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President Bragdon's 2008 City Club Speech

On March 14, 2008 Council President David Bragdon and Neil Peirce, columnist and chair of the Citistates Group, spoke at the Portland City Club about the Connecting Green initiative.

I'm going to follow some of what Neil talked about today as well as last night and he talked about what is happening with parks across this country, in other places as well as what is happening here. I start by thinking about what are the things that we have here and what are some of the gifts that we have here compared to some of the other places Neil gets to visit. What we start with. And what we start with is a metropolis that is in a remarkable natural setting.

We are surrounded by mountains; we are not far from the beach; our area is laced with rivers and streams, and even in the urban parts of our region, in fact to some extent when you talk about NW Portland vis a vis Forest Park, especially in the most urban parts of our region we do show that we can co-exist with trees, little canyons and forested buttes.

We have a lot going for us here and when you look around the room here you realize we have a tremendous amount of human resources in this region here. We have people who really care about this place and who have an ethic about really taking care of it. Our economy also features companies that lead the world in designing and marketing products that people elsewhere and all over the world use to enjoy the outdoors. So it is an important and significant part not only of our way of life but of our economy.

But when you look at those advantages in a strategic context vis a vis other parts of the world those are primary strategic advantages that we have now that other metropolitan regions around the world ought to be envious of and that we ought to be making the most of. That is what it's about; it is about what we do and in the future to make the most of what we have.

It is not about being smug about what it is that nature gave us or previous generations have left us. The test really is what we do with it now. As we heard from Neil last night and a little bit today, other metropolises around this country are making far more of far fewer natural gifts then we have. Chicago has been mentioned but Minneapolis - St. Paul, St Louis, New York City, even Atlanta, that we like to fancy ourselves as being vastly superior to, successful regions like that all over this country are recognizing the value of investing and expanding their parks and they are doing it in a very bold way. They're doing it in a very significant way financially; they are investing much more boldly then we are and they are also measuring the considerable return on investment and using the return on investment broadly construed to measure the return of that investment. They are seeing that return on investment in terms of reduced heart disease or reduced respiratory disease; they are seeing it in terms of reduced childhood obesity and general health of the population. They see the return on investment in terms of clean water that we and other species that share this space depend on or on the clean air that we all do.

Now all those regions are progressing not because nature gave them more than nature gave us. In fact it is quite the opposite; nature gave us a lot more than nature gave most of those other places, but they are progressing more because their economic, social and political systems have different circumstances and different expectations then we do. The major difference, and we had Mayor Daley here to speak last summer to talk about Millennium Park and other things they are doing in Chicago and when you listen to what they're doing the fundamental social, economic and political difference is in that successful regions like Chicago play to win. They play to win by adding to what nature gave them and enhancing it. They play to win while all too often we Oregonians simply play hoping not to lose what we have.

That to me is the fundamental challenge of all of this. It is about raising our expectations, not being smug about what we inherited but making the most and taking it to the very next level. Playing to win this competitive game, not just hoping we don't lose the great gifts that we have. If we do that, if we raise expectations, we are remarkable positioned like nobody else in this country to achieve something that is pretty simple and pretty astonishing all at the same time. What we are positioned to accomplish is to have the best network of parks and natural areas and trails in the world. All we need to do, it is simple but tough at the same time, all we need to do is leverage the gifts that we have, organize ourselves a bit more intentionally, work together better, and be willing to spend more strategically then we currently do.

Let's start a little bit with an inventory of the gifts we have.

We have hills and buttes with views in all directions. 855 rivers and streams that course through our region, trees that grow taller than Admiral Nelson's statue in Trafalgar Square, more than 75 extinct volcanoes, at least we think they are extinct, in our region. Thousands of picnic tables, several of the most significant international public gardens in the entire world are in our region, when you think about the public gardens that we have, 333 playgrounds, we have a nationally acclaimed arboretum that has a living collection of trees from around the globe.

These are very significant resources that we have invested in. We have other assets here that we haven't necessarily invested in that we are very lucky to have. Gifts like the Tualatin River or the view of Mt. Hood-- believe me it's there, come back in August-- that is something of tangible value. The osprey who had breakfast in the Sandy River Delta right near downtown Troutdale this morning and who is having lunch in Oaks Bottom right now while we are sitting here in the Governor Hotel just a couple miles away having our own lunch; that is a gift for our region. The steelhead that rested overnight also right around Ross Island; right now that steelhead is moving up to Oregon City because he doesn't want to meet the osprey for lunch, but again that is a gift for our region. Moving back to thing that we have built, we also have the only public plaza in America and the significance of public plazas for urban vitality shouldn't be underestimated. We have the only one in the country --and it is in Hillsboro Oregon --that has a LEED Gold certified city hall on one side and century-old giant sequoia tress on the other. There is no place else you can see something like that , a combination of a LEED Gold city hall and 100 year old trees.

So those are lots of gifts, lots of gifts that we have in the region overall. We have over 60,000 acres of land that are owned by the public, local governments, special districts, ourselves the regional government, state and federal governments, but really those lands are owned by you and they are really remarkable assets.

But we are not always doing the best by those assets. Biologists will say that that more than half of that public land today is degraded in one way or another. Deferred maintenance, invasive species, they will say perhaps up to ten percent of Forest Park is literally being strangled by ivy, ten percent being about five hundred acres of Forest Park in terms of invasive species and just plain old overuse are eroding the value of that multi billion dollar asset base that we have here. Yet even some of our best loved parks are being loved to death. Four in ten of our region's residents, particularly those in the suburban areas which developed in the second half of the twentieth century when shopping mall parking lots were considered to be the only civic space that anybody actually deserved, four in ten of our residents do not live within a safe walking distance of a simple neighborhood park and again that is in the suburban areas or places that developed more recently. To me it is astonishing to think that people can live in a place like Oregon and not be within walking distance of a neighborhood park but in fact that is the case for four in ten. That is like living in a town in Ireland and not being in walking distance of a pub. What is the point of living in Oregon if you can't be near a park? What is the point of living in a town in Ireland if you aren't in walking distance of a pub? It boggles the imagination that it is possible.

In terms of those bolder urban parks, versions of things Mayor Daley talked about in regard to Millennium Park, our deficit in that regard is even greater. That Hillsboro plaza that I described is still unfortunately a rarity. Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Portland, Vancouver, Washington are exceptional in our region in having built a public gathering place in their historic downtowns, but now Tigard, Milwaukie, Oregon City, Gresham and other communities now have aspirations to do similar distinctive parks in their downtowns but they lack the funds and financial tools to carry those out.

So it is an old cycle. It is not something new in Oregon; it is an old cycle of promise and falling short. The Olmsteds were here in 1903, defined a great vision which led to a plan for a trails network envisioned to some day total over 900 miles. But in the more than 100 some days since then we have built 194 miles and it will be more than 100 years before we complete that if we keep going at the pace that we are going. Footnote to the story is that not long after the Olmsteds left town voters rejected some of the funding for their plan so that is why some of it didn't come true.

So there are promises; there is redemption of promises; there is good news and then there is the potential for follow through. That is what we are working on now because in 2006 Metro Council voters approved $227 million for the acquisition of natural areas and trails, as well as local projects all over the region. Just this week, the Portland City Council --and hats off to them--they increased fees on new development so that parks capital funds can keep pace or hope to catch up with demand. We have success stories all over the region. Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation District, in and around Beaverton regularly wins national awards for top management practices and first class facilities.

I am not here to talk about a crisis. I am here to talk about an opportunity or potentially forgone opportunities, about how to put all those pieces together and how to go from good to great and be everything we can be.

That's where what I call Connecting Green comes in. Connecting Green is not an organization or Connecting Green is not a plan. Connecting Green is just a way of doing things and that is what we are proposing. It's a way of making all the things we are already doing add up to more than the sum of the parts and then doing a little more.

We already have a lot of great organizations, non-profits, and agencies all over the region and they are all doing good work. That is part of the point: how do we connect them all up and make them add up to more than the sum of the parts? Political boundaries, agencies, acronyms abound, all over our region and all of them play some role in our parks and natural areas network. U.S.F&W, T.H.P.R.D, P.P.& R, W.E.S., B.L.M.. O.D.F. & W., O. D.O.T, C.W.S. O.D.O.T., O.R.P.A. -- did I say O.D.A.T. twice? We need to get them thinking about paths; we need to get them thinking about bicycle transportation.

Well all those acronyms they may all be doing good work, but we're not particularly coordinated or even necessarily all that rational about how we go about it. The regional government - that's us, the Metro Council - operates some parks but only in the far eastern part of the region, Oxbow and Blue Lake, paid for by a garbage tax on the whole region. So the regional government is not truly a regional provider and in fact maybe we shouldn't be a provider at all. In the meantime the most truly regional park of all, Forest Park, is run but the smallest unit of government, a municipality, Portland, whose unwitting generous taxpayers provide that free park to thousand and thousands of users who come from unincorporated areas just outside the city limits without paying a dime for it. Our biggest unit of government, the state, runs only two small parks that maybe amount to a couple hundred of acres in the whole region even though 40% of the state's taxpayers live here in the metropolitan region. So we've got the state government running what are basically two neighborhood parks and a city government running what is basically a regional park, Forest Park, for 40 perfect or the state's population.

Now these sort of arcane and irrational bureaucratic arrangements may not matter to a whole lot of people or the average person on the street, but it seems to me that an organizational expert would look at this situation and say there are probably some geographic inequities in here that also may relate to those 4 in 10 people that don't have access at all and inefficiencies or unrealized efficiencies in how we're doing things. Inequities and inefficiencies are part of what we are trying to rectify through and effort like Connecting Green.

Our public expenditures and investments today are actually pretty fragmented and are very rarely leveraged and matched with one another. That is what we are looking for through Connecting Green: how do we match and connect and leverage one another's funds? When you pay your property taxes, you are contributing to about $159 million that gets spent on parks maintenance cumulatively around the region on operations. That is actually leading to more and more deferred maintenance, that property tax source being capped the way it is. In general, as I mentioned before, the unincorporated areas tend to pay less and yet their residents come into cities and use city parks without even knowing the difference.

There are a lot of other varied flows of money that are also uncoordinated. When you pay your sewer bill in Beaverton, Tigard, or elsewhere in the Tualatin Valley, some of your money ends up in an excellent tree planting and stream restoration program administrated by Clean Water Services, which is the sewer and surface water management agency in the Tualatin basin. When developers in most incorporated cities obtain building permits, they also pay system development charges to pay for parks improvements. When you buy a lottery ticket some of those pennies end up going to state parks, and while most of it ends up in other parts of the state rather than coming back here, some does go to state parks that we enjoy. When you pay your electric bill there's a surcharge that actually goes to the Bonneville power administration for salmon and riparian restoration that might occur along the Clackamas or Sandy River or it might not. It actually might be spent in Idaho because guess what, we have not really ever talked to Bonneville Power administration about how our efforts and aspirations along the Clackamas and Sandy might actually be teamed up with what they would like to do there. That is the type of discussion that we are having because of Connecting Green.

Really as these various intermittent and various streams of public money wend their independent channels across the landscape, they rarely converge into a common watershed so to speak. Connecting Green, this way of doing things, this way of approaching the environment and parks and natural areas, Connecting Green is about trying to create those common channels and common understanding among the myriad of organizations that area already out there doing a good job. Government and non governmental organizations, government at all levels, get them to collaborate voluntarily.

This is not any kind of a merger or mega organization at all but an attempt to get everyone together voluntarily and collaboratively to make their independent actions and expenditures more mutually supportive of one another and then ultimately supportive of what should be our shared goal which is that creation of the greatest network of parks, natural areas and trails in the world.

Let me give you just one tangible example that has surfaced in the six months or so that I and others in the parks field have been preaching this concept of Connecting Green. The example is one to build on: the Springwater Trail which is used by thousands of people. Literally multiuse, commuters, people are using it to get to and from work who used to drive their cars, recreationalists, seniors who are out for walks or kids on inline skates or bikes. The route from the Hawthorne Bridge to Gresham was pieced together painstakingly for more that 15 years, longer than it took then-governor Mark O'Hatfield to construct the entirety or what was then I-80N all the way from Ontario to Portland including hundreds of miles through the Columbia Gorge. On the Springwater the cities of Portland, Gresham and Milwaukie, as well as ourselves, the Metro Council, all contributed financially to different segments at different times with different pots of money: bond measure money, federal transportation money, local money. It's a great model of cooperation and it needs to literally go further.

When the OMSI to Sellwood segment opened, usership boomed; when the three bridges were built across Johnson Creek McLoughlin and the railroad, usership boomed even more. But in terms of going further beyond Telford road east of Gresham its terra incognita. Now it's not terra incognita in that fourteenth century sense--because explorers don't know what's there-- we actually know what's beyond Gresham. It's terra incognita simply because of artificial jurisdictional lines.

In fact, we do know what is there and what's there east of Gresham is easily known and pretty damn spectacular. What extends beyond Telford road is an abandoned railroad right of way which is currently overgrown and nearly impassable, which leads through a deep primordial canyon-- you would have no idea that you are near 1.5 million people-- called deep canyon which is now part of our acquisition target area. It emerges then a couple hundred feet from the gates of Barton Park on the Clackamas River. Now that part of the right of way is already owned by the State of Oregon and its sitting entirely disused, really unusable. From Barton, it parallels the Clackamas River and it passes within a stone's throw of various waterfront parcels along the Clackamas that are owned but us, the Metro Council or by the government of Clackamas County. It continues onto the edge of Mt. Hood National Forest, which is owned by the Federal Government. But my point at the beginning is that all of those lands are actually owned by you and those of us in public service who have trust and managed those lands need to be working together to make all those lands usable for you. It's very easy to imagine when you talk about it in this way, stitching all those different ownerships together to create the possibility of one day getting on a bike in Pioneer Court House Square, riding across the Hawthorne Bridge and two hours later pedaling quietly into the glade of a completely unmortorized campground on the banks of the Clackamas River. It's easy to imagine when you describe it and look at it that way. It is also very plausible to imagine walking or hiking just a little bit further then that and quickly being enveloped by the National Forest, then hiking further up that trail to a junction with the Pacific Crest Trail, where you could turn left and go to Canada or at least the Timberline Lodge or you could turn right and go to Mexico, or at least Crater Lake. Now is there another metropolitan region in the country or the world that has the opportunity to create an experience like that? Chicago-- can they create something like that? I don't think so. Can Paris create something like that? I don't think so. Hello? No. This is a very, very rare opportunity.

The only obstacles to capitalizing on this type of opportunity are institutional and financial obstacles, not natural obstacles. In fact the financial challenges are actually quite modest when compared to with the price tags for other forms of urban infrastructure; believe me this is also part of urban infrastructure but a relatively economical and affordable one with great return on investment. The project I'm describing isn't even that complicated, if everyone would agree to make it happen. The governor and legislature would need to get the Oregon Department of Transportation aligned with Oregon State Parks and in turn aligned with Clackamas County Parks and the Metro Council regarding the parcels along the river itself. We would all need to enlist the help of the U.S. Forest Service and the Congressional Delegation; that is all doable.

Let me just make a parenthetical comment, by the way, believe it or not, despite being a metropolitan region that is adjacent to hundreds of thousand of acres of federal lands-- we have U.S. Fish and Wildlife out along the Tualatin and B.L.M. and Forest Service on the east; we are also interlaced with the activities of lots of Federal Agencies ranging from the Corps of Engineers to the Bonneville Power Administration or FEMA with regard to flooding issues-- despite all that presence and activity in our region, our region has never given our congressional delegation a unified strategy for how we want our urban natural areas and recreation needs to interface with federal agencies. That is one of the tasks of that we are going to undertake with this Connecting Green Alliance is put together that type of unified list. It has worked for us on transportation; we need to make the same thing happen with natural resources.

But back to the Springwater trail on the way to Mt. Hood. On the way to Mt. Hood we could keep working with Portland General Electric Company on riparian restoration projects along the Clackamas; this is a partnership we already have. They have certain obligations as a generator of hydroelectricity and we have land that needs restoration. The partnership between Portland General Electric and ourselves is something that we can continue to expand out in that way or partnerships with non profits like the Trust for Public Land, which is often nimble enough to pull off public-spirited real estate deals that government can't make happen alone.

That is just one example of the type of thing we can accomplish. Connecting Green is a way of discovering those sorts of opportunities and getting all these agencies to get beyond our own turf and create the network needed to make things like this happen. That's only one example. I could stand up here for hours and give you others. I could tell you about the city of Forest Grove's visionary emerald necklace strategy for trails that connect around forest groves and up to the Veronian banks and the coast range. Or I could tell you about the city of Wilsonville's creative ideas about working with their school district and an education school and upping the ante on childhood environmental education, which is something that we also want to undertake with Connecting Green, on a grade school that is next to 260 acres that we own as a park which in turn is next to a new urbanist private development called Villebois. Again a connection between education, recreation, health and housing, all of that coming together. The point is when we start sharing our imaginations and our shared agendas and induce working relationships from among different agencies those possibilities are really unlimited. They are unlimited as what nature gave us to begin with.

Connecting Green really does begin and now end with that: with what nature gave us and with the customer. Neither nature nor the customers recognize the arbitrary jurisdictional and institutional boundaries that tend to unnecessarily fascinate those of us in government. The customer is the taxpayer, and the taxpayer is not paying just local taxes but also regional, state and federal taxes and may not know the difference; all the taxpayer knows is that it is coming our of the same pocket. The customer is also that family that heads out for a walk on Saturday morning around Forest Grove not knowing and as far as I am concerned not really needing to know the difference between land we own through the bond program, or land owned by Clean Water Service, or land owned by the city, or the land owned by the US Fish and Wildlife. Let's give the customer that shows up from out of town in Pioneer Square Court house because they are here for a convention; let's give that customer a single map and a website that shows all the different parks and trails we have regardless of what agency owns or operates them. It's easily doable. Just as the Star Alliance brand enhances rather than compromises the distinctive brands of companies as varied as Luftansa, United Airlines and Mexicana. These are all companies who all have their distinct way of doing things but choose to work together where it makes sense under this alliance type brand. So to the brand of Connecting Green will add coherence and identity to our region's parks providers without diminishing their local autonomy or their ability to do things differently in Forest Grove then they do in Gresham. But in communicating with the public better and more coherently and cohesively, whether they communicate with them as taxpayers at the ballot box or customers on Saturday morning, we will make the compelling case for confidence in the system and the ability to grow it even further and develop it into this greatest network in the world.

Why should we settle for less here? To settle for less really is squandering the gifts that we have received from nature and we have received from earlier generations. We have those natural assets here in the region; we have the people where who care about it; we have the traditions of doing it. We just need to set the goal and work for it and in doing that we will achieve having the best network of parks, trails and natural areas in the world.