Salem Political Snark

"Our Salem" plan needs a top-priority: reducing greenhouse gases

If you care about how livable Salem is, check out a recently-released draft report from the City of Salem, Our Salem Vision. There's a lot to like in that vision, but also a lot not to like. So let city officials know what you think of the report.

Even though the document says that the next step in the Comprehensive Planning process is public comment on the draft, I didn't see any indication in the report about how comments are to be submitted. A City of Salem Facebook post about Our Salem Vision also lacks any mention of how citizen feedback is to be provided.

So send comments to the project manager, Eunice Kim ([email protected]) and the City Council ([email protected]).

It's a nice-looking report. Good graphics and a readable format. Of course, the important thing is what the report says, not its appearance. And here there are grounds for criticism.

The Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger has an excellent critique of Our Salem Vision. Here's an excerpt from his post, "Our Salem Vison and Draft Plan Relies Too Much on Arterial Conversion to Mixed-Use."

In order to "protect" existing single detached housing and "neighborhood character," the vision offered by Our Salem in the new draft plan concentrates too much on already busy arterial streets and does not do enough to leverage our system of smaller, minor arterials and collector streets.

The main place this is visible, seemingly the project's "one big idea," is in the way the project team took a "mixed use paint brush" to the major corridors of Commercial Street and Lancaster Drive and changed the color on the existing zoning outlines. This is not by itself a bad move, but because it is an isolated move, it looks like warehousing new projects on streets that are already busy, unpleasant, and polluted.

An important missing ingredient, then, is a boulevard conversion for Commercial and Lancaster. The proposed change from commercial to mixed-use zoning needs to be accompanied by a stroad-to-boulevard conversion in the streets. Otherwise they will still be oversized for autoist primacy and still very zoomy. Boulevard conversions also add medians for street trees and improve tree canopy. They prioritize local travel on the margins at calm speed and give through-travel the center.

Is Mixed Use by itself going to help with this?

I heartily agree. South Commercial and Lancaster Drive are unappealing monuments to an era in Salem's development when the car was king and global warming wasn't an issue. 

Just as Confederate monuments are being removed because they no longer fit with the tenor of our times, so should Commercial and Liberty, perhaps along with some other major streets in Salem, be markedly renovated -- fewer lanes, dedicated bike paths, trees planted, additional pedestrian crossings, and other changes.

In short, made into boulevards. 

Why would residential mixed use areas on these streets be attractive to people when Commercial and Liberty are so unfriendly to anyone not driving a vehicle? As the Breakfast on Bikes blogger said, simply slapping a new zoning designation on the streets doesn't change their character.

My own critique of Our Salem Vision is more over-arching.

Yet it fits in with the above criticism that the draft report doesn't go far enough in calling for changes in Salem's urban landscape that promise to bring major improvements to our city, not simply tinkering around the edges of what already exists.

Currently Our Salem Vision tries to be all things to all people. There's a lengthy list of goals in a number of areas. Economy and jobs. Natural resources. Parks. Transportation. Housing. And such. 

The report contains a lot of laudable objectives. Each section sounds good. It'd be nice if everything called for in the report came to pass. But here's the thing: life involves choices between alternatives. Life demands that this be given a higher priority than that. Everybody with a to-do list, which includes just about every person, knows this.

What is most important? What needs to be done first? What is most central? Unless those questions are answered, either a home chore to-do list or a city planning document is going to suffer from a lack of attention to urgent priorities.

Here's an example of what I mean. 

My wife and I live outside the Salem city limits. We know that at some point likely we'll have to move into town when our 10 non-easy-care acres get to be too much for us. So we have a realtor who sends us listings of houses that might match up with what we're looking for. We've visited some of these houses.

Invariably, there will be one thing, or sometimes several things. that make us say "no way" even though the house fits with what we want in other regards. We have a hierarchy of needs/wants for a house. If a house is good in every regard but our top priorities, we tell the realtor that we'll keep looking.

Now, obviously setting priorities between various goals is a lot tougher when Our Salem Vision has to reflect what several hundred thousand people want. Maybe that's why there was no attempt to do this in the planning process for Our Salem. 

But it needs to be done now, or Our Salem Vision won't be the effective document that it sets out to be. When you try to be all things to all people, you end up not being genuinely yourself. My view is that the top priorities flow naturally from this graphic shown early on in the draft document.

The reddish areas where Salem isn't meeting targets, is falling behind other similar cities in our area, and is moving in the wrong direction, relate to greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution from travel, tree canopy, bicycle and pedestrian use, and walk and transit friendliness.

So the top priority seems clear. 

The Salem City Council has to make a marked reduction in greenhouse gas emissions the highest goal. Since transportation is the main driver of increased carbon pollution, a major change in how our city looks upon streets, mass transit, bike lanes, and such needs to happen. 

Other goals need to fit in with that top-priority vision.

For example, Neighborhood Hubs are properly emphasized in Our Salem Vision. And we shouldn't have just eleven of them, as the report calls for. Many more. Every neighborhood should have restaurants, taverns, shops, and other local businesses within easy walking and cycling distance. 

That will reduce the need to drive cars. That will enhance connections between people. That will expand the economy. Many good things will flow from making a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions the over-arching goal for Salem. 

Global warming has markedly increased the wildfire danger in Oregon, as elsewhere. Likely it is responsible for the drought plaguing our state. And global warming poses an existential threat to humanity in general. 

How can reducing greenhouse gas emissions not be the top priority for Salem? This needs to be stated explicitly by the City Council.

Otherwise, those who favor increased vehicular travel and building new roads will be able to point to other goals in the Our Salem document and say, "These things are mentioned along with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, so they deserve to be treated as equally important."

"Our Salem" workshop laid out an appealing vision for our city

Yesterday I came away more enthused than I expected about Salem's future, because there seemed to be widespread citizen agreement about how our city should grow in a fashion that improves quality of life.

Last night I attended a City of Salem workshop at Pringle Hall that marks another phase of the Our Salem project aimed at updating our city's Comprehensive Plan.

OK, that sounds geekily boring. 

And as I sat at a table at the beginning of the workshop, listening to someone describe what sounded like an overly complex plan for how the two-hour meeting was supposed to go, I had some misgivings about the wisdom of what was about to transpire.

Every table featured a really large map of Salem.

We were supposed to affix colored stickers to the map showing where we wanted various features: Urban Center, Mixed Use, Urban Neighborhood, Neighborhood Hub, Residential Neighborhood, Commercial, Office, Industrial, Community Services, Open Space.

There was more complexity to the exercise than this, including the ability to trade stickers in certain ways, but I'm going to focus on the simple positive results of the workshop.

Namely, some really interesting discussions about what could be improved in Salem -- a vast subject, certainly. I've had a Salem address since 1977, thirteen years inside the city limits, the rest of the time nearby in rural south Salem.

I've complained constantly about what bugs me about Salem. Yet along with my wife, I've continued to live here because there's so much to like about our town.

Early on, Eunice Kim, the Our Salem project manager, stopped by our table and asked how things were going.

I was still in my dubious frame of mind, so I told her that I wasn't sure if this exercise was going to get at what people really want to have changed in Salem, since ordinary citizens don't think the way a city planner does. They just know what they like and don't like about a town.

Pleasingly, Kim pointed out something that probably was stated in the opening remarks, but I failed to take adequate notice of -- a big white space on the map where Big Ideas could be jotted down. 

Ooh, Big Ideas! I like! Kim wrote down some of what I and my table mates said. Here's how that section looked by the end of the workshop.

I brought up the bike infrastructure, where "separate" indicates my desire for a large network of dedicated bike paths that are physically distinct from the roads vehicles travel on. If that requires doing away with a traffic lane on busy streets like Commercial, Liberty, and such, so be it.

Build it and the bicyclists will come.

Here's a photo of people at my table working away on our sticker-affixing job. It was surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. It took about 15 minutes of the hour devoted to Map Activity for us to talk enough about what we valued to get into the swing of plunking stickers down here and there.

We were so into Mixed Use, we had to do some trading of other stickers a few times.

My special sticker interest was Neighborhood Hub, defined as "Mostly single-family homes with neighborhood scale businesses." It'd be great if every residential neighborhood had a restaurant, tavern, small grocery store, or such within easy walking distance.

That's how Salem used to be in the old days. Let's bring those days back.

The last half hour of the workshop was dedicated to each table talking about their map, which was held up at the front of the room. It was great to see that everyone had pretty much the same vision for Salem, which would be a much improved city.

Here's some key themes and specific ideas that I jotted down from what the table reporters said.

-- Mass transit should be easily accessible in every neighborhood. Let's add a trolley system to our bus system.
-- Mixed use needs to be much more common, a mix of residential and employment in walkable areas.
-- Walking and bicycling paths/trails need to be well connected all over town.
-- The aforementioned Neighborhood Hubs will be gathering places for people.
-- Put mixed use next to the Willamette, a river that should be a focus for Salem, not an afterthought.
-- Reclaim the mall for the public good (not sure which mall was being referred to).
-- Have a year-round public market.

This is the map my table came up with.

Along with other tables, we had blue lines (dedicated bike paths) along many streets, including all of downtown.  The many purple stickers are Mixed Use. West Salem and East Salem got quite a bit of attention from us. More businesses and employment opportunities are needed in West Salem, while the Lancaster Drive area needs a heavy dose of redevelopment focused on Mixed Use.

I'll end by observing that what people at last night's workshop wanted Salem to become bore a striking resemblance to the Salem Futures project that was killed by cluesless conservatives in the early 2000s.

Given the current progressive-majority makeup of the City Council, hopefully that won't happen with the upcoming Comprehensive Plan update.

Salem Comprehensive Plan update needs a dose of pizazz

First off, it's been a long time since I used "pizazz" in my writing.

The word dates from 1935-40, and is out of fashion, but it seemed absolutely perfect to describe what I found missing in last Wednesday's meeting where progress on an update to the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan was discussed by City of Salem staff and hired consultants.

This photo of the beginning of the "Our Salem" open house in the Court Street Christian Church captures the non-electricity of the gathering, which attracted about 30-40 people. 

Sure, it was a warm sunny day, so sitting inside from 6-8 pm, or thereabouts, likely didn't sound all that appealing to some potential attendees. Still, the first page of a meeting handout said:

Now we ask:

"Are we heading in the right direction?"
"What is our community vision for the future?"

It could be that the now didn't really refer to this meeting, but to the Future Work described on the handout that sounds a lot more exciting.

Establishing a community vision for future growth, and updating the Comprehensive Plan.

-- What do we value?
-- How do we want Salem to grow and develop?
-- What goals do we have?
-- How can we improve our community?
-- What goals and policies do we want to guide development and how we grow?

Don't get me wrong: the meeting was well organized and the staff/consultants did a good job. I'm just hoping, and waiting, for the Future Work that is billed as starting in Summer 2019.

After all, I still believe in what I said in an October 2018 post, "Salem Comprehensive Plan needs simple vision, not complex platitudes."

"Why?" and "How?" are the only questions that need to be asked. Why is an upper-level question. How explains what's needed to attain the Why. Why's and How's alternate as needed for a particular situation. 

For example, why does Salem exist? This is a top-level question that I've never heard asked, much less adequately answered. It, or a question very much like it, should be part of the Comprehensive Plan update. Here's some answers that I think ordinary people would offer up:

To help people who live here be happy 
To be an economic center with good jobs
To preserve Oregon farm and forest land by limiting urban sprawl

There are many other possible answers, of course. My point is just that unless simple high-level vision questions are asked and answered first, a planning process is prone to veer off into bureaucratic objective/criteria setting that isn't grounded in fundamental human values.

I did enjoy the Q&A portion of the meeting. That's when people expressed what matters to them in everyday language. Such as, dealing with income inequality, having as much open space as possible, reducing carbon emissions.

A good portion of the Our Salem presentation dealt with the results of a draft Greenhouse Gas Inventory. As noted by a Salem Breakfast on Bikes post, "Greenhouse Gas Assessment points to cars," transportation is the biggest contributor to carbon emissions in Salem.

What grabbed my eye in the presentation was this slide.

This shows greenhouse gas emissions for all of Oregon, with the red line at the top being projected emissions under current policies and the steeply descending yellow line being "Oregon's statewide GHG goal trajectory to 2050."

Wow. If Salem is to do its part in meeting this goal, our city has to markedly reduce its carbon pollution, particularly in the transportation sector. The good news is, this subject is filled  with...pizazz! Here's some pizazz'y buzz words.

Less driving, more walking and bicycling.
Dedicated bike paths all over town.
Young and old meeting as they safely and happily walk and bike.
Expanded mass transit that everyone wants to use.
A downtown designed for people, not cars.
Electric vehicles, including buses, everywhere.
Rapid charging stations everywhere. 
Trees planted everyplace possible.
Open space preserved everywhere possible.
Zoning that allows restaurants/shopping in more residential areas.
Wider choice of energy-efficient housing.

I'm sure other people could add to these ideas. But what I've listed excites me. More ideas would excite me even more.

Hopefully future Our Salem meetings will involve visioning exercises that attract lots of people eager to explore and discuss how they want Salem to change for the better. With... pizazz. 

Fun facts about Salem (well, some aren't so fun)

Thanks, Jim Scheppke, for sharing on Scribd an Our Salem: Today presentation by the City of Salem that was discussed on April 3 at a meeting of committees charged with advising staff on revisions to the Comprehensive Plan.

OK, that sentence probably doesn't make your heart race with excitement. But if you click on the continuation to this post, you'll be able to pursue a bunch of facts about Salem that really are quite interesting.

For example, in the not-so-fun-fact category, Salem sucks when it comes to bicycling.

The miniscule blue bar in Salem's column shows that, compared to Eugene and other cities, very few people are riding bikes here. Which almost certainly is because the City of Salem has put very little effort into making cycling easy and safe to do. 

On the positive side, the presentation included the first results of a Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

As shown above, Salem has considerably higher emissions per capita than Eugene, likely because our transportation system is so car-centric. Eugene has a much better bus system and bike paths.That theory is supported by this chart, which shows Salem's reliance on automobiles leads to much greater per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector than Eugene enjoys.

So the next step the Salem City Council needs to take is creation of a Climate Action Plan that lays out concrete steps to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Click below to peruse the entire presentation. 

Let's make Salem a "Strong Town" with wise development

Excellent news! A Strong Salem group has emerged on Facebook that seeks to do a heck of a lot more than just exist in cyberspace. 


If you're on Facebook, join the group and get in on the ground floor of what promises to be a force for positive change in this town. For example, one of the first posts on Strong Salem talks about the Our Salem effort aimed at updating the Comprehensive Plan.

A primary motivation for starting up this group is to keep a close eye on the the "Our Salem" project at the City, which is a multi-year effort to revise the Salem Comprehensive Plan. The webpage below has lots of information about this you may want to review. As meetings are scheduled in the future we will work to notify everyone so that we can be fully engaged in the process. Our goal is to bring a lot of Strong Towns thinking to the revision of our comprehensive plan.

I first learned about Strong Towns, an organization with a national presence, when its founder -- Chuck Marohn -- gave a talk at the Salem Library in 2016. Before the talk, Marohn got a tour of Salem from some locals. 

So his talk was informed by some knowledge of what Salem is doing right, and wrong. I wrote about his talk in "Five 'Strong Town' things Salem is doing wrong." 

Here they are, with excerpts from my 2016 blog post:

(1) End our Ponzi Scheme development approach.
This truth is at the core of the Strong Towns philosophy: almost always, building new roads, water lines, sewers, and such doesn't pay off in the long-term. Even if private developers pay the full bill for the initial infrastructure construction, the increased taxes generated by the new development isn't nearly enough to pay for maintenance of what has been built.

Roads need to be repaired. Water and sewer lines break, or need to be replaced.

So since the new development isn't generating enough revenue to pay for long-term maintenance, Salem has to keep playing the Ponzi Scheme game: keep building new stuff that produces short-term revenue, but long-term debt. 

(2) Fix what we have first; build new stuff last. 
"We are fools if we build more," Marohn, who toured Salem yesterday morning, said. He made similar negative comments about the $500 million proposed Third Bridge several times during his talk.

As noted above, his main theme was that cities can't afford to build costly infrastructure that costs way MORE money to maintain over coming decades. "How much does your tax base have to go up to pay for this project?" he asked.

The answer is that there is no way the economic benefit of the Third Bridge is going to exceed the costs. This is how cities like Salem go broke: they make stupid, rather than smart, decisions about how to grow.

(3) Downtown and lower-income neighborhoods need to be priority #1. 
Last night Marohn showed other slides that gave a graphical view of the most economically vital areas of a typical town. It isn't suburban places like south Commercial Street. Rather, it is the downtown area, and the older more densely populated neighborhoods that surround downtown.

THIS is where City officials should concentrate on spending public funds. But they aren't.

The core of Salem is a net financial plus for the City of Salem, while sprawling suburban development is a net minus. So why is so much attention given to expensive road improvements in the suburbs, when that money would be much more wisely spent on bike paths, neighborhood greenways, streetscaping, and such in Salem's central area?

Answer: the unwise Ponzi Scheme mentality.

(4) Stop stupid subsidies to developers and corporations.
Marohn was highly critical of the tax subsidies City officials routinely give to both local Salem developers (like Mountain West Investments for the old Boise Cascade site along the riverfront) and corporations seeking an incentive to locate here (like property tax breaks given to occupants of the Mill Creek Corporate Center). 

He said that tax subsidies no longer work, so it doesn't pay to offer them, adding "We have a name for paying someone to love you." Or more accurately, pretend to love you.

The City of Salem shouldn't be prostituting itself to lure developers and corporations into its economic development fantasy room. As is evident by the fact that Portland and Eugene are kicking Salem's butt when it comes to attracting high-growth, high-wage companies, Marohn said it is important for us to "build up our cultural presence so high-quality people move here."

(5) Embrace bottom-up, not top-down, development.
Marohn started off his talk by showing photos of his home town in Minnesota in the early 1900s. Here's a similar one of Salem that I found online.


He pointed out that back then cities didn't have complicated zoning codes, rooms full of planners, voluminous rules and regulations. They just grew. What worked, remained and was built on. What didn't work, faded away. 

This was also true for Ur and Rome, Marohn said. Humans have experimented with what makes for a vibrant, vital, livable city for thousands of years. In the not-so-old days, Salem and other towns grew organically, from the bottom-up. 

But when an autocentric era really took off after World War II, the United States began a very rushed experiment with suburban sprawl and car-focused urban planning. The experiment has failed, in large part because people haven't sat back and taken a calm, cool look at its results. 

The Strong Towns web site has lots of information to browse through. An article featured on the home page caught my eye: "Does Your City Have Shiny New Toy Syndrome?" Answer: Salem does, for sure. 

Since at least around the middle of the 20th century, the leaders of most North American cities have had Shiny New Toy Syndrome. We have expanded outward at an unprecedented rate, building vastly more roads, pipes, pumps, and power lines than ever before—simply because those things are new, and new growth shows as a big win on the budget sheet.

Salem Futures project was killed by clueless conservatives

Echoing a Who song: Salem, let's not get fooled again. In the early 2000s a pioneering, far-reaching, creative Salem Futures project was killed by clueless conservatives. Our town has been paying the price ever since, as I'll discuss below.

Here's how someone active in land use issues at the time recently described to me the ax'ing of Salem Futures. (Note: LCDC stands for Land Conservation and Development Commission. It oversees the Department of Land Conservation and Development, DLCD.)

Mayor [Janet] Taylor killed the Salem Futures project after almost two years of work and a million dollars. LCDC was giving Salem grants to create a model comprehensive plan for the State. 

Taylor decided to have a public meeting prior to the public hearing. Some property owners had heard about a proposal to do an overlay zone not unlike what just recently was recommended for the State Street area.

She went in unprepared. She did not lay the groundwork with staff. The business people got upset after they felt blindsided. Too much seemed predetermined to them and she did not handle the meeting well. She got into a shouting match with a couple of big owners and then she stormed out of the meeting. I think there was a newspaper article at the time.

Anyway Taylor unilaterally cancelled the project. There was a very angry city council session. A rep from LCDC was present and tried to convince council to not cancel but Janet Taylor would not listen. I recall the man saying that if Salem cancelled after they had given the city a million dollars they would never approve a grant again. She didn’t care. The council did not overturn her decision. So all that work never moved to the next phase. 

 

I can send you the only document that made its way to print. It was to have three phases. This first one talks about current scenarios and goals. It was very progressive for the times and talked about quality of life issues and maintaining livability. Cecelia Urbani, now retired, was the Chief Planner for the city. 

 

You can read the June 1999 document, "Salem Futures: Thinking About Tomorrow Today -- Phase 1 Report" by clicking on the PDF file below. 
Download Salem Futures:Phase_1_Report_Community_Profile_Vision_Statement_Conceptual_Alternatives

And here's another 2009 document that summarizes the Salem Futures project in eight pages.

Download Fregonese Associates report 

I said let's not get fooled again because the City of Salem is embarking on another effort to update the Comprehensive Plan that guides land use patterns and future development in Salem. This time the project is being called Our Salem: Planning for Growth.The first meeting of a Stakeholder Advisory Committee meeting is next Monday.

Already there are danger signs about how the Comprehensive Plan update will be conducted.

As noted in this post, the membership of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee has come in for well-deserved criticism. It is stacked with members of the Powers That Be, who tilt toward making Salem comfortable for special interests rather than making our town livable for everybody. 

 

Also, this description of the project on a City of Salem web page shows a bias toward the status quo -- which clearly isn't meeting the needs of everybody in Salem. 

 

So City officials have decided to start -- and maybe also to end -- with a study of different scenarios regarding how Salem could grow under current policies. This is the only phase that has been committed to. 

Astoundingly, there may never be a Phase 2 that examines the community's vision for future growth and development. And there may never be a Phase 3 that updates the Comprehensive Plan to implement the community's vision.  Instead, this plan indicates that the Our Salem project could only look at current growth patterns, and apparently leave the current Comprehensive Plan as is, with no update.

This is astoundingly short-sighted and limiting.

 

I invite you to look at the Salem Futures report and see how a genuine effort to involve the community and plan for sustainable, livable, vibrant growth over a 50 year time span was conducted. Yes, it then was killed, which left us with the sprawling, ugly, poorly planned mess that marks too much of Salem.

In contrast with the current Our Salem project, Salem Futures started with both a baseline look at current growth patterns, and alternative growth scenarios. Here's screenshots of the alternatives. I haven't shown the maps and photos that accompany the discussion of each alternative. 

 

The degree of community involvement in fashioning Salem Futures seems to have been markedly greater than what is planned for the Our Salem project. Here's an excerpt from the Salem Futures document.

The project began in late-November 1998 with a public lecture by Gordon Price, Vancouver B.C. City Councilor and noted lecturer on urban affairs and design. Councilor Price presented a talk titled “Vancouver BC and Lessons for the Future of Salem”.

This talk was followed by three Community Forums to discuss what makes Salem a unique place and what should be the guiding principles for future growth. During this time, the Statesman Journal published a Community Questionnaire as another opportunity for citizens to express their views about the future.

The CAC [Citizens Advisory Committee] used this public input to draft a Vision Statement. In January, 1999, a town hall meeting was held to discuss the draft Vision Statement.

Since then, the Vision Statement has undergone numerous refinements to ensure it reflects what is important to Salem’s quality of life, such as a vibrant downtown, safe and friendly neighborhoods, and the preservation of the natural environment. It also addresses future change, such as ensuring quality design for new development, saving mature trees, and making it easier to walk, bicycle or ride transit.

Inspiring. Which makes it so disturbing that Salem Futures was killed by Mayor Janet Taylor and failed to be revived by what I assume had become a conservative City Council.

 

I wasn't involved with Salem Futures.

 

However, I do remember coming across crazy talk about Salem Futures by Rodney Stubbs, who viewed "sustainability" as a United Nations plot to take away our freedoms.

 

And I'm assuming that while Stubbs was farther out in crazy land than most of his fellow Salem conservatives, a key reason why Salem Futures was put to death was a fear that if ordinary citizens in our town get to decide how growth and development should take place, Salem's rich and powerful won't be as rich, or as powerful.

 

You can read how Stubbs viewed things here and here. It pains me to share his words, but I'll copy in some excerpts to show that when it came to crazy conservative thinking, he was ahead of his time -- but pretty much in the mainstream of current Republicanism. 

Salem, Oregon

At 0900 hours Saturday 28 September 2002, the Progressive Liberal Democrats, Greens, Socialists, and Communists will launch an attack on unsuspecting citizens in cities throughout America. Their objective is securing the signatures of millions of Americans endorsing the Earth Charter Initiative.

Their purpose, abdicate individual freedom and the Nation/State that made America one the greatest Nations in history.

In a desperate last ditch effort the Democrats hope is to garner the signature and votes of millions of unsuspecting Americans who do not have a clue that the Earth Charter is a declaration designed to destroy America and supersede the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776.

...The proponents of the Earth Charter fail to disclose that the authors of the Earth Charter are in fact representatives of the United Nations. The Earth Charter Summit propaganda proclaims:

The Earth Charter is an international people's (not governments, UN or organizations) agreement for a compassionate, just and sustainable world that was written by thousands of folks in 78 countries over the course of 12 years and was launched at The Hague Peace Palace in June 2000. It has the core value of interdependence and calls for economic and social justice, peace, democracy and ecological integrity.

...All across the Nation the Trojan horse for the Earth Charter campaign is buried in the Smart Growth program that encourages cities and counties to foster land use planning programs that reach into neighborhood watch organizations. Federal dollars from the Clinton-Gore administration funded local initiatives for livability and transportation. Professional land use planning organizations were co-opted and facilitated the movement using tax payer dollars for a political purpose.

A beachhead was secured in Oregon, when on July 3, 2001, the Oregon Legislature adopted the Oregon Sustainability Act.

In Salem, Oregon Mayor Mike Swaim is rapidly moving the implementation of the Sustainable Development program through a project called Salem Futures and in the Willamette Valley the program is known as the Willamette Valley Livability Project. The Mayor and a committee of the League of Oregon Cities drafted a Template for Local Government Sustainable Development Initiatives.

...In Salem the Progressives or their sympathizers dominate (66 percent) of the Salem Futures Citizen Advisory Committee. On Saturday 28 September 2002 the Progressives are sponsoring through the Oregon Peace Works a program titled "ALL ABOARD THE LIVABILITY EXPRESS!" The focus is to create a community-wide democratic platform so that "We the People ... " can focus and direct "the Will of the People" into our City government.

OMG! Salem Futures wanted to represent the Will of the People! That sounds... um... WONDERFUL. We can only hope that the Our Salem project has a similar aspiration, even though like I said, it doesn't look that way at the moment. 

 

Salem Comprehensive Plan needs simple vision, not complex platitudes

I'm sort of ashamed to admit it, but once upon a time I was a professional planner. I was an executive service manager with the State Health Planning and Development Agency (SHPDA) back in the 70s and 80s. 

Looking back, what I'm not proud of is how I and other SHPDA staff elevated technical criteria over human values without giving much thought to why we did this.

I bring this up because I'm worried that the City of Salem effort to update the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan will make the same mistake: expect citizens to conform to the values of professional planners, rather than the other way around. 

Yes, it's important to have measurable indicators as part of a planning process. But these should flow out of an overall vision that's founded in what people value in life, which for sure isn't quantitative criteria like, in health planning, the number of CT scanning machines per 1,000 population within a certain geographic area.

Which is the sort of criteria planners love.

When it'd come time to approve or deny a hospital's application for a new CT scanner, us SHPDA staff would receive heartfelt letters from people who, say, had to drive a hundred or more miles in eastern Oregon in bad weather when a doctor ordered a CT scan for some serious medical condition.

How much weight did those letters play in our decision? Zero, basically. We health planners had developed numeric criteria that had been rubber-stamped by a compliant advisory council. How patients felt about access to a CT scanner was irrelevant.

Now, I don't know much about the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan update process. No one does, at this point, other than City of Salem staff. The process already has come in for some well-deserved criticism, as described in a blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and a Salem Reporter story, "Residents challenge early plans for Salem's future."

Here's my main concern.

Planners typically are addicted to the familiar notion of Goals, Objectives, Actions, and such. But there's a simpler way to look at this, which I remember from my two years in Portland State University's Systems Science Ph.D. program (I completed the coursework, but then dropped out after I got my health planning job in Salem).

"Why?" and "How?" are the only questions that need to be asked. Why is an upper-level question. How explains what's needed to attain the Why. Why's and How's alternate as needed for a particular situation. 

For example, why does Salem exist? This is a top-level question that I've never heard asked, much less adequately answered. It, or a question very much like it, should be part of the Comprehensive Plan update. Here's some answers that I think ordinary people would offer up:

To help people who live here be happy 
To be an economic center with good jobs
To preserve Oregon farm and forest land by limiting urban sprawl

There are many other possible answers, of course. My point is just that unless simple high-level vision questions are asked and answered first, a planning process is prone to veer off into bureaucratic objective/criteria setting that isn't grounded in fundamental human values.

Last week I has a pleasant conversation with Mark Wigg, who I believe used to be a transportation planner, and now is an ardent advocate for dedicated bike paths and multi-use trails in Salem. Wigg shared with me his ideas for additional paths/trails in various parts of Salem, which he hopes will be included in the Comprehensive Plan update.

In 2016 I wrote a blog post in which I shared a video of Wigg's testimony at a City Council meeting where he talked about his vision for a multi-use trail from Salemtowne to downtown. I loved how Wigg described his goal as "create beauty and spread joy."

Beautiful! This is the sort of language that ordinary people relate to. (Note: naturally professional planners can act like ordinary people when they're not planning.)

This is part of the current Salem Comprehensive Plan map. I didn't include the legend, but I can tell you that none of the colored areas, or uncolored areas, represent locations that "create beauty and spread joy." 

In fact, as someone who has lived in the Salem area for 41 years, I can confidently say that many areas in this town seem deliberately planned to do exactly the opposite -- create ugliness and spread unhappiness. 

Now, I'm not saying that the ultimate goal of the updated Salem Comprehensive Plan is to create beauty and spread joy. I'm just suggesting that the high-level vision of the Comprehensive Plan should include "Why?" statements that are similarly simple and reflect an aspiration that most people want Salem to strive for.

To offer up one example: I grew up in a time and place (small foothills town in central California during the 1950s and 60s) when children could ride their bikes just about everywhere they needed to go. Now, I'm bemused by lines of cars at elementary schools filled with parents waiting to pick up students.

It sure seems like a goal of the Salem Comprehensive Plan should say something like, "People of all ages should be able to ride a bicycle safely and without fear everywhere in Salem." Currently painted bike path lines on busy streets are mostly what Salem offers.

This is nowhere near good enough, in my view. And I'm pretty sure a good share of people in Salem, a majority, likely, agree with me. Yet Salem's transportation budget continues to be slanted heavily in the direction of what has been called "hydraulic autoism." 

Meaning, a mechanical, habitual bias toward making vehicles move as quickly as possible, even if this is unsafe, unwise, and at odds with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to preserve our planet's habitability for humans.

If the Salem Comprehensive Plan doesn't have a high-level goal about the need to lessen our city's reliance on fossil fuels, that plan won't be worth the paper it is printed on.

City of Salem comprehensive planning effort gets some well-deserved criticism

Well, that didn't take long. At 11:30 am yesterday, City of Salem officials sent out an email about the start of an effort to update the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan. 

A mere 19 minutes later, at 11:49 am, Michael Slater wrote a post on a Facebook page where Salem City Council issues are discussed that critiqued the Our Salem Stakeholder Advisory Committee, which a City of Salem web page describing the planning effort says "will be providing guidance to staff." 

Slater said:

The City has released the members of the advisory group that will assist staff on "technical" issues related to Our Salem, the first stage in an update to the comprehensive plan, whose goals are to:

1. Review existing plans to identify City goals and priorities
2. Choose measures to evaluate the city
3. Conduct a greenhouse gas inventory to determine the community’s impact on the environment
4. Create and evaluate scenarios to illustrate how Salem could grow.

There are, to my knowledge, no renters, bike commuters, natural resources or open space advocates, young people, or affordable housing advocates involved.

Also, if this is a technical advisory group, why are five of the people listed elected officials (and two are appointed by the City Council)?

At least Geoffrey James and Linda Wallmark are on the committee.

I agree with Slater. There's good reasons to be critical of the makeup of this committee, regardless of what it is supposed to do -- and that isn't at all clear at the moment.

First, I've come to dislike the whole idea of a "stakeholder."

That word assumes that some people and organizations in the Salem area have more of a stake in how our city grows and develops than other people and organizations. In short, "stakeholder"  is an elitist, narrow-minded concept. It would be more honest to call this committee something like, "Our Salem Selected Special Interests Committee."

Second, as Slater noted, why should two Salem City Council members be advising City of Salem staff on how to update a plan that, I assume, will be reviewed and approved by the City Council at some point?

And I'm also assuming that Marion County, Polk County, and the City of Keizer also will be weighing in on the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan update. So why are officials from these entities taking up three spots on the committee?

The makeup of the committee does seem unduly political. I'm including the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce CEO in that category, since the Chamber has been a highly politicized organization (not so much recently, admittedly).

In January 2017 I wrote a blog post, "Few City of Salem 'stakeholders' are ordinary citizens." This was in regard to the City's Strategic Planning Process, of which the Comprehensive Plan update is an outgrowth. Excerpts:

Ah, yes, that wonderfully perplexing term, stakeholder. The dictionary has a couple of definitions that make sense in this context: one that has a stake in an enterprise; one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.

So seemingly every Salem resident and property owner, along with every person who works in or regularly visits Salem, is a stakeholder in the City's strategic planning process.

One would think that this would be an opportunity for City officials to hear from people who usually don't have much of a voice in civic affairs. 

Well, anyone who thinks like that would be wrong.

...I'm bothered by the mostly insular "good old boy/girl" approach to choosing these community stakeholders. Like I said, everybody in Salem has a stake in how our city grows, evolves, changes, addresses its problems.

Asking members of the Powers That Be strategic planning questions is almost certainly going to lead to answers pointing to a continuation of their privileged position. Yet this is what City officials have done. 

The current makeup of the Our Salem Stakeholder Advisory Committee does have some good choices. But City officials and the consultants they are working with should seriously consider making some changes to the committee members.

It just seems like there are too many card-carrying members of the Powers That Be club on the committee, and not enough people with a special passion and expertise in making Salem a more livable community for everybody, not just the already privileged.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the Breakfast on Bikes blogger also wrote about this issue today in "Comprehensive Plan Update Already Prompts Head Scratching." He finds the composition of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee to be puzzling, just as Michael Slater and I did. The Keizer Mayor, Cathy Clark, and global warming denier Sam Brentano (Marion County Commissioner) are mentioned without using their names:
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Over on FB there is already a conversation about this, so there's not much new here to say. But maybe just to amplify concerns that the project already looks compromised from the start?

• If it's "our Salem," why is there a Mayor from another city that is frequently dismissive of Salem, indeed whose municipal origin story and self-identity is all about "not-Salem"? That's not "ours" that's negation!
• If the project is supposed to include a greenhouse gas assessment, why is a prominent denialist on the committee?

Sure there's a need to have diversity and some debate on the committee. But is this set up with the right diversity and for the right debates?

The committee's composition looks like something designed for gridlock and the status quo. It doesn't look very productive.
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Then the Breakfast on Bikes blogger theorizes about why, at least in part, the committee members were chosen:
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But its composition looks like it might be intended to produce something extra. One way of looking at the odd composition is to note the number of people who also sit on the SKATS Policy Committee, who have for several years resisted any kind of greenhouse gas assessment or scenario planning. Is this "Our Salem" process actually a way to do what SKATS has refused to do? There may be some subtext or other maneuvering going on here.

It also seems worth noticing that while this committee just appeared fully formed as announced, the committee for the Crosswalk Committee will have a process and recruitment.

[T]he City will seek community input and participation from Salem’s 18 neighborhood associations in a Project Advisory Committee to help develop a Safer Crossings Program.

Why didn't Our Salem have a similar announcement and solicitation?