Salem Political Snark

Here's why Salem needs a genuine downtown association

Salem no longer has a downtown association. We need one. What happened at last night's City Council meeting is only one of many reasons why. 

But before I explain what transpired at the meeting, a bit of relevant history about how downtown lost its downtown association is in order. I wrote about this in a couple of blog posts.

My November 2013 post "Should Salem City Manager be known as Exalted Emperor Linda Norris?" explained how the existing downtown association, Salem Downtown Partnership, had its contract terminated by the City Council after Chuck Bennett (then a city councilor, now Mayor) made a motion to allow the City of Salem to take control of Economic Improvement District money that had been funding Salem Downtown Partnership.

The City Manager, Norris, then essentially acted like a one-person downtown association. A Statesman Journal story quoted in the blog post said:

Business booster groups for merchants have a rocky history in this city, but Salem City Manager Linda Norris has personally taken on the task of marketing downtown.

For about nine months, Norris has overseen marketing and beautification plans with advice from her hand-picked City Manager Downtown Steering Committee. The 16-member group, includes Norris, Urban Development Department Director John Wales and representatives of business interests.

Norris, with her advisory group, determines the use of about $313,000 in funds collected from property owners in downtown’s Economic Improvement District.

By May 2014 I'd learned more about how and why the City of Salem had taken over the downtown association. Here's how "City of Salem took over Salem Downtown Partnership for lousy reasons" started out.

A few days ago I talked with someone in-the-know about how the Salem (Oregon) City Manager, Linda Norris, ended up controlling on her own $215,000 in Economic Improvement District funds paid by downtown businesses.

It was a lengthy conversation. This person asked to talk with me because he/she was so disturbed about how the EID was handled, and liked my blog-reporting on other downtown issues.

I was on the phone with this person for about 90 minutes. I learned a lot about how the City of Salem ended up cancelling the contract Salem Downtown Partnership had to administer the Economic Improvement District (EID) money. 

The headline, so to speak, is this:

Norris and other City of Salem staff set up Salem Downtown Partnership to fail. Instead of working cooperatively and collaboratively with this duly-selected organization that represented downtown businesses, the City undermined its efforts in various ways.

After describing a lot of details about how City staff orchestrated the failure of the downtown association, I said:

Rather, the real concern is with how the City of Salem, in the person of Linda Norris, is mismanaging the EID funds contributed by businesses. She is treating the money as her own private fiefdom. But what downtown really needs is an independent organization that decides how to promote the area and is an autonomous voice for downtown interests.

Thus frustration is high.

So much so, there is an effort to grab the City's attention to how badly it has screwed up the EID via a remonstrance process where the Economic Improvement District would be dissolved if, as the newspaper story says, "the city receives written objections from downtown property owners on which more than 33 percent of the assessment is levied."

That process succeeded, and the Economic Improvement District was dissolved, thanks to a campaign led by Carole Smith. Smith and her husband were the key businesspeople who got Salem Downtown Partnership up and running. Smith also ran against Chuck Bennett in the 2016 Mayoral race.

So here we are in 2017.

A new group, Salem Main Street Association, was formed in April, as I discussed in "New Salem Main Street Association debuts with questions and concerns." Among other things, I noted that the Association doesn't really deserve its name, since it doesn't have any members. 

Rather, it is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with a self-selected board of directors. Meaning, the board established by the founders chooses new board members. Since there aren't any members -- such as downtown business owners -- Salem Main Street Association isn't at all like a real downtown association.

A Salem Weekly cover story made this clear.

SMSA will have no members, meaning that all significant decisions will be made exclusively by its board. The board is self-selecting, itself appointing and replacing board members. Bylaws say that only “owners, employees, partners or associates of businesses and residents living downtown” may serve on the board.

None the less, they asked for $32,000 from Parking District funds. And last night the City Council passed an ordinance that allows the City Manager to give grants that "further economic promotion activity." 
Download Resolution Economic Promotion

Interestingly, the resolution doesn't mention the Salem Main Street Association. I have to assume that a separate budget document authorizes the $32,000 to go to that group, rather than being available to other organizations that might want to engage in downtown economic promotions. 

I watched last night's City Council meeting via CCTV. What bothers me is the resemblance of what transpired yesterday with what happened back in 2013, when the City Manager started acting as a downtown association. Once again, funds to promote downtown are being doled out by the City Manager. 

And City Council members asked very few questions about the $32,000 that's been earmarked for Salem Main Street Association. Guest councilor Mark Wigg (substituting for Tom Andersen) couldn't vote, but he did ask about a letter from Carole Smith that was critical of that money being awarded to the group.

Here's a video I made of the rubber stamping by the Council of the $32,000. Kristin Retherford, Urban Development Director, is first seen, then Mark Wigg. He can't even fully say Carole Smith's name before he is interrupted by Mayor Bennett (Bennett and Smith have a tangled history, to put it mildly).

The upshot of all this is that it points to the need for a genuine Salem downtown association. Once again, City of Salem political games are being played with Parking District money, just as happened before with Economic Improvement District funds. 

The City Manager shouldn't be controlling how funds contributed by downtown businesses are spent.

This should be the responsibility of a genuine downtown association that is broadly representative of not only downtown businesses, but also people who live downtown, and maybe also people like me who patronize downtown businesses and care about the success of the Historic District area.

I get the impression that Salem Main Street Association is angling to be treated like a downtown association without actually being one. I also have a suspicion that Mayor Bennett and other City officials want to have parking meters installed downtown, and they see the Salem Main Street Association as a willing accomplice in helping to make that happen.

Lastly, below is what Carole Smith said in a letter that was included in last night's agenda, being advance public testimony on the ordinance that allows the City Manager to make economic promotion grants from Parking District money. I wish members of the City Council had discussed her concerns before approving the ordinance.

And it is indeed weird that, as Smith notes, some six months after its public kickoff, Salem Main Street Association just has a blank "under construction" web site nor any other online presence other than a Facebook page with no postings since April 12. This isn't a sign of a vibrant group that is reaching out to Salem citizens and the downtown community.

Yet it just got $32,000 from the City of Salem. I agree with Carole Smith. Something feels wrong here. Read on for Carole's critique.

Honorable City Council,

Sorry to write to you again. I notice the award of the Parking District funds may be awarded to the new Mainstreet Organization

I want you all to know, this organization has not made any attempt to communicate with the business and property owners downtown. The board has not committed any of their own funds to communication with downtown business/property owners. They were created in secret and they have refused to name their board of directors. This board discriminates against the majority of downtown and property/business owners downtown by not allowing them on their board.

Patricia at 1895 Cider Shop, a board member of the Mainstreet Organization, told me the present board did not ask any "'old people' downtown to join the board." This is clear discrimination.

The organization is a 503.C.3 Charitable Organization instead of a 501.C.6 like other downtown organizations. A charitable organization is not the correct structure for a downtown organization.

The Mainstreet Organization elected to have "no members". This means they do not represent anyone but themselves. When new board members are elected they can only be elected by the present board member, not the downtown community. They DO NOT REPRESENT the downtown community.

The Mainstreet program has existed now for over a year and never once have they communicated with the downtown business and property owners. They do not communicate when their board meetings are, they do not have a website, they do not email us, they do not represent us and they have had over a year to do so. This show they have no intention of working with us, or listen to us. If they are unwilling to use their own funds to create this organization then they don't have much invested and you should not fund them until they show they are personally financially committed to the downtown community.

Please do not award this organization the Parking District funds. We desperately need a downtown organization that represents us, formed by us, supporting programs and projects we want and run by us. This is NOT that organization. They do not deserve funding until they show they stop discriminating against us, start representing us, are willing to work with us, and LISTEN to what we want done downtown. Until then, no funds.

Thank you, Carole

 

Robots could replace many of Salem's 1,000 Amazon warehouse jobs

Amazon is betting big on robots handling many, if not most, of the order fulfillment tasks now being carried out by humans in its giant packing and shipping warehouses. 

So even though it's good news that Amazon is going to build a warehouse here in Salem that reportedly will employ a thousand full-time employees, this excerpt from an article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords," gives good reason for concern about how long those jobs will last.

For low-skilled workers, warehouse jobs have seemed to be something of a bright spot. Even if fewer people are required to staff a Target or a Sam’s Club outlet, the movement of products requires a network of warehouses to store and ship goods.

Amazon—the world’s largest online retailer—currently has more than ninety thousand employees at its U.S. distribution centers, and plans to hire tens of thousands more. Workers still do the “picking” in a warehouse, using their dexterous fingers and discerning brains to take soap and coffee and tubes of toothpaste and millions of other products off the shelves and put them into boxes to fulfill the online shopping orders that make up an increasing portion of consumers’ buying patterns.

But the same factors that make warehouses a draw for labor have made them a tempting target for automation. In 2012, Amazon spent almost eight hundred million dollars to buy a robotics company called Kiva, which makes robots that can zoom around a factory floor and move tall stacks of shelves of up to seven hundred and fifty pounds in weight.

A Deutsche Bank research report estimated that Amazon could save twenty-two million dollars a year by introducing the Kiva machines in a single warehouse; the savings company-wide could reach into the billions. With such a powerful incentive, Amazon is on a quest to acquire or develop systems that can replace human pickers. When, in June, it announced plans to buy the Whole Foods supermarket chain, speculation quickly spread that the company intended to automate the grocer’s food-distribution centers as well as its stores.

Robots aren't going to replace human "pickers" overnight, given the difficulty in designing machines that can do a task that's easy for people but complex for current machines.

But that day is coming. In "Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon's Warehouses," this Wired story says:

Squat wheeled machines carry boxes around in more than 20 of the company’s cavernous fulfillment centers across the globe. But it falls exclusively to humans to do things like pulling items from shelves or placing them into those brown boxes that bring garbage bags and pens and books to our homes.

Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon’s efficiency—and make it much less reliant on human workers. It’s why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups—and their human handlers—to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.

...Amazon has run versions of its challenge in two previous years. This time around, though, the retail giant has revised the rules in ways that make the competition more difficult. “I think it’s getting closer to the real conditions you would find in a warehouse,” says Juxi Leitner, who leads a team from the Australian Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. “They’re getting people to work on a problem they think they will need to solve to stay competitive without needing to hire anyone.”

...When asked to estimate how long before a commercial-grade robot could do tasks similar to those presented in Amazon’s contest, Rodriguez of MIT guesses five years. Robotic fingers are getting nimbler but still have much to learn. Amazon’s mechanized picking contest could be an annual event for a while yet.

A previous 2014 Wired story contains a quotation from an Amazon executive that shows the optimistic spin the company is trying to put on its major push into robotics.

But if robots move Amazon's merchandise faster while costing less overall, won't Amazon try to find ways to replace as many of those human workers as possible? Clark says that won't happen, because the rise in productivity will give Amazon the means to grow. And growth means Amazon will need to hire more people.

Well, that has held true so far. But my bet is that robots are going to be replacing workers in Amazon's Salem warehouse within five years. 

A Statesman Journal story had some glowing comments from Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Salem Mayor Chuck Bennett.

Brown heralded the move, saying in a statement: “Amazon’s continued expansion in Oregon means more jobs and bright futures for the Oregonians who work there and live in the surrounding communities."

Salem Mayor Chuck Bennett welcomed Amazon to town with a statement: "Salem is looking forward to partnering with Amazon to create innovative jobs and develop a lasting relationship with our vibrant community."

Hmmmm.

With ever more sophisticated warehouse robots being developed by Amazon, there's good reason to doubt that the people who will be hired initially for the warehouse jobs have "bright futures." And the "innovative jobs" Bennett speaks of will require considerable technological expertise.

Meaning, robots will be doing most of the work now being done by humans. The role of people will be to keep the robots functioning smoothly, and that won't be an entry-level job. 

Salem Strategic Plan a mix of yawns and yays

Next Monday, October 23, the Salem City Council is set to vote on whether to approve the Strategic Plan that it's been working on for about a year. 

Looking over the plan, I was hoping to find a lot that excited me. Maybe I was expecting too much, since only a few things made me think, Wow, that's cool!
Download Salem Strategic Plan

Still, I give the City of Salem and its consultants credit for page 1, "Plan on a Page." The only problem is, on that page there's little to be enthused about -- since this is where the most high-level abstract stuff is described: Mission, Values, Goals.

I heartily agree with how the Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger looks upon this part of the Strategic Plan.

Who doesn't want a "proactive and forward-thinking" city? Is anyone going to argue against a "fair, equitable, and safe" city?

If this big process has value, the big goals should limn a clear area of difference. It should be easy to discern areas in which the City's policy is changing, was wrong, resulted in failure or unwanted outcomes. The Plan should answer the question: What is different now? A good strategic plan would make clear at least some of the renunciations and emphases in the vision. It seems like you ought to be able to read the values in the plan, formulate their opposite or attach a different valence, and be able to say that we made an actual choice to be this and not that.

Maybe you will have a very different reading of it all, but at this point, the process seems more shapeless than it should be. It seems like you ought to be able to read the provisional goals and come away with a strong sense of ambition and purpose. But all in all the recommendations seem pretty generic and anodyne, driven more for broad popularity than for real discernment.

I don't think it is going to help the City make the hard choices between competing values and competing valuable goods.

For sure. 

Here's the Vision, Mission, and Values part of the Plan on a Page.

There's nothing here that fires me up. Rather, it puts me to sleep.

It's purely bureaucrat-speak, words that say nothing because they're intended to appeal to everybody. As the Breakfast on Bikes blogger said, the Vision, Mission, and Goals don't make any difference because there's no difference implied in them. 

Meaning, you can't disagree with what's said given that these words could apply to any city in the country. There's nothing here that makes me think, "Yes, Salem can be different and better than other cities!" 

So let's move on to the Goals in the Plan on a Page.

These are a bit more specific, but not much.

The Goals also are full of bureaucrat-speak, and largely talk about the need to plan more. And my writer mind wishes there was a consistent grammatical style, since some of the Goals start with a verb (which implies action) and others just sit there as incomplete sentences.

I mean, why not say "Develop a public transportation system that meets community needs"? I realize the City of Salem doesn't control the Cherriots bus system, but the Strategic Plan really should be a plan for all of Salem, not just City departments.

When I got to page 3, I finally saw where the real meat (or tofu, since I'm a vegetarian) of the Strategic Plan lies: in the Actions.

So the Policy Agenda for the City Council includes high-priority actions in the Strategic Plan. These haven't been clearly identified yet, so I suspect there will be a lot of discussion and debate about the 2018 Policy Agenda  come next January. 

This screenshot is taken from a consultants' report in the materials for Monday's City Council meeting. It shows which actions were given the highest priorities at a September 2017 Council work session.

The yellow dots identifying the highest priority total eight, if my counting is correct, with nine being the number of members on the City Council. "Climate Action Plan" got three yellow dots, the most of any action. But that action also got two red dots, indicating a concern.

So I guess this explains why the top actions at the September work session were different from the top actions identified by an online survey of seven city council members, as described in a staff report.

With seven responses, the top strategies through this exercise were: (1) partner to establish a sobering and recovery center; (2) explore the possibility of bringing high speed internet to Salem; (3) explore alternative building codes for adaptive re-use of older buildings; and (4) develop a robust City asset management program. Each of these proposed actions were ranked as a top priority by at least three of seven respondents.

Well, "Climate Action Plan" also got three top priority votes when there were eight of nine council members present at the work session.

Since our federal government is taking a pass on reducing greenhouse gas emissions under Trump's unenlightened presidency, this makes it more important for state and local governments to step up and do what Washington, D.C. isn't doing -- save our planet for human habitation. 

Here's a few other observations about the Strategic Plan.

-- Page 5 notes that the City doesn't have an overarching vision for how Salem will grow. For me, this is the second most important action the City Council needs to take, with a Climate Action Plan being #1. Fortunately, page 9 calls for a "citywide visioning process to determine the community's goals and priorities for future growth and development." Excellent!

-- The only mention of a 3rd Bridge is on page 15, which accurately notes that residents are split on whether a third bridge across the Willamette is needed. Fortunately, a majority of City Council members appear to be opposed to a 3rd Bridge, which I like to call a billion dollar boondoggle.

-- On page 19 there's a photo that I at first thought was an example of bad road design, because it looks so horrendous. Then I realized the photo shows the "improvements" at the intersection of Wallace and Glen Creek Roads in West Salem. This is a great example of what we don't want in Salem, streets that are highly autocentric and difficult for pedestrians and cyclists to use.

-- Lastly, page 21 calls for a Climate Action Plan that prioritizes reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. A community-wide greenhouse gas inventory is part of this action/objective. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to tell whether the Climate Action Plan is succeeding.

Chamber of Commerce no longer running Salem. Let's keep it that way.

When I first got heavily involved in Salem politics about four and a half years ago (after the horrendous needless killing of the U.S. Bank trees got my ire up), fellow progressive citizen activists would tell me, "The Chamber of Commerce runs this town." 

Well, this isn't true any more. And that's a very good thing. 

To understand why, take a look at the goal of the Chamber of Commerce's political action committee, Build Jobs PAC. As should be obvious from its name, the Chamber really is only interested in one thing: jobs.

But obviously there's a lot more to wellbeing, livability, and economic vitality than simply jobs. Have you ever felt that all you needed in life was a job?

Not good health; not happiness; not friends; not culture; not education; not a marriage partner; not love; not nature. Just a job.

Of course not.

Back in 1998, though, the Salem Chamber of Commerce set out to elect a Mayor and City Councilors who would bow at the altar of job creation. This is from a March 2016 post on the Build Jobs PAC web site, where the PAC announced that it was endorsing Chuck Bennett for Mayor and Jan Kailuweit and Warren Bednarz for two council seats (both of whom lost). 

Eighteen years before 2016 gets us to 1998, when Mike Swaim, a progressive, was Mayor from 1997 to 2002. Janet Taylor was elected Mayor in 2003, kicking off a string of Chamber-supported candidates who controlled the City Council until this year, 2017.

Since Salem is a liberal-leaning city, it's fitting that this town should have a majority of progressives on the City Council.

Thanks in large part to Progressive Salem, which supported Tom Andersen's campaign in 2014, and has had a string of winning city council races since (Cara Kaser, Matt Ausec, Chris Hoy, Sally Cook), progressives have five seats on the nine-member City Council -- eight city councilors plus the Mayor.

It's interesting to contrast the wide-ranging goals of Progressive Salem with the singular jobs! goal of the Chamber's PAC.

Economic opportunities. Environmental health. Public health. Alleviate poverty. Safe and accessible transportation network. Clean and sustainable energy. Education.

It's no wonder Salem voters have been choosing Progressive Salem candidates over Chamber of Commerce candidates. Like I said, most people know that there is a heck of a lot more to life than simply having a job, even a well-paying one. 

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about the creative writing of Geronimo Tagatac, a Salem resident. I included a link to a 2014 post where I quoted Tagatac, "Truth Bomb #6: Salem's citizens are too politically passive." 

Here's what Tagatac said about my observation that Salem puts up with political crap that wouldn't be tolerated in Portland, Eugene, or Corvallis.

The problem isn't, at its heart, the city council. It's the overall community that elects the city council and is willing to live with its lack of transparency and subservience to the chamber of commerce.

Yes, there's a progressive, reform-minded subculture in Salem, but it's simply not large enough or influential enough to stop what's been going on for decades.

The Corvallis, Eugene, and Portland communities would never put up with such behavior on the part of their elected representatives, the violations of the public meetings law, the conflicts of interest, etc.

Making closed-door deals with a bank to cut down trees would be political suicide in those communities.

The reason that the Salem city council does these things is that they know that the community won't hold them accountable. And there are likely to be few or no whistleblowers to embarrass them, other than yourself and a handful of others.

Well, it's really encouraging that so much has changed politically for the better in Salem since October 2014, when Tagatac wrote those words. 

From one progressive city councilor we now have five. Progressive Salem and other like-minded groups have become a counter-weight to the Chamber of Commerce, proving that people power can win out over money power. 

We liberals can't become complacent, though. There's still a lot of work to be done, a lot of political battles to be fought. 

I'm just happy that the single-issue goal of the Chamber of Commerce's PAC -- jobs, jobs, jobs -- is being rejected by Salem voters who understand that our town's livability, attractiveness, and economic vitality depend upon a whole host of factors, as reflected in the goals of Progressive Salem.

Let's keep it that way.

Challenged to say what I've done to make Salem better, I'm pleased to reply

Blogs should come with a warning: If you ask a blogger questions that require some talking about themselves, expect a verbose answer.

Especially if the challenge is to explain my contributions to Salem from a couple of people who appear to doubt that I've done anything useful in my entire life.

Today they left rather similar comments on my post, "T.J. Sullivan is the Chamber's President-Elect. He's gotten well-deserved snark from me." 

Concerned Citizen left the first comment.

Hi Brian. Honest questions: What concrete things have you done to make Salem better? How many people do you currently employ and how many have you employed over the past ten years? How much cumulative tax have you paid over the past ten years? Have you built anything?

I think it's great that people speak out on a blog and try to add value. However, if that is all that you do, you are just typing. You have no real world experience creating or building. If a small community in the middle of nowhere was just made of 50 people like you, it would whither and die in less than a generation.

Ben left the second comment. 

I’d love to see Brian put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with TJ Sullivan’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and blogging about your urinary tract problems and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours TJ Sullivan has given to this community.

Ooh! Fighting words. Let's get it on.

To begin with, Concerned Citizen is way off base with the assumption that only people with employees are doing "concrete things to make Salem better" and have "real world experience creating or building." 

I come from a family of highly successful businesspeople. I'm not stating this because it makes me look better. I'm stating it because it is a fact that informs my current worldview. 

My great-uncle and godfather was Conrad Hilton, the hotel person. I spent quite a bit of time with him as a youth, since my (divorced) mother lived in central California and he lived in the Beverly Hills area. My maternal grandfather started a materials handling company. My father was a co-founder of a high-tech company in the 1980s.

Being the oldest male child on my mother's side (I never met my father until I was in my 30s, and then only for an hour), it was assumed that I'd go to Dartmouth, get an MBA from the Tuck Business School, and eventually run the family materials handling/electric lift truck business. 

But I shockingly decided to go to San Jose State College, where I majored in Psychology, then got a Masters in Social Work from Portland State University (where I also became a Ph.D. dropout in Systems Science). My mother, an intellectual, loved that at San Jose State I was admitted to an honor's program featuring tutorials with a small number of students and professors. 

So screw the idea that the only good life is one devoted to running a business. This denigrates most of the United States population.

Further, I never heard any of my family members talk as if being a businessperson was more important than any other calling. I can't remember any of them putting other people down because they weren't running a business. So this is a new thing for me, the idea that someone's life is worthless if they don't have employees.

As you'll read below, I've done a lot of creating and building. It just hasn't been structures, or a company. 

Regarding Ben's comment about me blogging in my underwear, this has never happened. (But for the right amount of money, I'm ready to both do it and publish photos of me in the act.)

What has occurred is a tremendous amount of volunteer time I've given to my blogs since 2003. Hey, Ben and Concerned Citizen, since you admire a business mentality so much, here's some hard data about my blogging for you to chew over.

Total pageviews: 7,843,580
Total posts: 5,383
Total comments: 44,662

The market, as the saying goes, has spoken.

Not one of the almost 8 million pageviews was coerced. Not one of the almost 45,000 comments was forced upon the commenter. Lots of people have been reading the blogs that I created and built because they find value in what I write about, even if they don't agree with what I have to say.

Now I'll turn to what I've contributed to Salem. 

I moved here in 1977. At first I worked for the State Health Planning and Development Agency as an executive service manager. Then I became the publicist, and after that, executive director, of Oregon Health Decisions, a pioneering nonprofit bioethics organization. 

I'm proud of what was created and built during that part of my life.

The work we did in conjunction with then Senate president John Kitzhaber laid the conceptual framework for the Oregon Health Plan/Medicaid expansion. We engaged the public in discussions about death with dignity and living wills. 

Turning to my neighborhood, I moved out of the Salem city limits to rural south Salem in 1990. Almost immediately I began serving on what amounts to our "neighborhood association" in our planned community, Spring Lake Estates. For about 24 years I was the secretary for our neighborhood group and put in countless volunteer hours in this position. 

My wife and I led our neighborhood's fight against a subdivision that threatened our water supplies. For about five years I tirelessly worked on this battle. We eventually succeeded,  showing that when a community sticks together, it can overcome great odds.

What about Salem proper? Well, here's a list of things that I feel good about accomplishing after I became an ardent Salem citizen activist about four years ago.

-- I wrote a tell-all report about the shameful destruction of the U.S. Bank trees on downtown's State Street. This, I believe, gave impetus to revisions that were made to Salem's tree ordinance so more large, beautiful, healthy trees wouldn't be needlessly cut down. 

-- When the parking lot at Riverfront Park next to the Carousel was threatened by a planned road for apartments on the west side of the railroad tracks, I and others worked hard to prevent this from happening. I discovered that it would take years to get federal approval to allow the changes to Riverfront Park, which helped kill this bad idea. The apartments ended up being built along Commercial Street, a marked improvement.

-- I led the fight agains the poorly thought-out $82 million police facility bond measure that was defeated by Salem voters in 2016. The price tag was reduced to $61 million in a second-try 2017 bond measure, saving Salem's citizens about $21 million. 

-- For several years I, along with others, harped on the need to seismically retrofit the Library and City Hall along with building an earthquake-safe police facility. I'm convinced that if we hadn't worked so hard to bring this to the attention of the City Council, and the citizenry in general, there wouldn't be a bond measure on the November 2017 ballot to make seismic upgrades to the Library, along with other renovations.

-- I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly at no charge or about two years. This undoubtedly brought joy, delight, and inspiration to countless Salemians. (Well, it did for me, at least.)

-- I've been a member of the Salem Community Vision steering committee since this group was founded. We've done a lot of good things, and will continue to do more.

Lastly -- the reader can only hope -- I was an active member of an India-based spiritual/meditation organization for about 35 years. I volunteered to write three books for the organization, which took an immense amount of time and energy. 

For many years, too many to remember, I was the secretary for the local spiritual group in Salem, which held weekly meetings that I had to arrange, set up the chairs for, and often give the talk ("satsang") at. Yeah, I know, to some people this doesn't count as volunteering because I'm not a Christian. In fact, I'm now an atheist. But this volunteer work was a labor of love of mine for a long time.

(If you aren't totally bored with this rendition of my life, there's more on my web page that's devoted to me.)

Anyway, I've responded at length to Concerned Citizen and Ben because (1) it bugs me when someone asserts that I haven't created or built anything because I'm not a businessperson, and (2) it bugs me even more that this assertion oozes over into denigrating the contributions of everybody in Salem who has taken a non-business path in life. 

Concerned Citizen said that if everybody was like me, a community would wither and die. Well, the same is true if everybody was like anybody. 

Salem would die if there were only businesspeople in it. And not just figuratively, literally, since there would be no doctors and no nurses. And if there weren't teachers, librarians, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and so on, Salem wouldn't be a town worth living in.

So let's bury the Chamber of Commerce notion that Business Rules way more than ten feet under. How about ten miles under. I and countless others are valuable members of the Salem community not in spite of us not being in business, but because we're not.

T.J. Sullivan is the Chamber's President-Elect. He's gotten well-deserved snark from me.

Ah, it's so fitting. The Salem Chamber of Commerce has chosen T.J. Sullivan to be its president-elect. Meaning, Sullivan is in the on-deck circle to come up and bat for this town's most notorious promoter of selfish right-wing business interests.

To "honor" T.J. Sullivan (note the ironic quotation marks) I spent some time this evening Googling my previous blog posts about him. 

Here's what I found, in chronological order:

February 2016: "Salem Chamber of Commerce mass transit bill to aid Cherriots is dead." 
Sullivan led the Chamber's fight to defeat a payroll tax that would have brought weekend and evening bus service to Salem. He said that if the payroll tax was defeated, which it was, the Chamber would work hard to find another source of funding for Cherriots. Well, they didn't try very hard, probably because, as I said in this post:

Bluntly speaking, the Salem Chamber of Commerce is controlled by people who don't give a shit about decent bus service in Salem. They just want to appear to care about the needs of those who use Cherriots, by necessity or choice.

In a related October 2015 post, "More evidence that Salem Health violated IRS rules on political donations," I presented evidence that the $50,000 Salem Health gave to the Chamber's Create Jobs PAC  to oppose the mass transit payroll tax was an illegal political donation. T.J. Sullivan was the chair of the Create Jobs PAC, according to a commenter on this post. 

April 2016: "Mean-spirited letter to the editor cheapens mayoral race."
Sullivan supported Chuck Bennett over Carole Smith in this race, which was fine. Not so fine was what he said in a Statesman Journal letter to the editor.

I have worked with both Carole Smith and Chuck Bennett and had the opportunity to watch them engage with citizens in Salem.

...there aren’t many worse choices for mayor than Carole Smith. If she were elected mayor, and people like her elected to the City Council, they would set our city back years with their inability to make decisions that are in the best interest of Salem.

According to Carole Smith, the first sentence almost certainly was a lie. She couldn't remember ever working with T.J. Sullivan. In an online comment on his letter, Smith said:

Say all the nice things you want about Bennett, but leave me out of it since I don't really know you TJ and I can tell by your comments that you really don't [know] me either. Stop the hate.

October 2016: "T.J. Sullivan lies about cost of proposed police facility" and "No, savings from Measure 24-399 WOULDN'T fund Civic Center seismic strengthening." 
Sullivan was a leader in efforts to pass a wasteful, poorly-thought-out $82 million police facility bond measure that was wisely rejected by Salem voters in November 2016. In debates with me about Measure 24-399, Sullivan lied several times. I called him out on this in two blog posts. 

Yeah, I know.

"Lie" is a word that's supposed to be reserved for Donald Trump'ian sorts of deliberate falsehoods. "Misspoke," "shaded the truth," "was inaccurate" -- these are oft-heard replacements for "lie."

But I don't what else to call what T.J. Sullivan, a representative of the Keep Salem Safe campaign that's advocating for Measure 24-399, the vastly over-priced $82 million police facility bond measure on the November ballot, did last night at a Morningside Neighborhood Association meeting.

...Here's another T.J. Sullivan falsehood about Measure 24-399, the $82 million police facility bond on Salem's November ballot. (Sullivan's previous falsehood is described here.)

At the September 23 Salem City Club debate on the police facility bond between Sullivan and me, he said this:

"So if we get $82 million for this new police facility, and we don't use the whole $82 million, we can, depending on how we write the bonding language, we can take that money and put it into retrofitting City Hall and the Library...That's the fastest way we're going to get City Hall and the Library retrofitted, by passing this bond."

Not true.

January 2017: "Disturbing facts revealed about $749,000 Park Front urban renewal grant" 
T.J. Sullivan, a former Salem city councilor, was able to get a $749,000 grant from the City of Salem for his Park Front building under highly dubious circumstances. I delved into the details of the urban renewal grant after getting documents through a public records request. 

Here's highlights of what I learned:

Park Front developer T.J. Sullivan wrongly asserted in his grant application to the City of Salem that 80 permanent new jobs would be created by the project. This should be grounds for the City Council revoking, or at least revisiting, approval of the $749,000 urban renewal grant, since the actual number of permanent new jobs likely is zero, or very few. 

It is clear that the Park Front building was going to be built with or without urban renewal funds, so the City of Salem's claim that public funds leveraged private investment with public money is false.

The Park Front developers said they plan to use the $749,000 to "add back" features of the building that they were going to leave out after construction costs escalated and Pioneer Trust Bank failed to loan them as much money as they asked for. So I continue to call this crony capitalism, since these are normal problems encountered by developers.

Approval of the grant by the City Council acting as the Urban Renewal Agency Board was rushed through by City staff before the end of 2016 so it wouldn't be considered by the 2017 City Council that would include three newly-elected progressive councilors.

So putting all this together, T.J. Sullivan is a mean-spirited guy prone to political lies who opposed a tax to improve Salem's bus service yet used his connections with City officials to get a bunch of undeserved money for his office building through crony capitalism.

In other words, he's a perfect match to lead the Salem Chamber of Commerce!

Third Bridge supporters resorting to ridiculous arguments

Over the years I've heard lots of ridiculous arguments about why Salem should build a billion dollar (with financing costs included) Third Bridge across the Willamette River.

For example, back in 2013 I asked Public Works Director Peter Fernandez to give me the "single most important reason Salem needs a Third Bridge." How did he respond?

By saying that the single most important reason is that there is only one way into and out of West Salem. Redundancy and safety were the top reasons a Third Bridge is needed. He said that the bridges are seismically unfit. Currently serious accidents on the bridge tie up traffic for long distances into neighborhoods on both sides of the river.

Well, actually right now there are three ways to get into and out of West Salem -- the two current vehicular bridges and the Union Street pedestrian bridge, which can be used by emergency vehicles if necessary.

As noted in the above-linked post, plans already exist for some lanes to be reversed on a bridge if an accident shuts down the other bridge. And the state has allocated money to seismically retrofit the Center Street bridge.

So there goes the #1 reason for a Third Bridge put forth by one of the people most knowledgeable about the proposed Salem River Crossing. Poof. Vanished. 

Notice that Fernandez didn't bring up reducing rush-hour congestion between West and East Salem as the primary rationale for a Third Bridge. Likely that's because he knows that backups aren't caused by a lack of lanes on the bridges, but by the poorly-designed approaches to the current two bridges. 

The approaches can be improved for much less money than the billion dollars a Third Bridge would cost. 

But Third Bridge supporters keep on trying to convince Salemians that they should pay a $1.50 each way toll on both the new bridge and the two existing bridges, which is the primary financing strategy put forth by Salem River Crossing planners. A toll being deeply unpopular, the frantic arguments for a Third Bridge keep getting more and more absurd.

Case in point: today's opinion piece by Robert Royer in the Statesman Journal, "When response to growth is ignored, hostile takeovers are nothing new."

The hostile takeover Royer refers to is the West Salem Neighborhood Association, which has been suffering from outrageous behavior by members of Salem Bridge Solutions, a group that has been using bullying tactics at neighborhood association meetings that have gotten well-deserved criticism from Salem city councilors. 

Here's the first problem with Royer's arguments.

A Third Bridge wouldn't be for the private convenience of West Salem residents. In fact, many, if not most, of the reasons given for the Salem River Crossing tout its claimed regional benefits. Meaning, a new bridge supposedly is needed to speed traffic from I-5 onto the Salem Parkway and other routes, then across the Willamette onto destinations to the west (Dallas, Monmouth, the coast).

Yet Royer says, "as long as a growing population wants to live on one side of the river and work, play and use medical facilities on the other side, this issue won’t go away." Well, actually it will if City officials realize the futility of stumbling onward with a hugely expensive Third Bridge that is unneeded, unwanted by the majority of people in Salem, and unpaid-for. 

The wise thing to do is work on improving the two bridges we have now. "Build it now" isn't a bad idea if "it" means revamping bridge approaches and seismically reinforcing at least one of the bridges. This should produce all of the local benefits of the Salem River Crossing for a fraction of the cost. 

And here's another problem with Royer's opinion piece:

Citizen involvement and environmental reviews are a good thing, not a bad thing. Royer longs for the days when a bridge could be approved by the state transportation agency and city/county officials with very little, if any, opportunity for ordinary citizens to be involved in the planning process.

He also decries Environmental Impact Statements and Oregon's pioneering land use system that has succeeded in saving farm and forest land from over-development, and prevented wasteful urban sprawl. This shows how out of touch with mainstream Oregonians those advocating for a Third Bridge are.

Most people in Oregon, as well as Salem, don't want to have the environment trashed in the name of pave-it-over "progress."

They also value governmental transparency and openness so people have a say in major infrastructure projects like the Salem River Crossing. Backroom deals may be good for rich developers and construction companies, but not for the average citizen.

I'll end by sharing some online comments on Royer's opinion piece in the Statesman Journal.

From Jim Scheppke
Who are the "extremists"? Someone who thinks it's a good idea to build a 3/4 mile bridge through an earthquake liquefaction zone? Someone who thinks we have $450 million to spend on it? Someone who would be okay with tolling the two bridges we already have to pay for it? Someone who is okay with destroying 100 homes and businesses that are in the path of it? Someone who thinks paving over Wallace Marine Park is no problem?

Those are the "extremists" Mr. Royer. And they in no way represent the opinion of the vast majority of Salem citizens. That's why the last five City Councilors we have elected are against the 3rd Bridge. They are not extremists.

From Lee Moore
Another article about the bridge issue that conveniently ignores that a 2nd two lane bridge was constructed at Marion Street & the two lane Center Street bridge was replaced with a 4 lane bridge in early '80's, while infering nothing has been done for "50 years and counting." How about those pushing for the 3rd bridge "put their money where their mouth is" and request a $5-10 thousand surcharge on all new residential lots in west Salem to put in escrow & start to build a fund for the bridge, since the leaders of this group are developers & realtors. (Fat chance that will happen--they want the rest of us to pay for it so they can increase their profits.

From Philip DeRobertis
I didn't realize it was extreme to not want to incur a $3.00 a day crossing tax um..i mean toll, just for the priviledge of going to work. Not to mention the various & sundry taxes that will be associated with this project.

I notice the 'built it now' crowd screams pretty loudly about wanting a bridge but grows strangely silent when it comes time to talk about how we're going to pay for it. 

Hell, yes, today is the day to talk about American gun violence

The White House doesn't want to have a debate about gun control today, because last night 59 people were killed in the largest mass shooting in American history, with 527 injured. 

That's incredibly wrong.

This is precisely the day we need to start talking about why the United States has so many gun deaths compared to the rest of the world.

After every mass shooting I roll out the same plain fact: more guns means more gun violence. Today Vox updated their excellent  explanation in "Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts."

America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.

The whole piece is well worth reading. Here's the first chart and commentary.

This chart, compiled using United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for the Guardian, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.

The second chart shows  that the United States has 4.4% of the world's population, but 42% of the civilian-owned guns in the world. So more guns aren't making us safer. They're killing us -- mainly by suicide, but also by a much higher homicide rate than in advanced countries with fewer guns.

"Thoughts and prayers" are completely useless after a mass shooting. So are vigils.

Every single freaking time a significant mass shooting happens, our politicians, first responders, and local officials call for thoughts and prayers. Which, obviously, don't do a thing to prevent the next mass shooting. Also predictable is the NRA and its backers claiming that if more people carried guns around, mass shootings would be prevented.

Well, in this Las Vegas shooting it took well over an hour for the shooter to be dislodged from his 32nd floor hotel suite. He started firing on people shortly after 10 p.m. and he was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot just before midnight.

No matter how many guns the concert goers might have been carrying, it wouldn't have made any difference in this mass shooting.

What I found most irritating about today's news coverage was the self-congratulatory tone of local and state officials regarding the response to the shootings. Amazingly, I even heard the Lieutenant Governor of Nevada say this was the state's "finest hour." No one, absolutely no one, had the guts to tell the truth.

The one and only reason so many people were killed was because the shooter was able to buy so many guns, some of which apparently were turned into fully automatic weapons. 

After a mass shooting killed 35 people in Australia, that country instituted strict gun control laws.  An Atlantic story says:

My colleague Uri Friedman wrote about the impact of the Port Arthur massacre in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, California in 2015. He noted that, among other things, the Australian government “banned automatic and semiautomatic firearms, adopted new licensing requirements, established a national firearms registry, and instituted a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases. It also bought and destroyed more than 600,000 civilian-owned firearms, in a scheme that cost half a billion dollars and was funded by raising taxes.” The entire overhaul, Friedman pointed out, took just months to implement.

And the result was many lives saved.

The number of mass shootings in Australia—defined as incidents in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself, which is notably a higher casualty count than is generally applied for tallying mass shootings in the U.S.—dropped from 13 in the 18-year period before 1996 to zero after the Port Arthur massacre. Between 1995 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides in the country dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively, though these declines appear to have since leveled off. Two academics who have studied the impact of the reform initiative estimate that the gun-buyback program saves at least 200 lives each year, according to The New York Times.

So. please, American politicians, don't spout any more "thoughts and prayers" bullshit. Strong gun control legislation at both the federal and state level is the only way our country has a chance of preventing more mass shootings and needless gun deaths. 

Guns are the problem in this country, not people. Almost certainly we don't have a higher proportion of citizens who are homicidal and suicidal than other advanced nations.

Our problem is too many guns that can be purchased too easily. Anyone who believes otherwise is ignoring the facts I shared above.