merry pranksters.

The Laquedem Plan to honor Anatole France with low-income housing

Tokyo is so dense a city that commercial spaces are even squeezed into the arches that support commuter trains.  As I read yet another story about how Portland's pro-density policy encourages property owners to tear down older houses (often rentals) and replace them with newer (owner-occupied) townhouses, I pondered what the city and TriMet will do with the space underneath the new rail/bike bridge that connects the South Waterfront to OMSI.  At that point Anatole France's famous line came to mind: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."  (That last bit is not often enforced against people who run hedge funds.)

Hence the Laquedem Plan to honor Anatole France.  It occurs to me that the Tillikum Crossing project gives us a striking opportunity to achieve several goals at once, if we construct affordable housing underneath -- not next to, but underneath -- its western approach.  We can meet a need with housing that is convenient to transit and walking distance from downtown and the inner east side.  We can give that part of the city a more international flavor.  We can provide an opportunity for the city and the South Waterfront developers to keep their broken promises to provide affordable, working-class housing in the area.  The land is cheap -- free, really -- and services are all available.  A wag with Isaac's sense of humor might name the housing project "Anatolia."  The literary among us could take that as a reference to the Anatole France quotation about living under bridges.  The commercially minded might take the name to refer to an area that is part of a larger turkey.

Oregon's Monsanto Protection Act, Part II: Monsanto protects the humble pot grower

I'd written a few months ago about Oregon's Monsanto Protection Act, which prohibited local governments from regulating the production, sale, and use of certain kinds of agricultural products.  The Monsanto Protection Act, Senate Bill 863 in the 2013 special session, was rushed through the legislature without any particular sponsor, and was intended to prohibit cities and counties from regulating or prohibiting the use of genetically modified seeds and their products.

The act doesn't, however, refer to genetically modified seed, but states in broad terms that local governments may not enact or enforce any regulation that restricts (among other things) the sale, propagation, or use of agricultural seeds, nursery seeds, and their products.  You can read the text of the act here.

The 2013 legislature also passed a law to allow medical marijuana use, and retail dispensaries ("pot stores") of medical marijuana.  Several Oregon cities are working to ban retail marijuana stores from opening up shop within their limits.

If you didn't click on the link to the Monsanto Act, go back and do that now.  Then consider whether the Monsanto Act prohibits cities and counties from regulating marijuana stores, at least if the marijuana is grown from seeds that could qualify as "agricultural seed," "nursery seed," or "vegetable seed" as defined in the law.  "Vegetable seed" includes "the seed of those crops usually grown in Oregon in gardens or on truck farms or for canning and freezing purposes and generally known and sold under the name of vegetable seed."  "Agricultural seed" means "fiber, forage and grass crop seed and any other kind of seed or bulblet commonly recognized in this state as agricultural seed or as lawn or turf seed, and mixtures of any of such seeds, as may be determined by the Director of Agriculture."

Is marijuana seed "grass crop seed," and will the Director of Agriculture determine it to be "grass crop seed"?  If so, then the Monsanto Act prevents cities from banning the sale of marijuana seeds, and also from banning the growing, harvesting, marketing, possession, and use of marijuana seeds and their products.   This happy result almost reconciles me to the Monsanto Protection Act itself.

Isaac dissects the decision of the Court of Appeals to throw out 3 years of planning

After three years of work, in June 2010, with the concurrence of Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington Counties, Metro issued its order stating what parts of the area would be "urban reserves" and what would be "rural reserves."  The tag "urban reserves" was for farmland that Metro wanted to keep in large chunks so that it could be efficiently brought into the urban growth boundary over the next 50 years.  The tag "rural reserves" was for land that would be kept rural, and out of the UGB, for at least the next 50 years.

Big money rides on these designations.  If you own 80 acres at the edge of town, it is worth a lot more if it might come into the UGB, and be developed to urban densities, than if it's guaranteed to be farmland or forest for another 50 years or more.  People who own land just outside the edge of the UGB pushed to get their land tagged as urban reserves.  Groups that oppose development fought just as hard to keep prime farm and forest land out of the urban reserve designation, and to tag it as rural reserve.

Metro submitted its decision to the Land Conservation and Development Commission, which in August 2012 approved it, taking 156 single-spaced pages to explain why.  Twenty-two parties appealed LCDC's decision to the Court of Appeals.  The parties included Metro, the three counties, Hillsboro, Tualatin, West Linn, four investment groups, many individuals, and two non-profits. Today, a year after hearing the oral arguments, the Court of Appeals issued its decision, also more than 150 pages, but double-spaced.  The court took a long time to issue its opinion because it had to read and digest 36,000 pages of material from the LCDC and Metro proceedings.

The short punchy summary of the court's decision is that it threw out the years of effort that went into that decision, and has bolstered a faction in the legislature advocating a "grand bargain" that would short-circuit the planning process and admit selected parcels in Washington County as urban reserves.  The court sent the matter back to LCDC to reconsider.

I was prepared to support the legislators (led by Rep. Brian Clem of Salem), until I read the entire 150 pages of the court's decision.  The short punchy summary is wrong.

Here's how I summarize what actually happened.

First, the main issues.  (1) Did Washington County improperly condense into four factors the ten or so factors that the law required the county to consider in assigning land to urban reserves and rural reserves?  (2) Did Metro improperly designate Stafford as an urban reserve over the objections of Tualatin and Lake Oswego that the transportation system wouldn't be able to serve it?  (3) Did Multnomah County improperly lump developable land on the southwest (Bethany) side of NW Skyline Boulevard with higher-quality farm and forest land on the northeast (Multnomah Channel) side of NW Skyline Road?  (4) Did Clackamas County cut corners in designating the Langdon Farms golf course south of Wilsonville as a rural reserve?

Next, the players:  (1) In Washington County, 1000 Friends of Oregon and Save Helvetia challenged the decision because in their view the county designated desirable farmland as urban reserves, while some landowners challenged the decision because their land was designated as rural reserves, keeping it out of the development path for half a century more.  (2) Tualatin and West Linn, which don't want Stafford to be developed, said that Metro's own record showed that the land isn't urbanizable.  (3) In Multnomah County, landowners below Skyline on the west side said that the county should not have relied on the scenic value of the land east of Skyline to designate the west side land as rural reserves.  (4) The Maletis family, owners of Langdon Farms and nearby acreage who have been itching to develop it for years, challenged Metro's authority to designate their land as rural reserve because it's outside the Metro district, and challenged Clackamas County's procedure for designating it as rural reserve.  I'm leaving out a lot of detail here.

And now, what the court did:  (1) It held that Washington County made up its own criteria instead of following state law, meaning that all of Washington County's designations of urban reserves and rural reserves are suspect.  (2) It held that Metro and LCDC should have taken into account the traffic study that showed that if Stafford is urbanized, its road system will function at Level of Service "F" (standing for "failure," or "frozen," or some other f-word), which is evidence that urban services can't be provided there, and couldn't rely on the hope that light rail might someday run along Interstate 205.  (3) It held that although Metro could evaluate "areas" for suitability as urban reserves or rural reserves, if a landowner objected that his or her particular parcel within a larger area wasn't appropriate for a rural reserve and pointed to some evidence to support the argument, then Metro had to at least consider the evidence and explain why it was including that parcel in the larger rural reserve area.

What does this mean?  Overall the court thought that Metro did a reasonable job of analyzing the data and coming up with a decision.  The court found, however, that Metro should have paid attention to the facts about Stafford, that Multnomah County had to look at individual parcels within a proposed reserve area if the owners made a decent argument, and that Washington County cut corners and didn't follow state law.  Before Rep. Clem and his colleagues in Salem try to take this decision into their own hands, they should reflect on one point that I read between the lines of the court's opinion.  The problem isn't with the land use system, and it's not with Metro; it's with Washington County. 

Should the Planning Bureau ask compound questions in a land use survey and oppose building a freeway through Alameda?

As state law requires it to do every five years, the City of Portland is updating its comprehensive plan, the document that sets out in broad terms what land uses the City will allow, and where, and on what  conditions.  (The zoning ordinance, which by law must be consistent with the comprehensive plan, provides more specific day-to-day rules.)

As part of this process, the Planning Bureau solicits public comment, both through traditional means such as open houses and mailed questionnaires and through modern methods, including e-newsletters, online surveys, and the Bureau's Facebook page.  One of the Bureau's surveys ran through May 1, and the Bureau told the good citizens that their answers would "help refine and amend many of the goals and policies in the Working Draft Part 1 of the Comprehensive Plan" and "help staff answer some critical questions around infrastructure investments, watershed health, industrial land development and housing choices."

The survey was composed by people knowledgeable about planning, but not so much about surveys.  One responder noted that almost all of the questions were compound questions that combined two questions into one, so that you could answer "yes" to both parts, or "no" to both parts, but not "yes" to one and "no" to the other.  (An example of a compound question, not from the survey: "Do you support protecting social security for the elderly and instituting the death penalty for jaywalkers?"  The title of this post is another example.)  For example, one of the survey questions asked if you want to "promote 'ecologically friendly' industrial sites through monetary incentives and technical assistance."   I couldn't answer that question; I favor promoting environmentally friendly industrial sites through technical assistance (providing knowledge) and not through monetary incentives (paying people not to mess up the City).  Yet I would have to support both or neither. 

Another question asked if the City should "subsidize the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields."  These are two different things: the first part asks if the City should pay for part of the cost to clean up old industrial sites; the second part asks if the City should pay people to build new projects on the cleaned-up sites.  I might support the City paying part of the cost to clean up someone's environmental mess, in collaboration with DEQ and EPA and then pursuing the responsible party to repay the cost, but be less excited about the City subsidizing a project on private land, whether clean or dirty, under the benign if mistaken belief that the City is a real estate developer.

The Bureau says that it will release the results this month.  The results will be interesting, not so much for the answers as for the questions.  Also interesting will be learning whether the Bureau hired an outside consultant to write the rather sloppy questions.  For the record, I favor protecting Venerable Mom's social security and I oppose the death penalty for jaywalkers.