Isaac Laquedem

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.

Bojack has left the building

Light rail: Clackamas County doesn't want to pay, and Milwaukie can't pay

Last year the voters of Clackamas County passed an initiative which requires the county to seek the voters' approval before providing any money or other resources to light rail.  The county's first election is this May, though some assert that the election results won't affect commitments that the county made before the voters passed the initiative.

The next light rail funding election is likely to be in Milwaukie, but not because of the county initiative, which doesn't apply to cities.  Rather, it's because Milwaukie's councilors and management have discovered that the city can't afford the commitment it already made to the new light rail line.  As told in the Portland Tribune this week:  "In 2008, city officials signed on to paying TriMet $4 million for the light-rail line under construction.... TriMet renegotiated a payment plan with Milwaukie after it became clear that the city wouldn't be able to pay within 90 days of the Federal Transit Administration's 50 percent match to the $1.49 billion total project cost."  The city and TriMet negotiated a 19-year payment plan, with the last payment ($364,875) coming due in 2031.  TriMet is charging interest at 5%, incidentally.

According to the Tribune, Milwaukie's city manager "predicted that the city can make the payment for this year and next year, . . . but the payments would quickly lead to an unsustainable situation in following years."  Translated, that means that the city will have to either raise taxes or cut services in order to pay its bill to TriMet.  The city council plans to ask voters which choice they prefer, and will also possibly put a bond measure on the ballot to support a particular city service, perhaps parks or the city library.

So Milwaukie's situation is different from Clackamas County's: the city won't be asking voters whether they want to pay $5 million for light rail, but whether they want to pay $5 million to keep the city services that the council would otherwise have to cut in order to pay for light rail.  Nothing in the article suggested that anyone's asked the councilors who were serving in 2008, and who committed Milwaukie to pay the $5 million, where they expected to find the money.  I doubt the voters expected that they might look to the parks and libraries to pay for the trains.

Not only can you not take it with you, but you'd better have left $35 behind for the Arts Tax

One quirk of the arts tax imposed by the City of Portland through the will of the well-meaning voters in November is that it taxes the full-year 2012 income of Portland residents even though it didn't take effect until December 5, 2012, when 339 days of the year had already passed.  The act defines a "resident" of Portland to include persons who spent 200 days or more in the City, with some exceptions not important here, bringing up the delightful possibility that the estates of Portlanders who died between June 18 and December 4, 2012 are liable for the $35 head tax even though they died before the tax came into being, giving the government an unexpected reason to reread the obituaries.

Metro released the Convention Center Hotel study. Let's see the rest of the plan

A few days ago Metro released the market impact study for the proposed Convention Center hotel.  (Here's the Oregonian story reporting that happy fact.)  The study, performed by a firm nondescriptly named Strategic Advisory Group, says that the Oregon Convention Center would attract more conventions if a 600-room headquarters hotel were built across the street.  I read the study with great interest.  Its reasoning seems sound and the methodology is better than what I expected.  I was also impressed with SAG because it included one hotel project, Detroit's, in which it concluded that there was not enough demand to justify building a convention center hotel.  (Beware the consultant who always gives the same answer.)

The consultancy's website includes a list of eleven convention center hotel projects that it's worked on, which you can read by following this link.  One of them is the Portland project, which SAG describes in these words:

The City of Portland desired to increase it marketability within the convention and tradeshow industry. With a recently completed expansion of the Oregon Convention Center, those charged with marketing and booking the facility continued to face obstacles in attracting many key, high-impact events. Would-be customers of the Center and visitors of the City frequently vocalized the need for a larger, first-quality hotel adjacent to the OCC. Therefore, the City of Portland, the Portland Oregon Visitors Association (now "Travel Portland"), and later the Portland Development Commission engaged SAG to create a Headquarter Hotel Strategic Plan and help realize the project. The project involved understanding and defining the market, customer needs, and required hotel
program; assessing the impact of a new headquarter hotel on the existing hotel market; quantifying the economic impact on the OCC and the community; estimating the hotel's cost and financial feasibility.

SAG's description includes this juicy bit:

SAG's Plan did detail a need for a new hotel but also described other necessary steps Portland would need to take to truly maximize its penetration in the industry.

Why is this a juicy bit?  The study that Metro released is only part of what SAG did for Metro.

The study that the Oregonian links to doesn't include the list of "other necessary steps" that Portland must take to "maximize its penetration of the industry," that is, to get more convention business.  SAG told Metro.  Metro should tell us.

The Lake Oswego mayor's race gets even tighter

Greg MacPherson leads Kent Studebaker by 15 votes.

The Lake Oswego mayor's race is a railbiter

The Lake Oswego mayor's race is unusually a bellwether race for the pulse of the metropolitan area this year.  The Clackamas County voters are giving a slight edge to Kent Studebaker over establishment pillar Greg MacPherson, 6424 to 6385 at latest count.  However, Lake Oswego extends into Multnomah and Washington Counties.  Mr. Studebaker leads in Washington County, 2 to 0, but Mr. MacPherson leads in Multnomah County, 478 to 387, for a net lead by Mr. MacPherson of 50 votes out of nearly 14,000 counted.  It may be a few days before they know which of them should shop for some mayoral robes.

The Clackistanis rise, at the county commission and in Lake Oswego

The hottest local election action this year was not in the City of Portland, but in Clackamas County, where opposing slates of candidates ran for the County Commission and for the Lake Oswego City Council.  At the county, anti-Metro candidates John Ludlow and Tootie Smith hold three-point leads over Charlotte Lehan and Jamie Damon, and will likely win their races.

In Lake Oswego anti-Metro candidate Kent Studebaker holds a slight lead in the mayor's race over Greg McPherson, and two of the three anti-Metro candidates (Karen Bowerman and Skip O'Neill) will be elected to the city council, dramatically tilting the council to the right.  Look for Lake Oswego to back out of the Willamette Streetcar project completely.

[I'm likely being a little unfair to the victors in describing them as anti-Metro candidates; they aren't opposed to the organization itself, but it's a convenient shorthand.]

Portland City Council: Hales defeats Smith; Fritz defeats Nolan

Early Multnomah County returns with about half the vote counted indicate that Amanda Fritz has defeated Mary Nolan for the city council.  Charlie Hales, as expected, has defeated Jefferson Smith by a wide margin.

The unused-ballots law resurfaces, and Multnomah County still doesn't want to comply

Not much noticed in the media last week were the efforts of James Buchal (the Republican candidate for attorney general) and others to force Multnomah County to comply with the obscure bit of Oregon's elections law, ORS 254.483, that requires our county clerks to destroy unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m. on election day.   Mr. Buchal sought the Multnomah County Circuit's court help in enforcing this law.

On October 9, Judge Youlee You denied Mr. Buchal's request, based in part on Multnomah County's argument that if the county destroyed the unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m., then "any citizen who is in line at 8 pm and entitled to vote but who needs a replacement ballot would be denied the right to vote"  (Quaere: does anyone yet line up at the county clerk's office at 8:00 p.m. on Election Day to try to vote?). Judge You also noted that although ORS 254.483(1) requires county clerks to destroy unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m., ORS 254.483(2) requires county clerks to provide for the security of unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m.  She reasoned that county clerks could not simultaneously destroy the ballots and keep them secure, and observed that the clerks place the unused ballots in sealed boxes and place the boxes in a locked room. Seeing it as her duty under a 1955 Oregon supreme court case to adopt an interpretation that would give effect to the entire statute and not one that would "wreck a substantial and important part of it," Judge You held that the counties do not have to destroy the ballots despite the plain language of the statute.

The final oddity of the case is that Multnomah County wants the plaintiffs to pay the county's attorney fees, leading to the amusing if painful realization that the county's taxpayers are paying their lawyers first to defend the county's unwillingness to follow state law, and then to recover the cost of not following state law from the citizens who want it to.