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."

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.

Our local transportation planning organization is fiddling while carbon emissions burn us up

It's embarrassing that the SKATS (Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study) body, which focuses on transportation planning in our area, has some global warming deniers on it who are mightily resisting connecting a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with how people should get around via vehicles, mass transit, bicycles, and whatever. 

Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study (SKATS) is the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the Salem-Keizer area. A MPO is a federally mandated body for any urban area over 50,000 in population. The SKATS MPO is directed by a Policy Committee composed of elected representatives from the cities of Keizer, Salem and Turner, Marion and Polk Counties, the Salem Area Mass Transit District, the Salem-Keizer School District and a manager from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) Region 2 office.  MWVCOG staff provide the day-to-day staff work for SKATS.

The Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger has been following the saga of how, following a City of Salem strategic planning initiative calling for greenhouse gases to be studied, and, I assume, reduced, Marion County Commissioner Sam Brentano has been the SKATS ringleader in denying science, common sense, and the will of the public to deal with global warming.

Today the blogger wrote, "Hazy Skies and Unsettled Weather at the MPO: Intransigence on Goal 7."

The Directors of three State agencies, DEQ, DLCD, and Energy recently sent to ODOT's board, the OTC, a letter on greenhouse gases and transportation.

They write:

"According to the Oregon Global Warming Commission’s 2017 Biennial Report to the Legislature, Oregon will not meet the Legislature’s 2020 target for greenhouse gas emissions reduction (ten percent below 1990 levels). We also are not on track for the Legislature’s 2035 and 2050 goals. With greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector increasing (rather than decreasing), and with transportation responsible for 39 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, it’s clear we need renewed focus on reducing emissions in this sector."

At last month's meeting of our Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Policy Committee endured a different smoke-blowing from members who insisted that "SKATS' focus is transportation not the environment" - notwithstanding clear Legislative direction to reduce emissions in the transportation sector.

...The result seemed to be a weasely version of Goal 7 that makes no specific reference to greenhouse gas emissions, and merely adds an "explanatory statement" that project evaluation "may include" things like greenhouse gas emissions. As a goal, it's all very optional, hardly a goal at all - a fig leaf.

What seems to be going on here is that the MPO/SKATS has some sort of weird commitment to consensus among its members, even though the representative of the City of Salem obviously speaks for hugely more people, than, say, the representative of the City of Turner.

Thus rather than basing transportation planning goals on settled science -- global warming is happening, humans are responsible for it via greenhouse gas emissions, and something needs to be done about it -- SKATS appears to want a dumbing down of a environmental impact goal such that the language is so meaningless, even a global warming denier like Commissioner Sam Brentano will be comfortable with it.

Hopefully this won't happen.

Unfortunately, I believe the City of Salem representative is Jim Lewis, one of the three remaining conservatives on the nine-member Salem City Council.

Lewis doesn't have strong environmental credentials, to put it mildly, so he is unlikely to be a strong advocate for an explicit SKATS commitment to making reduction of greenhouse gas emissions part of the local transportation planning process.

Salem's Mayor, Chuck Bennett, and the City Manager, Steve Powers, need to make it crystal clear to Jim Lewis and the rest of the SKATS/MPO members that it is totally unacceptable to water down a goal calling for greenhouse gas emissions to be part of transportation planning policies in this area. 

Consensus, or unanimity, is great when this makes sense. However, combatting global warming is too damn serious to allow a few science-deniers to have a veto power over the wording of a SKATS/MPO environmental goal.  

I couldn't resist commenting on a woman's praise of Salem

Yesterday the Statesman Journal published a "Your Turn" piece by Emily Skelding that began as a post on her This Is Just to Say blog, and ended being titled either "Salem a fabulous place to raise family" (print edition) or "Salem transplant proud of her new hometown; wants community to stop apologizing" (online edition). 

I liked Skelding's praise of Salem. I also can't resist commenting on it. 

First off, notwithstanding the online title the Statesman Journal gave to her piece, Skelding's blog post says that she grew up in Salem, then lived in other places before returning here. 

I must add a caveat to this tirade: I had the unlikely and strange experience of a happy childhood. And that childhood was in Salem. And so, maybe I like Salem more than other folks I grew up with here. I understand needing to get away and see the world or needing to escape the painful ruts of childhood. Place and experience weave together.

This could indeed influence how she currently looks at Salem. Most of us have fond memories of where we grew up. I sure do. Anyway, here's my decidedly personal reaction, in red, to what Skelding had to say about Salem in her Statesman Journal essay. 

Salem, please stop apologizing. Calm your insecurities. You are a fabulous place to live.

No disagreement from me on this.

Your landscape surprises me every day, a natural beauty who needs no make-up.

Well, parts of Salem are beautiful while some are ugly. Lancaster Drive and South Commercial are soul-crushing streets, filled with tacky strip malls and garish signs, monuments to our culture's primacy of the automobile over people.

While the tourists are directed to our wineries and historic sites, it is the air that catches my attention: crisp and fresh, earthy and leafy.

OK. I've never thought of Salem air this way, but Skelding could have a more sensitive nose than mine. The global-warming exacerbated forest fires last summer made Salem's air smoky and unhealthy, but mostly she's right about our air quality.

Your big open spaces dot the city: parks and farms and hills too steep to build on. You beg me to climb out of my minivan and slip on my rubber boots to tromp around, discovering the trees while my dogs run freely and I help my girls add thistles, pine cones, and chestnuts to their collection.

Um, we have a dog. The City of Salem says that only Minto-Brown, Orchard Heights Park, and Cascades Gateway Park have off-leash areas. Salem could use more. Compared to Portland, we suck at dog-friendliness. 

You have trees, all sorts, lining your streets and covering your hills. And what about the ingenious play structures around every turn? They remind me of Paris. My husband takes long bike rides. He marvels how quickly he can get to your outskirts, and be on the country roads, pedaling by sheep and goats and Christmas tree farms and fields cleared for the winter.

Salem does have lots of beautiful trees. City government also has had a nasty habit of treating trees badly. Hopefully this is mostly in the past. I'm not aware of ingenious play structures, but I don't have children of playground age. Maybe they do indeed exist. Regarding cycling, Salem doesn't have enough safe, family-friendly bike paths. Salem Bike Boulevard Advocates is trying to change this. As Skelding implies, Salem is fine if a cyclist is of the "fearless" variety, unafraid to ride on roads that give most people qualms. But the majority of people much prefer dedicated bike paths to riding on the street.

It reminds him of his time in Oxford, England, a city of about the same size. The ease of living in Salem cannot be understated.

Salem indeed is less stressful than larger cities. Our rush-hour traffic would bring a smile to those who live in the Los Angeles area.

You are practical, affordable and manageable, but not a suburb on the end of a freeway originating in the center of a metropolis.

Yes, our home values are much more reasonable than Portland's. And we do have a wonderful downtown that is steadily improving as a place to live, work, and play. However, City of Salem resources are still unduly devoted to promoting growth in the suburbs of far West Salem and far South Salem. We have too much sprawl and too little central-area improvements.

You are a community that stands on your own. Don’t be like Oakland and Baltimore, cowering in the shadow of your nearby, cool sibling cities. Envy does not become you. This isn’t a race to be the best, just settle into being you.

I sort of agree and sort of disagree. We need to look upon the best of what "nearby, cool" Portland has to offer, while avoiding the worst of Portland. I've come up with the saying that Salem should be Portland without the problems. 

My father has always explained to me that Salem has a larger-than-average middle class - state workers and teachers and regular folk.

This appears to be true. We also have a lower per capita income than Portland, Eugene, Bend, Medford, and Corvallis. And there are marked income disparities by both geography and ethnicity.  North and East Salem are considerably poorer than West and South Salem; Whites and Asians have considerably more income than Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, and American Indians.

You aren’t a rich, bratty snob looking for the best avocado toast in town. One of my daughter’s surprises when she moved here? The number of fundraisers the student organizations at South Salem High School host.

I'd never heard of avocado toast. Now I want some! Fundraisers do teach students some things. However, I'd rather see students doing less fundraising and more regular learning. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but back in my high school days we had very few fundraisers (perhaps because we didn't have many student organizations).

They work for their privilege to participate. All of the places I’ve lived other than Salem are becoming less diverse, both racially and socio-economically because of policies encouraging gentrification.

Gentrification certainly has both pluses and minuses. It could be argued that the above-mentioned income disparities in Salem are due in part to this town being viewed as a less desirable place to locate a business with well-paying jobs,  compared to Portland, Eugene, and other large cities in Oregon. But this does leave Salem more affordable, though housing costs are pricing many out of both the rental and purchase markets. So I worry about Salem not enjoying the benefits of gentrification (such as revitalization of our close-in neighborhoods) while still becoming less and less affordable for middle and lower class families.

Not you, Salem. You are becoming more diverse every year. This trend is likely to continue. Let’s make sure to make city policies that continue to support your diversity. 

Well, several years ago Salem was slightly more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse than Portland. An updated 2017 report showed that Portland was slightly more diverse than Salem. So it's unclear if Salem is becoming more diverse. Having moved to Salem in 1977, my view is that this town is decidedly more accepting of diversity than it used to be, which perhaps is more important than small changes in how diverse Salem  is.

Finally, Salem, embrace your grime and call it grit. Appreciate your home-grown habits and call it culture.

Interesting idea. I just wonder if this is stretching the definitions of "grit" and "culture" too far. Maybe. Maybe not. I do like Skelding's provocative writing style. She makes me think.

A woman I saw at Costco who still does her bangs with a curling iron and mousse followed by Aquanet? She’s your emblem, not an embarrassment.

Nicely said. I just can't quite picture what the bangs look like from my clueless male perspective. 

Stop by Happy Curry and get a dozen samosas. Thrift at your safe and steady Value Village or Goodwill by the pound on Portland Road NE or the higher-end Assistance League Shop and know you’re getting a deal and recycling.

I like samosas. Shopping at thrift stores, not so much. But I know people who really enjoy finding good deals at them.

Instead of looking away as you drive by Magoos, stop by and raise a glass to yourself.

Not sure what to make of the Magoos mention. I find it appealingly bar-like, and yes, gritty. (From the outside; I don't think I've ever been inside.) Skelding's blog post put it this way: Be impressed that Magoos is still open, instead of looking away as you drive by.

Salem, I pick you. You surprise me and I love you for it.

Ditto. I love this photo that was shared by Travel Salem.

Salem, it's OK to reinvent yourself. Don't cling to the past.

During my 40-year tortured relationship with Salem -- love you! hate you! let's never part! divorce time! -- here's one of the things that bugs me the most about the town I both can't leave and can't be totally happy with.

Salemians (the obviously proper word for people who live here) tend to expect that our city's future should be like the past, only more so. Conservatism runs rampant, even when this isn't of the political variety. Bold visions of what could be are shunned in favor of sticking with an embrace of what has been.

Individuals frequently reinvent themselves. So can cities.

But this takes the same sort of willingness to let go of the past as is evidenced by someone who changes careers, adopts a different outlook on life, says goodbye to a longterm relationship that isn't working any more, alters their physical appearance markedly, takes up a new creative pursuit with unbridled passion, or any other sort of this is the new me! activity.

Salem's previous Mayor, Anna Peterson, liked to say this town was a "collaboration capital." Aside from this being not really true, I'd much prefer that Salem be known as an "innovation capital." 

We're often the last to get on board a Trend Train that other bolder cities have embraced years ago.

Whether it be Uber/ride sharing, Airbnb/home sharing, tiny houses/accessory dwelling units, an environmental/global warming action plan, homelessness/affordable housing initiatives, or whatever, all too often we follow belatedly in the footsteps of other municipalities rather than being among the first to venture into new enhanced-livability territory.

Many millions of dollars have been spent planning for a billion dollar boondoggle -- a third bridge across the Willamette River. Alternatives that are both vastly more creative and hugely less expensive were rejected because building a bridge, pretty much like the existing ones (a bridge is a bridge), has been done before, so let's do it again. 

Ditto with City of Salem policies that primarily encourage sprawl rather than dense mixed-use downtown development. Hey, subdivisions and big box stores on the edge of town were Big Ideas -- albeit decades ago! -- so let's keep on doing what we're doing regardless of whether it makes any sense.

Case(s) in point: City officials don't allow brewpubs downtown, apparently because -- shock!-- brewpubs brew beer in addition to selling it. And City officials don't allow businesses that sell marijuana to be located downtown. So tourists/visitors who come to downtown Salem expecting to sample some quintessential Oregon offerings, brewpubs and cannabis emporiums, will have to go to some other more with-it city. 

Also, downtown could get a marvelous makeover through a full-blown creative streetscape project, but City officials seem determined to make this as blandly "off the shelf" as possible rather than transformative. I keep hearing, "We can't do anything about major downtown streets like Liberty and Commercial because current traffic patterns would be disrupted."

Well, that's the freaking point! 

Change. Innovation. A fresh vision. Reinvention. Breaking with a past that doesn't meet Salem's needs in favor of a way-more-attractive future.

Here's a passage that I like a lot in Yuval Noah Harari's new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harari is a historian with a wonderfully creative view of how things were, are, and could be. 

Science is not just about predicting the future, though scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures. This is especially true of history. Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider.

Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable, and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics, and society, but also our thoughts, fears, and dreams.

The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future.

We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free and envision alternative futures.

For sure. Few people are doing this in Salem, especially at City Hall. 

"More of the same" is the safe slogan that keeps money, power, and energy flowing in ways that are no longer working well for Salemians. There's no overarching vision of what our town could and should become, just stuttering steps in different directions that don't add up to any concerted productive movement. 

Hopefully things will change in this town. Otherwise we will continue to be viewed as So-Lame with considerable justification by other cities which are better are recognizing the value of pursuing alternative futures. 

Five "Strong Town" things Salem is doing wrong

Loved it!

Chuck Marohn's talk about Strong Towns last night at the Salem Library was hugely inspiring. And, well attended. I was pleased to see Mayor-elect Chuck Bennett and City Manager Steve Powers there.

Now, they need to take to heart the logical, evidence-based advice Marohn gave to Salem. This town is doing a lot of things wrong. Of course, we aren't alone. Most cities in the United States have fallen into the same traps.

Here's five things Marohn said Salem needs to fix in order for us to become a strong smart town, city planning-wise, rather than a weak stupid town.

Chuck Marohn

(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. 

This Strong Towns slide that I found on another blog post about a Marohn talk shows how the scheme works. For a while, the City of Salem gets positive cash flow from new development, especially when a developer pays the full infrastructure bill.

But after a few dozen years, or even before, the publicly-owned stuff that has been built -- roads, water lines, etc. -- needs to be fixed. Now the cash flow turns highly negative. The money that's been coming in from the new development is way less than the money needed to maintain that development over the long-term. 

So this is why the City of Salem can't afford to maintain our town's parks, but City officials want taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new bridge and new streets. The Ponzi Scheme keeps on scheming, until citizens say "No more! Stop the craziness!"

(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.

In a Q and A session, City Councilor Tom Andersen asked Marohn, "Is it wisdom or folly to be building new roads and bridges when we can't fix what we have now?"

Marohn's answer: folly.

He offered up the analogy of someone wanting to build an addition to their house, but not first fixing the leaky roof. Large infrastructure projects almost never pay off financially, Marohn told us.

As we've seen from the chart above, they look good on paper for a number of years, but when it comes time to maintain and repair them, the costs bankrupt a city like Salem because the projects don't generate enough economic activity to make them worthwhile. 

(3) Downtown and lower-income neighborhoods need to be priority #1. 

Marohn showed this slide last night, a comparison of the economic vitality generated by dense mixed-use development compared to sprawling suburban development. Here's what a Easton, Pennsylvania blogger said about this after attending a Chuck Marohn talk in his own town:

Using examples from his home town of Brainerd, Minn., Marohn showed how even the most run-down city blocks generate more value to a community than suburban-style new development.

City blocks generally hold several properties, all individually paying taxes and requiring less infrastructure, while suburban-style development will generally support only one property or business on the same amount of land. Therefore, the "old" planning style will generate more tax revenue while costing less in the way of municipal services and maintenance than the single property.

Additionally, this old style of planning lends itself to building reuse, while when suburban shopping centers and big box stores go out of business, they are hard if not impossible to repurpose.

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 spend 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."

The kinds of companies Salem wants desire a high-quality work force.

So the old notion of "Build it and they will come" doesn't work anymore. Witness the mostly unoccupied shovel-ready Mill Creek Corporate Center. If a city isn't highly livable, and thus attractive to skilled, educated, creative people, it isn't going to attract businesses that need those sorts of people as employees.

(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. 

I like how Marohn isn't easy to categorize.

He creatively melds conservatism and liberalism in his Strong Towns philosophy. For example, rather than have strict top-down zoning rules that typically keep residential and commercial uses separate, Marohn favors what basically is a "whatever works for people" approach. 

If a convenience store fits with the needs and desires of a suburban neighborhood, why not allow it? Try many small inexpensive experiments, not a few hugely costly ones (like a billion dollar Third Bridge). 

Marohn told us that bottom-up innovations are chaotic but smart, while top-down planning is orderly but dumb.

Salem doesn't need more of this -- orderly sprawl that costs taxpayers way more than it benefits them.

Rather, Salem needs more dense old-style "chaotic" development that is way more interesting, creative, and economically vital. 

Secretiveness of Salem City officials reflected in embarrassing email

Almost everybody has mistakenly sent out an email that had a regrettable something in it. City of Salem officials have joined this large club, as KATU reported in "'Kind of embarrassing': Salem authorities send email with note not meant for public."

SALEM, Ore. -- An official with the city of Salem admits it's "kind of embarrassing."

The city sent out an email alert that included a footnote the public was not supposed to see.

The footnote is regarding whether to tell the public about the cost of a road project in downtown Salem.

...Gotterba said the budget information he released to KATU Thursday is available through a public records request but also admitted it was not included in either of the two news releases put out about the project.

Here's a KATU video story about the downtown bike paths email embarrassment.

 

 A Salem Breakfast on Bikes post, "Controversy over cost of downtown bike lanes is unwarranted," correctly observes that what is most concerning about the email is how City of Salem officials are worried about whether citizens will think that a much-needed $244,000 downtown bike lane project is too expensive, but are proud of their hugely wasteful Billion Dollar Third Bridge and $82 Million Police Facility projects.

A footnote meant for internal communication only was not edited out of a public message on the bike lanes for High and Church Street, and it doesn't look very good. Especially in light of the proposals to overbuild a new Police Station and overbuild a giant new highway and bridge across the Willamette River, it seems to feed a narrative of an out-of-control and secretive city.

The truth in this case is the opposite.

Construction costs might be higher than we like, but relative to industry norms, the City of Salem routinely brings in small road construction projects under budget. The costs from the 2008 road bond projects came in about 80% of budget and by adding a bunch of smaller projects, the City was able to add by count of projects another 50%. Sure, much of this was during the Great Recession, but the facts are that the City is not profligate on small and medium-sized road projects.

The project for bike lanes for Church and High is no different.

Yet the staff person's mistakenly-shown note says about construction of the bike paths, "People might see it as a very expensive project."

No, they won't. People love bike paths. Salem's citizens want more bike paths. And not just a few disconnected blocks of them. They want an interconnected system throughout our city of bike paths, bike boulevards, and multiuse paths.

This can be built for hugely less money than autocentic road improvements cost. So the real embarrassment in the City of Salem's email isn't that officials were trying to hide the cost of the bike paths from the public, but that they felt a need to do so -- which shows a lack of commitment to building better cycling/pedestrian infrastructure in this town.

Oh, there's one other thing that City officials should be embarrassed about.

In the KATU video, City spokesperson Mike Gotterba says that 3 to 5 managers approved the email before it was sent out. Um, this doesn't sound very efficient to me. One manager's review sounds sufficient to me.

But it is well known that the Mayor Peterson administration is highly secretive and controlling.

Thus it isn't at all surprising that the folks at City Hall debated how open and transparent they should be about the $244,000 cost of the downtown bike paths. This is disturbing. What's even more problematic is that City officials are so wary of the comparatively low cost of making Salem streets more bike and pedestrian friendly.

The Breakfast on Bikes post says:

A typical enhanced crosswalk with a pedestrian refuge median (no flashing beacon) is in the neighborhood of $50,000 or $60,000 - the same amount the SRC [Salem River Crossing, or Third Bridge] is spending on average each month. Imagine, well over 100 medians for walking safety!

By this measure, the cost for 10 or 12 (it's actually 14+) blocks of downtown bike lane and parking reconfiguration is proportional.

When the Glen Creek/Wallace interchange cost around $10 million, this project on Church and High only costs about 2% of that total. Again, is this really so out of proportion?

Bend sets goals for climate change. Salem's City Council sits on its butt.

As a long time Salem-area resident, I'm used to having my town's environmental reputation kicked in the ass by more with-it Oregon cities like Eugene, Corvallis, and Portland. 

But now also Bend?

Geez, Bend is in Deschutes County, central Oregon, which used to be reliably Republican. And hence, not much concerned with supposedly optional niceties such as protecting the livability of our one and only planet Earth. 

With a lot of new people moving to Deschutes County, though, the gap between Democratic and Republican voter registration has shrunk considerably in recent years. 

So this helps explain why today's Bend Bulletin newspaper has a story, "Bend City Council wants feedback on climate change plan."

Bend residents have a chance this week to give the City Council input on how Bend should combat climate change.

On Thursday, the council plans to hold a special meeting to get the public’s feedback on a resolution that sets goals to reduce carbon emissions and prevent climate change.

Considering a large part of Bend’s economy is based on outdoor recreation on the river and in the mountains, it’s important the city takes a proactive approach to protecting the environment, said Nikki Roemmer, of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Other cities such as Eugene and Boulder, Colorado, have adopted similar measures, she said.

“This really just says, ‘We care, and we care enough to do something about this global problem,’” Roemmer said.

The effort came after environmental groups asked the city to develop a government policy that addresses climate change, said Gillian Ockner, a senior policy analyst for Bend. The City Council responded by forming a group that started working to draft the resolution in May, she said.

One of the goals in the draft plan is to make all city facilities and operations “carbon neutral,” meaning city operations would emit no greenhouse gases or would get offsets — such as through tree plantings or purchasing renewable energy — for any emissions.

Meanwhile, the resolution would also ask the city to reduce fossil fuel use by 40 percent by 2030. And by 2050, it would have to reduce fossil fuel use by 70 percent, according to the plan.

My first reaction after reading this was envy. 

Envy that the Bend City Council is willing to go on record that climate change is a serious problem that has to be addressed by politicians at all levels, local, state, regional, national, international. Because 7 out of 9 members of the Salem City Council won't even admit that climate change/global warming is happening and humans are responsible for it. (See my blog post, "How Salem's candidates and other local leaders look upon climate change.")

Envy that Bend has environmental groups that are willing to push their city government to develop a climate change policy. Because environmental activists in Salem haven't shown much of a willingness to get involved with City of Salem goings-on, leaving our right-wing Mayor and her current City Council majority distressingly free to pursue anti-environmental policies. 

Envy that City leaders in Bend are willing to set goals for reducing carbon emissions. Because here in Salem, community leaders have a head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change and the urgent necessity of stopping global warming before it is too late for civilization as we know it. As I said in my 2015 "Salem leaders need to say where they stand on climate change":

Only two city councilors out of the ten City of Salem officials responded to me. They agreed with the scientific consensus, saying "Yes" to each question.

The others wimped out, probably because they fear being held accountable for City Hall's environmentally destructive policies: pushing for a billion dollar sprawl-inducing carbon-spewing unneeded Third Bridge; allowing large, beautiful, healthy trees to be cut down for no good reason; ignoring the urgent need for bike lanes and pedestrian safety while throwing big bucks at 1950's style autocentric road projects.

it isn't only City officials who are in the environmental dark ages. Salem Hospital, the Chamber of Commerce, and other corporate types are acting just as destructively. 

This was the theme of my most recent Strange Up Salem column in Salem Weekly, "Salem fiddles while the planet burns."

Salem is a great town. I've loved living here for the past 39 years. However...this city also regularly drives me nuts. Or rather, nuttier than I am in my normal nutsy state of being.

Salem is the state capital of Oregon, a state with a well-deserved reputation for being on the cutting edge of wise environmental policies (for example, our marvelous farm/forest-preserving land use system with strict urban growth boundaries). Yet Salem lags far behind other neighboring Willamette Valley cities when it comes to ecological awareness, alternative/public transportation, and local government commitments to reduce this area's carbon footprint.

If the Chamber of Commerce types who run Salem -- hopefully not for much longer, given the encouraging election of three progressive City Council candidates in the last election -- think having a 1950's "pave it over" mentality is helping Salem compete for new residents and businesses, they really need to think again. 

Bend is on the right track, even though the latest version of the climate change policy document is weaker than it should be.

Here in Salem, the Mayor and City Council aren't even trying to look like they care about the environment and dealing with climate change, much less actually do something about preserving the habitability of Planet Earth.

Salem only town in Oregon that bans tiny houses

Ah, Salem. I so look forward to the day when the name of my home town isn't regularly mentioned after someone says, "The last town in Oregon to not allow [some cool thing] is..."

Tiny houses are an example. Salem bans them. Along with only one other city in the northwest. A 2014 Statesman Journal story said:

Tiny houses.

Everyone loves them. Cute, inexpensive, and eco-friendly, tiny houses are popping up all over the Northwest.

Portland, which just relaxed its permitting rules, is seeing a boom, and even boasts a tiny house hotel.

But don’t look for them in Salem.

The Capital City is alone in the state in banning tiny houses, more formally known as “accessory dwelling units.”

In fact, a recent study of large and mid-sized cities in the Northwest found that only Salem and Idaho Falls have outright bans on accessory dwelling units.

It's embarrassing, and not conducive to Salem's attractiveness to new residents and businesses, that this town often is so far behind the times. 

Here's a couple of recent KGW News stories about Salem's ban on tiny houses.

I captured the first video via my iPhone, since I couldn't find it on the KGW web site. The July 5 story was on the 11 pm news. A City of Salem planner says that "long overdue" zoning changes are in the works that would allow tiny houses.

 

And here's a KGW video of an earlier version of the story. It shows Eric Olsen talking about his Fairview Addition development, which features both "granny flats" (ADUs) and tiny houses. 

 

I sure hope the Salem City Council approves tiny houses. A proposal to do this is being worked up.

The first video shows the owner of Salem-based Tiny Mountain Houses saying that he's selling his homes all across the country. But not in Salem. Sigh...