Isaac Laquedem

Oregon's Transportation Planning Rule puzzles Isaac

Oregon's Transportation Planning Rule (TPR), at OAR 660-12-0060 (here, scroll down about three-quarters of the way) requires local governments to consider the effect on transportation facilities when they consider applications for zone changes, zoning code changes, and amendments to the local comprehensive land use plans.  A "transportation facility" is anything that moves people or goods, except utility lines.

When Tri-Met (as it was then called) built the first MAX line (the one to Gresham) in the mid-1980s, it asked the City of Portland and Multnomah County to upzone the land around the proposed stations to accommodate higher densities. The city and county happily obliged.  Similarly, Tri-Met (as it was still called) asked Beaverton, Hillsboro, and Washington County to upzone land around the stations on the west side light rail to Hillsboro when that line went in about 10 years later.

Now, TriMet (which paid someone a fortune to drop the hyphen) proposed to build a light rail line to Milwaukie.  One difference between now and when the Gresham and Hillsboro lines were built is that the Transportation Planning Rule is now in effect.

A second difference is that it's become apparent that TriMet can't afford to maintain district-wide bus service at effective levels and also run light rail.

Similarly, TriMet, Portland, and Milwaukie will look to upzone areas around the light rail stations on the Milwaukie line.  When the line goes into service, TriMet will likely need to cut some more bus service.  The question that occurs to me is whether, when Portland and Milwaukie consider whether to change the zones around the Milwaukie light rail stations, the TPR will require them to evaluate not only whether the new light rail line can adequately serve the upzoned areas, but whether TriMet's service cuts elsewhere will make some other transportation facility, or TriMet itself, unable to serve the demand induced by the upzoning.

Another wrinkle hidden in the TPR is in subsection (4), which as I read it entitles the local government to rely on a planned transportation improvement (such as a proposed highway widening or mass transit line) only if a funding mechanism is in place to build, maintain, and operate it, unless the planned transportation improvement is in a metropolitan planning organization's area (think Metro here) and is "part of the area's federally-approved, financially constrained regional transportation system plan."

What I think this means is that if Metro plans light rail on every block, and gets the plan approved by the United States Department of Transportation, then local governments can approve increased densities regardless of whether the lines have any chance of actually being built.  Similarly, if Metro's transportation plan includes a 10-lane Columbia River Crossing, and if the feds approve that plan, then the City of Portland can approve higher densities along the I-5 corridor in North Portland and Hayden Island (as, for instance, on the Port of Portland's property at the west end of Hayden Island), relying on the CRC to serve that increased traffic, even if the CRC never gets built.

I'd like to think that I'm misreading the TPR, but I'm afraid that I'm not.

Put heavy rail, not light rail, on the Columbia River Crossing

The transport mavens who are planning the Columbia River Crossing should consider, if they haven't already, figuring out how the bridge can accommodate, not light rail, but heavy rail traffic, to replace or support the old SP&S (now BNSF) railroad bridge across the Columbia that's a few hundred yards downstream from the Interstate Bridges.  The railroad bridge is a swing bridge and is even more ancient than the older of the two Interstate Bridges; it opened in 1908.  If we're ever to have high-speed rail between Portland and Seattle, we need a bridge that can accommodate high-speed trains, and a century-old swing span doesn't cut it.

Who told you not to cooperate with the government? The government did, that's who

The Oregonian's Saturday story on the outside review of the city's investigation into the death of James Chasse while in police custody carried this little snippet,which hasn't received the attention it deserves:

The report revealed that Multnomah County refused to allow its employees to be interviewed by internal affairs investigators until after they were deposed in a civil lawsuit, which was pending at the time. That meant internal affairs waited until April 2008 [19 months after Mr. Chasse was killed - Isaac] to interview sheriff's Deputy Bret Burton, who by then had been hired by Portland police.

I read it and then thought of this bit of Oregon law, ORS 162.235:

  162.235 Obstructing governmental or judicial administration. (1) A person commits the crime of obstructing governmental or judicial administration if the person intentionally obstructs, impairs or hinders the administration of law or other governmental or judicial function by means of intimidation, force, physical or economic interference or obstacle.

  (2) This section shall not apply to the obstruction of unlawful governmental or judicial action or interference with the making of an arrest.

  (3) Obstructing governmental or judicial administration is a Class A misdemeanor.

The question that occurred to me when I read this provision, and that likely won't be answered by anyone in authority, is whether the Multnomah County employee who instructed the county's employees not to cooperate with the police investigation committed the crime of obstructing governmental or judicial action.  It's also a little unreasonable for the county to complain that a private citizen (for instance, this one) isn't cooperating with a police investigation if the county sometimes orders its own employees not to cooperate with another police investigation.

Replacing the Sellwood Bridge is 7 times more cost-efficient than building Milwaukie Light Rail

Let's inaugurate my new unit of measurement, the Sellwood (1 Sellwood = $200 million), by using it to measure our region's three most significant proposed transportation projects: the Columbia River Crossing, the Milwaukie Light Rail, and the Sellwood Bridge replacement itself.

At current estimates, the CRC will cost about 15 Sellwoods, the Milwaukie Light Rail about 7 Sellwoods, and the Sellwood Bridge 1 Sellwood.  The CRC will carry about 300,000 people a day (I'm assuming about 15% growth in demand from the present level by the time it opens), Milwaukie Light Rail about 26,000 people a day, and the Sellwood Bridge about 30,000 vehicles (so perhaps 40,000 people) a day.

That means that 1 Sellwood spent on the Sellwood Bridge serves 40,000 people, 1 Sellwood spent on the CRC serves 20,000 people, and 1 Sellwood spent on Milwaukie Light Rail serves 1,700 people.  Measured by the number of people who benefit, the Sellwood Bridge is 33 times more cost-efficient than Milwaukie Light Rail.

Am I palming a card by not taking into account that Milwaukie Light Rail is a longer run than the Sellwood Bridge or the CRC?  Let's see.  If the average trip on MLR is about 3 miles, on the CRC is 1 mile, and on the Sellwood Bridge is 1/2 mile, then MLR will carry about 80,000 people-miles a day (26,000 people times 3 miles, rounded up slightly), the Sellwood Bridge 40,000 people-miles a day, and the CRC about 300,000 people-miles a day.  Milwaukie Light Rail will carry about 5,333 daily people-miles per Sellwood, the CRC about 20,000 people-miles per day per Sellwood, and the Sellwood Bridge about 40,000 people-miles per day per Sellwood.  The Sellwood Bridge is still 7 times more cost-efficient than Milwaukie Light Rail.

The Sellwood: a convenient unit to measure transportation costs

I was working out the math in some upcoming posts about transportation, in which I intend to tackle the Columbia River Crossing, the expansion of light rail, the gas tax, and ODOT, and struggling with how to compare costs and make the comparisons meaningful and easy to follow.  After a few hours of going through budgets, projections, and revenue statements, the eyes glaze over and "billions" begins to sound not much more expensive than "millions."

It occurred to me that we need a new unit of measurement, sized to the task at hand.  Just as the millimeter is too small a unit to use to measure our height, the dollar is too small a unit to use to measure our spending on transportation.

We need a more convenient unit to measure transportation spending.  I am inventing the "Sellwood," a unit of money that equals the cost to replace the Sellwood Bridge.  I'm arbitrarily setting that at $200 million, which is where I think the cost of the bridge, not including the west side interchange, will end up, if we actually get around to building the thing in the next two or three years.

Here's the Sellwood in service: it will cost 1 Sellwood to replace the Sellwood Bridge.  The Columbia River Crossing is estimated to cost about 15 Sellwoods, including 1 Sellwood already spent on planning and engineering.  ODOT collects about 7 Sellwoods a biennium (3.5 per year) from the gas tax and the truck weight-mile tax.  ODOT borrows 4.5 Sellwoods a biennium to finance road improvements, and pays 1 Sellwood a biennium (increasing rapidly) in debt service.  ODOT's 2009-2011 budget (2 years) is 20 Sellwoods, of which 5 Sellwoods will come from running up debt.  The proposed light rail line to Milwaukie will cost us 7 Sellwoods.

The Sellwood is the right size for the job; more importantly, it will remind us that when we spend money on one project, we take away money from another.  Here's to the Sellwood!

The FDIC's back in Oregon

Today's fatality is Home Valley Bank ($250 million in assets), in Cave Junction, pushed into the arms of South Valley Bank & Trust of Klamath Falls.  A bank in Washington is supposed to be on today's list also, but hasn't shown up yet.

Are our election laws too clean to be legal? A Colorado judge's opinion suggests that they might be

Patti Galle may have quit too soon.  Ms. Galle is the former mayor of West Linn, that leafy suburb to the south with placid streets and turbulent politics.  When she ran for the office in 2008, she claimed in the Voter's Pamphlet that she was "degreed in English with an emphasis on teaching."  (Here's the Oregonian's article with more of the detail.)  State investigators said that the mayor's degree was dated 1973, but came from a diploma mill that was not established until 2003, and was purchased by Mayor Galle in February of this year.  She resigned shortly afterward, and on May 10, she pleaded guilty to making a false statement in the Voter's Pamphlet.

Lots of laws prohibit us from making false statements.  One of the less prominent federal laws of this ilk is the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which makes it a crime to falsely claim to have won a United States military award.

A Colorado man named Rick Strandlof was recently charged with falsely claiming to have won the Purple Heart and Silver Star medals in Iraq, statements the government alleged he made while he was running an organization he founded called the Colorado Veterans' Association.  I should add that Mr. Strandlof was running the organization under a false name.

He argued in court that the Stolen Valor Act violated the First Amendment by restricting his right to free speech.  To my great surprise (and maybe even to the surprise of Mr. Strandlof's lawyers), United States District Judge Robert Blackburn agreed with Mr. Strandlof's argument and said that because a person violates the Stolen Valor Act by making a false statement about having been awarded a medal, whether or not the person intended anyone to rely on the statement and whether or not anyone actually relied on the statement and was harmed, the Stolen Valor Act does not fit within the fraud exception to the First Amendment.  (The fraud exception says that the government can restrict speech that is intended to defraud, particularly false commercial speech.)  Therefore, Judge Blackburn ruled, the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional.  (Here's his opinion in PDF, and thanks to wired.com for the story.)

What does this have to do with former mayor Galle?  She was prosecuted for making a false statement about her education, in violation of an Oregon law that prohibits candidates from making false statements about their education in the Voter's Pamphlet.   However, our state's law does not require the prosecutor to show that any one relied on the false statement, or even paid any attention to it.  If a local judge used Judge Blackburn's logic, he or she would find that Ms. Galle was prosecuted under an unconstitutional law.

Judge Blackburn, though a federal judge, sits in a trial court in Colorado and his decisions aren't binding precedent in Oregon.  His decision does, however, suggest that some of our laws on clean elections may make them too clean to be legal.

Millard Fillmore offers some advice on foreign policy

Today's revelry at Laquedem Manor celebrates in part the accession of Millard Fillmore to the presidency, which occurred 160 years ago to the day when Zachary Taylor died suddenly.  Like the other presidents of his time, Fillmore temporized on the slavery question, advocating the Compromise of 1850 but enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.  In other respects he was an able administrator and a careful steward.

The constitution assigns the president the task of reporting to Congress, from time to time, on the state of the union.  This has developed into an annual event at which the press focuses less on what the president says and more on whom he invites to attend and introduce.  Not so in the 1850s.  Fillmore's speeches to Congress on the state of the union are filled with facts, data, and recommendations.  For example, in his first state-of-the-union speech, President Fillmore described the nation's negotiations with Great Britain, Mexico, Chile, Hawaii, Peru, Mexico, and Portugal.  He then reported on the paydown of the national debt, the budget surplus, postage rates, revenues from tariffs on imports, the census, and land titles in the west, recommended that Congress establish the Department of Agriculture and build a home for disabled veterans, and advocated making improvements to navigation on rivers and lakes as well as at the ocean.

Fillmore elegantly expressed his views on foreign wars:

Hence it becomes an imperative duty not to interfere in the government or internal policy of other nations; and although we may sympathize with the unfortunate or the oppressed everywhere in their struggles for freedom, our principles forbid us from taking any part in such foreign contests. We make no wars to promote or to prevent successions to thrones, to maintain any theory of a balance of power, or to suppress the actual government which any country chooses to establish for itself. We instigate no revolutions * * *. We should act toward other nations as we wish them to act toward us, and justice and conscience should form the rule of conduct between governments, instead of mere power, self interest, or the desire of aggrandizement. To maintain a strict neutrality in foreign wars, to cultivate friendly relations, to reciprocate every noble and generous act, and to perform punctually and scrupulously every treaty obligation--these are the duties which we owe to other states, and by the performance of which we best entitle ourselves to like treatment from them; or, if that, in any case, be refused, we can enforce our own rights with justice and a clear conscience. 

It was a good policy then.  It's a good policy now.

FDIC update: The Ideal Federal Savings Bank isn't

The FDIC's bank closing team enjoyed the long weekend last week, and didn't close any banks for the Fourth of July weekend.  They're back on duty.  They've shut down four more banks today, with the west coast yet to be heard from.  One of today's failures is the inappositely-named Ideal Federal Savings Bank of Baltimore, Maryland. It must have strayed far from the ideal; the FDIC found banks to assume the insured deposits of the other three failed banks, but not for Ideal.

The Friend of Long Standing and I are speculating on the next northwest bank to fall to the FDIC's axe, something I expect to happen on July 16.  She's not willing to commit to a date, but she, and some of my other banking friends, figure on the FDIC coming back to the northwest this month, perhaps when the heat wave ends.

Three songs of America, part 3: Lift Every Voice and Sing

I ended Wednesday's post with a teaser: other than its treacherous melody, what is the fault or omission in The Star-Spangled Banner?  It's this.  Although we did not adopt it as our national anthem until 1931, Francis Scott Key wrote his stirring words about "the land of the free" in 1814, when slavery was yet part of our nation.  Key owned slaves himself, black people who were in the land of the free but not free themselves.  Key even alluded to slaves, without irony, in the third verse, which I'll quote in its entirety:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Who are the "hirelings and slaves" of Key's verse?  According to Robin Blackburn, a British socialist historian, the British army included American ex-slaves whom the British had freed, and who wanted to do battle with the nation that had enslaved them.  Key's verses about "the land of the free" ignored the unfree in America, and mocked those that sought the same freedoms that Key himself enjoyed.

This background brings me to the third patriotic song that every American should know.  It's called Lift Every Voice and Sing.  James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote the words in 1899 and his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954) set it to music in 1905.  It begins with these three lines:

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Unlike the invocation of immediate peril in La Marseillaise, or the florid description of the battle in The Star-Spangled Banner, James Johnson's verse alludes only subtly to the slavery era:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

The college classmate from whom I first heard the song many years ago said it was the black national anthem, and in fact the NAACP had so designated it in 1919.  As an anthem it's a remarkable statement of hope.  It's nearly as remarkable for what it doesn't say: it doesn't wish destruction on anyone, and it doesn't, unlike Key's song, celebrate freedoms that more than half of Key's compatriots couldn't enjoy.