Below you can read what I just emailed off to T.J. Sullivan, chair of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Police Facility established by Mayor Anna Peterson.
If you're not familiar with this issue, check out one of my Truth Bombs, "Salemians were excluded from police facility planning."
Which, pretty much, they still are.
I wrote to Sullivan, asking if public testimony would be taken at the beginning of next Thursday's task force meeting -- which looks like it either will be the last, or next to last, meeting of the group.
I was told that likely public testimony would be heard only at the end of the meeting, by which time, of course, any votes and decisions already would have happened. Sullivan offered to send the task force members any testimony I'd like to submit ahead of time, so I took him up on that offer.
T.J., thanks for offering to forward this message to the entire Salem police facility Blue Ribbon Task Force. I’m not sure whether I’ll be at the Broadway Commons Thursday meeting, so by sending you this email I can be confident that these thoughts will be considered by task force members before final decisions are reached.
Being a member of the Salem Community Vision steering committee, an active blogger, and a Salem Weekly columnist (hopefully you read my Strange Up Salem column; if not, you clearly should!), I’ve closely followed the ins and outs of police facility planning.
What strikes me the most about this effort — and also what bothers me the most — is a theme I like to bring up in my writing: Why can’t we all get along?
Unnecessary divisiveness in Salem sucks up a lot of time and energy that could be productively spent on actually improving this town. Instead of battling back and forth from fixed positions, like trench warfare in World War I, people should be able to meet on common ground, openly talk about problems that need fixing, and reach compromises that serve the broad community interest.
For over 20 years I’ve been the secretary of the board of our neighborhood organization out here in rural south Salem, Spring Lake Estates Recreational Properties, Inc. That’s a fancy name for a small group of unpaid volunteers who handle a $15,000 annual budget to keep common property (lake and trails) in good condition and oversee other community matters.
I mention this because I’ve had a lot of experience in seeing how people can work together harmoniously in an informal, non-hierarchical, open-minded, good-hearted fashion. My wife (a board member) and I get kidded about being tree-hugging, electric-car driving, vegetarian liberals by the conservative members of our neighborhood organization.
But all that is set aside when we meet to discuss some issue. By the way, our board always lets any property owner who comes to a meeting have their say at the beginning of the meeting. If it takes an hour, I and the other board members/officers just stay an hour longer.
Listening to our neighbors and each other is the key to our success. I mean, REALLY listening. Listening with an open mind, without preconceived ideas immutable to change.
Recently our board president was adamant that weeds in the lake needed to be treated with chemicals. My wife and others told him, “no, that's the wrong thing to do.” And explained why. After about 45 minutes of intense discussion and quite a bit of arguing, everybody agreed on first trying another way to control the lake weeds.
So what is preventing the Blue Ribbon Task Force from doing the same: finding common ground? (Can’t help noting that “Blue Ribbon” is a strange term. What does this make everybody else in Salem who isn’t on the task force? Losers?)
Nothing, really.
But I fear that you’re headed down the same divisive path that has marked so many other City of Salem issues during the past few years. Pringle Square, Third Bridge, U.S. Bank tree killings, downtown parking, Howard Hall, streetlight tax, North Campus redevelopment.
To come together, to collaborate, to achieve a community consensus — people on both sides of an issue have to give ground, compromise, understand that the best approach often lies in the middle, not on extreme sides.
That hasn’t happened yet with police facility planning.
What’s striking is that very early on, City of Salem officials decided on their own that a new police facility should be sited on the Civic Center campus. Five years or so later, nothing seems to have changed, even after good reasons for altering that initial notion have been brought forward by both experts (including a consultant brought out to speak to the Task Force) and community members.
I’ve documented how the Civic Center location was determined. No City of Salem official has challenged the accuracy of what I said in this blog post.
The City of Salem decided to build a new police facility at the Civic Center without any public hearings or public discussion. City staff and the Mayor made this decision.
Now, I was hopeful that the Task Force could rectify this. However, so far you haven’t done much, if anything, to involve the public in making the decision about where a new police facility should be located, what its design should be, and how much it should cost.
Instead, a rather obvious game has been played.
The Mayor clearly wants a new police facility at the Civic Center. She appointed members of the Task Force. Some “away from the Civic Center” members were appointed to avoid giving an obvious stack-the-deck look to the group, but not so many as to run the risk of having “at the Civic Center” members being outvoted on key motions.
So in the battle of the motions, it looks to me like the Mayor and City Manager’s game plan was to have the Task Force approve siting criteria that could be used to justify the initial decision to build a police facility at the Civic Center, complete with very expensive underground parking, three stories, and an inability to expand the facility if future needs require this.
All drawbacks to a Civic Center site, according to the police facility expert brought in by the Task Force.
But no matter.
No or few “Civic Center” minds were going to be changed, because the Mayor’s real purpose for the Task Force wasn’t to achieve a community consensus about siting, but to have this group provide political cover for the Civic Center siting decision made long ago behind closed doors.
Thus at present it looks like the Task Force will approve siting criteria that can be used by City staff to justify the same Civic Center location that was, has been, and still is the preferred choice of City officials — even in the face of good arguments for building the police facility elsewhere at a much lower cost.
If the Task Force continues down this path, I predict the following things will happen. (I’ll be open about one reason I’m making these predictions: I love to be able to say, “I told you so.”)
(1) A minority report will be issued by members of the Task Force who disagree with the siting criteria that will be used by City staff to justify continued planning for an over-priced, poorly designed police facility at the Civic Center. This report will demolish any claim by City officials that a Task Force consensus exists for a Civic Center location.
(2) A bond measure needed to pay for an over-priced police facility at the Civic Center will be defeated in 2016. Conservatives will oppose an attempt to waste taxpayer dollars on an unnecessarily expensive “police palace.” Liberals will vent their frustration at top-down City of Salem planning, along with gripes about other issues where City officials have taken a “my way or the highway” approach. Voters will say, take a hike, Mayor. We aren’t paying for a boondoggle.
(3) The Salem Police Department will have to put up with its current cramped, outmoded quarters for quite a few more years. Citizens will sympathize, but not to an extreme degree. After all, the police are seen by most people as they drive around in police cars or on bikes (downtown). Rightly or wrongly, a modern central police facility isn’t a huge priority for ordinary citizens, who see more important unmet needs in Salem. A lean bond measure with clear community consensus about the location and design of a new police facility could have a chance of passing. A controversial over-priced bond measure won’t.
Maybe I’m wrong. But this isn’t just me talking. What I’ve said above reflects the wisdom of people I’ve talked with who know a lot more about Salem, including Salem bond measures and politics, than I do.
So the task force has a choice.
Continue to go down the path you are on, or choose a better direction. Visualizing myself in your place, I’d feel bad if I knew that choosing to endorse a Civic Center location for a new police facility vastly increased the likelihood of no police facility being built for a long time.
I’d also worry that opposition to an over-priced, poorly designed police facility would spill over to efforts to seismically retrofit the Salem Library and City Hall, which likely also will require voter approval of a bond measure. If the Big One earthquake hits after a bond measure was rejected, possibly killing many people in collapsed Civic Center structures, if I were a task force member I’d berate myself for not doing more to assure that this wouldn’t happen.
But I’m me, and you’re you. Each of us has to act as we feel is best. I’ve done just that in sending you these thoughts. How you react to them is up to you.
— Brian Hines
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