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2006 State of the Region address

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On Jan. 17, 2006, Metro Council President David Bragdon delivered his State of the Region address to the Beaverton Chamber of Commerce.

It was either Ann Landers or Alfred Lord Tennyson who said that all great stories include either a wedding or a funeral. To be on the safe side, I will give you one of each.

The funeral was held in Pioneer Courthouse Square, year before last, in honor of Ernie Bonner. Ernie had been a Portland city planner in the 1970s and a Metro Councilor in the 1980s, and passed away in 2004. I attended his service on a blustery day.

Like a lot of us, Ernie was born elsewhere – but chose to come to Oregon. He had moved here from Cleveland, Ohio. One of the speakers at his funeral described why Ernie came here: He thought the Portland area was different from most metropolitan regions in our nation.

Those areas, whether they were Cleveland or Phoenix or even Seattle, were growing in ways that took choices away from people; those places were spreading out so far that people were forced to live farther and farther from where they could work, or even shop or go to school. Some neighborhoods were being abandoned, while others were overwhelmed with growth – and in neither case did people have much choice about it; decay or growth were things that just happened, beyond our control. People in those metropolitan areas also had fewer and fewer options about how to get around – it was the car or nothing.

Ernie thought good planning could be an antidote – that good planning was a means to giving people more choices.

As I listened to the speeches at Ernie’s funeral, I had the nagging feeling that at some point between his time and mine, planning in Oregon had come to seem less about choices, and more about codifying what people couldn’t do. It seemed like the system had us spend a lot of time litigating sub-paragraph “this”, article “that” of Goal whatever, Factor 9.3, as interpreted by LCDC and reinterpreted by LUBA and remanded by the Court of Appeals two years later.

That shift, unfortunately, let some extremists say they’d rather junk Oregon’s system. Often those critics cloak their arguments with beguiling words like “property rights” and “freedom,” – overlooking the fact that our country, the world’s best example of liberty, was founded with the recognition that in a civil society, freedom isn’t the result of everybody doing anything he or she wants, any time at all, without consideration of the consequences on others. Philosophically, that style of government is more accurately called anarchy – or, in land-use terms, Houston, Texas.

So, in 2006, 230 years after the Declaration of Independence proved that liberty comes through collective action, that tension still plays out in Oregon. Perhaps the best manifestation of that tension is the paradox that shortly after 61% of Oregon voters approved Measure 37, throwing the planning system into chaos, a poll showed that 70% of Oregonians say planning has made Oregon a better place to live.

Resolving that paradox is an urgent challenge. And the world is not going to slow down while we figure it out: projections are that over a million more people will be living here in the next 25 years. Many (like most of the people living here now) will have been born someplace else and will come here for the reasons we came here, but a third to half will be our own children and grandchildren.

Our choice – our choice as a region – is whether we guide that growth so that it contributes to our region’s economy and livability, or whether we sit back with complacency, or false definitions of freedom, and allow that growth to crush what makes our communities special.

One of the good choices we made in the past is to have a forum for making decisions regionally. Voters approved creation of the Metro Council because they realized there are some things done more efficiently if done regionally, and because in a modern world, arbitrary boundaries drawn in the 19th century don’t make much sense. It makes sense to have an elected Metro Council, directly responsible to the voters, to guide and coordinate interdependent issues that individual cities can’t deal with on their own.

In many ways, our history of regional cooperation is strong.

To start with z, there is the Zoo. In the 1970s, it was broke, a ward of the Portland city government – yet over half its patrons were coming from Beaverton, from Oregon City, from Gresham: places outside the Portland city limits. When the voters approved transferring it to the Metro Council’s management, and approved its tax base at the ballot box, they were recognizing that the Zoo no longer belongs to any one city government but belongs to everyone in the region.

We also manage the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, the Expo Center and the Oregon Convention Center – all regional assets, and, again, a recognition that when tourists come to our area, they don’t just inject money into a five-block area of northeast Portland: they also spend money at the wineries outside Forest Grove or in the restaurants of Troutdale, gateway to the Columbia Gorge.

Then there is garbage. You may take it for granted, but it’s one of those things that you’d actually hear more about if things were going wrong. The fact that it’s not controversial must mean we’re doing something right, because once upon a time it was controversial, when each part of the region struggled to site a landfill. It’s another of those common sense things, more efficient to achieve by working together: if 25 cities had to figure out what to do with their trash independently, we wouldn’t have the efficiencies of scale of one big landfill in eastern Oregon.

Our regional parks and natural areas are another example of a need that could only be met regionally – and which was voter-approved. In 1995, voters entrusted the Metro Council with the funds and responsibility to purchase large tracts of important natural areas from willing sellers – something no individual town could have done on its own, yet an investment which would be equally valuable to all. Today, whether you live in Gladstone or Tigard, you own over 8,000 acres of natural areas that will be in public ownership forever.

We also plan the region’s transportation network. Again, common sense: roads, streets, transit lines don’t stop at city limits.

So that brings us back to land-use planning, where the stakes are now very high, and where the Metro Council is on the verge of taking a new look at how we manage growth.

Responding to more than a million newcomers is not a matter of putting out extra guest towels. But nor is it a matter of arguing about it the way we have been. For nearly all of the past ten years, the Metro Council dealt with growth projections by focusing almost entirely on the edge of town, on the urban growth boundary, litigating about a relative handful of acres in an adversarial, expensive process that was often unable to take local communities’ aspirations into account.

Nobody involved was satisfied, particularly the seven of us who felt we had been placed in “no win” situations.

Going forward, under the gun of a state law that says we have to repeat the whole ordeal by 2008, and under the pressure of these new unprecedented population projections, we are going to take a New Look at how and where we can accommodate growth, both inside the existing boundary in areas where it makes sense, and if and when we expand the boundary, how we do so in ways and places consistent with community goals.

What are those goals, the goals not just of the Metro Council but of people in this region? The average person would agree that two goals are important to our families:

• True economic development that equips our region to compete globally, giving our citizens a wider range of choices for earning a living.
• A natural and urban environment that protects our quality of life, with a variety of choices of neighborhood and lifestyle.

Let’s talk about that first goal, the foundation for any successful region: the ability to generate the wages and economic opportunities that fund the good life.

Last Monday, nearly a thousand business leaders and public officials gathered at the Oregon Convention Center for the statewide business summit. Michael Porter, the respected economic development strategist, gave a lecture beamed in from the Harvard Business School. Asked how to improve Oregon’s economic prospects, Porter said the competitive edge today is about leveraging a region’s distinctive characteristics.

Comparative advantage, he said, requires integrating all the factors at which a region excels. In fact, our quality of life and environment were two of the first things out of his mouth in describing Oregon’s strengths. Comparative advantage is also about education, and also transportation. About research and development and also affordable housing. We must do all these things, and more, well – and, most of all, make them work together.

But no one organization can do all of these things unilaterally. Not the business people gathered in that room, not the governor, not the chamber of commerce, not the Metro Council, not the department of transportation or the board of higher education. But nor can it be woven together without all of those interests working together.

That’s why last year the Metro Council approved the first ever comprehensive economic development strategy for the region, a sign that we will do our part in helping set the table for prosperity.

For example, we’re committed to funneling resources under our control – things like transportation dollars – where they will increase the productivity of our region’s companies, not be wasted on roads to nowhere. That pledge will be fulfilled as we work with the trucking industry and shippers to develop a freight plan for our trade-reliant region.

For another example, that also means considering the economic consequences of our environmental policies, as the Metro Council now does, and working to get the greatest amount of environmental protection through the greatest level of cooperation.

It means using some of the most sophisticated mapping software –as we have at the Metro Council – to provide quality information to firms that want to expand or locate here, and do it at the speed of a mouse-click. It means applying for a federal grant, as we have now done, to map old industrial brownfields which could be re-used.

It means that when Linus Torvald, the inventor of Linux, who could live anywhere, chooses to live in our region in part because – as he told the Oregonian – he likes it that he and his children can safely ride their bikes to a neighborhood shopping area, that’s an anecdote we can all relate to. But when the open source development labs in Beaverton, or the IBM Linux development center, and other companies all follow in his wake, that local anecdote becomes a story the world notices – especially now that Linux is growing three times faster than Windows and has 10 percent of the network market – maybe Bill Gates is stuck in Seattle’s traffic?

Another breakthrough statement came out of last week’s business summit: in bold letters, the Portland Business Alliance’s draft regional business plan stated: “strategy isn’t about simply being efficient or cheap: it is about making choices.” This observation is a dramatic departure from some past conventional wisdom about the relationship between economic development and land supply. Until now, to the extent our land-use system took economics into account, it was under an assumption that competitiveness is about being cheap – or the mistaken fallacy that land development is automatically the same as economic development.

Once upon a time, Oregon’s economic development approach could be that simple: we had cheap water, cheap utilities, cheap labor costs and cheap land, especially compared to our major competitor, California. Now, we’re recognizing we don’t want to compete with India or Taiwan on the basis of cost, and must compete on high quality instead. And so our land-use system should now recognize that cheap land is not an enduring feature of our economic competitiveness.

The lesson is that the Metro Council’s new look at commercial land supply should be less about whether it’s cheap, and more about whether it’s in the right place, has the required infrastructure like transportation, water and sewer, and supports opportunity for our traded sector and distinctive character, not just real estate speculation or generic office parks that could be anywheresville.

If we look at commercial and industrial opportunities in this new way, we can preserve our communities’ identities and invest tax dollars wisely. The future might look more like the way downtown Hillsboro is starting to look, at the intersection of historic and high tech: Pacific University converting vacant parking lots into a new health care learning center next to a hospital and light rail, less than a year after Mayor Tom Hughes opened a new plaza and five-story civic center where there were once dilapidated old buildings. Or, if we look for new financing tools like updated versions of what were called urban renewal bonds, an abandoned water treatment plant along the Sandy River could become a retail jewel in charming downtown Troutdale, with new homes walking distance away, complete with river views as good as the ones Lewis and Clark had near the same spot.

The Metro Council’s New Look at regional choices can help those communities fashion that type of creative revitalization. We’re working with the city of Milwaukie on a boulevard improvement to McLoughlin which will help open up their Willamette waterfront, and has made a new housing development possible on an abandoned grocery store site. We’ve provided transportation dollars to Gresham for access improvements to their downtown – and the financial analysis shows that it is more economical for the city of Gresham to grant a tax abatement for one to two additional floors on office or residential buildings in their downtown than it would be to extend new infrastructure to the edge of town. Our New Look at how we grow must take all those true financial costs of different growth patterns into account.

The other major issue our council will be working on this year relates to that second major value that people in this region hold close to their hearts: the preservation of our natural environment. I once asked a venture capitalist what makes the metro area a good place for high-tech start-ups. He was not joking when he answered, “the hiking.” And I have heard from the biggest of companies, Intel, about how their valuable employees resist being transferred away from Oregon because they love its natural lifestyle.

We must continue to preserve more natural areas, protect fish and wildlife habitat, and maintain our water quality, or else this won’t be Oregon. Last fall, I asked local business and community leaders to fashion a plan that will accomplish this goal.

They have recommended a ballot measure for November 2006 that will ask voters to approve $220 million to purchase more natural areas from willing sellers, and continue the work started by the successful 1995 effort that enabled us to set aside over 8000 acres, ranging from sensitive areas along the Tualatin and its tributaries, to the tops of Cooper Mountain near Beaverton or Mount Talbert near Sunnyside, to the banks of the Clackamas river.

When the Blue Ribbon Committee issued its report, the Beaverton Valley Times editorialized, “the track record of the 1995 bond measure program exemplifies what ought to be the first rule of government: do what you say you’re going to do. That should give voters confidence….to continue this program.”

I hope that as you learn more about it, you will agree that this ballot measure will have earned the support of voters throughout the region in November.

Meantime, we’re working in other creative ways to ensure both environmental health and individual choices. I promised you a story about a marriage, since I gave you one about a funeral, so here it is: last month, the Metro Council and the Homebuilders Association jointly hired an architect who specializes in green building practices. She is going to work with developers and government officials to make environmentally-friendly development more feasible in this region. To longtime watchers of the Metro Council, or of the homebuilders, this joint hiring may have seemed like an odd marriage – that the Metro Council is partnering with the homebuilders and that the homebuilders are interested in green development. To those who are shocked, we say: there is more where that came from, if you are willing to give up your outdated stereotypes about the Metro Council, developers or environmentalists.

Those are the choices we are going to be working on – and by “we” I mean not just the Metro Council, but “we”, you and I. Choices about whether we are going to prosper by building on our strengths, choices about whether we are going to preserve our clean water and natural areas or not.

When I think about those choices I remember one warm day last summer when I was on Cooper Mountain, one of the natural areas you own because of the Metro Council’s acquistion efforts. It was one of those August days in Oregon and from the top of Cooper Mountain you can see across to the coast range shimmering in the distance, and standing there I was so happy to be able to be in a place like that.

Then, just a little bit later, as I was driving home, passing through Beaverton, it occurred to me that five minutes’ll drive from some of the most modern high tech labs in the world I had been in that beautiful natural setting – and that both the natural area and the Silicon Forest were the product of good investment choices people had made in the past.

So today, when I wonder whether a hundred years from now people will be able to enjoy that view from Cooper Mountain, or when I wonder what new technological invention in Beaverton will be next to revolutionize the world, I know we need to act so that future generations will be able to have those experiences, and those opportunities. Peter Drucker, one of the great business thinkers of all time, passed away last year, and – while I already told you one story about another funeral – he once said something that is worth remembering when you are wondering what the future will bring. He said, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” That is what our work is about, and I appreciate the chance to do it.

Thank you.

Need assistance?

Metro Council President David Bragdon
503-797-1889 | 503-797-1793 fax
david.bragdon@oregonmetro.gov
or
Eileen Schill
503-797-1560
eileen.schill@oregonmetro.gov