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2006 City Club Friday Forum

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On June 30, 2006, Metro Council President David Bragdon delivered his address, "A New Look at the State of the Region," at the City Club's Friday Forum.

Thank you for having me here today.

Lessons from Chicago

Last month, Metro Councilor Brian Newman, Forest Grove Mayor Richard Kidd, and several other Oregonians went to Chicago for a seminar about regional economic competitiveness, sponsored by the Commercial Club of Chicago and its affiliate, a public-private regional planning organization called Chicago Metropolis 2020.

While in Chicago, we were repeatedly reminded of that city’s motto, coined by Daniel Burnham: “make no small plans.” The evidence of Chicago’s plans were in front of our eyes: Spectacular architecture. Job growth. Revitalized theaters and museums. New and renovated buildings in the thriving downtown loop, and in older neighborhoods too. Incredible Millennium Park on Lake Michigan, and an emerging natural areas and trails network extending through the suburbs. Strategic investments to expedite freight trains through the nation’s biggest rail hub. Corporate headquarters, including Fortune 500 companies, where CEOs, whether in suburb or city, play positive leadership roles in the shared civic life of the region.

We learned that “plans” in Chicago are more than government documents – plans in Chicago are prologue to reality. And we learned that those plans become reality because public and private and non-profit leaders work together to accomplish tangible objectives.

You learn a lot about home by going away. Oregonians pride ourselves on “planning,” but many of the accomplishments of our planning are from years past: Hillsboro’s industrial urban renewal plan in the 1980s or Portland’s downtown plan in the 1970s, for example – two plans which succeeded precisely because they were tied directly to investment policies that understood shrewd private money will follow shrewd public money. But in more recent times, the Oregon pastime of planning has been more about conflict than commonalities, more about what not to do than about what to do. It certainly hasn't been about bringing different sectors of society together to actually accomplish stuff.

In Chicago, the Commercial Club – the major business organization there – gives visiting dignitaries a souvenir. Whether the visitor is the Prime Minister of Germany, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, or Ted Turner, the business organization gives her or him a booklet about the Chicago Metropolis 2020 plan – a plan that addresses issues like freight access, education and economic growth, affordable housing, and parks and natural area preservation.

Now, close your eyes: can anyone here imagine the Portland Business Alliance giving copies of our Metro Council’s 2040 plan to visiting dignitaries?

No, unfortunately, I can’t picture it now either.

2040 Concept: A Good Vision

Members of the City Club probably do know about the 2040 concept – many people in this room probably remember the vision was developed in the 1990s, when the year 2040 was 50 years in the future. The simple idea was that as population grows – which it inevitably will – our region should develop, and redevelop, in denser urban centers, rather than sprawling in endless suburbia.

It is a good vision, still supported by the public in scientific polling. And some of the vision is coming true. Thanks to the urban growth boundary and changes in zoning (and lots of often unstated credit to demographic changes which reshaped the real estate market) our area has had significant population growth without sprawling the way most US metropolitan areas have. I visited my uncle outside of Phoenix last spring (remarkably far outside Phoenix, as it turned out) and was stunned at how far he has to drive just to get to a grocery store. And he does have to drive, because there is no other way to get there. By comparison, things are working better here.

Just the same, many Oregonians on the front lines of growth management today aren’t exactly thumbing through the 2040 booklet and finding the operating instructions needed to make the 2040 concept actually work everywhere. Picture the Tigard Planning Commission, volunteers sitting up until 11:00 at night, presiding over controversial hearings where neighbors complain loudly about new building applications in town – their protests filling the same chamber where similar voices just as vociferously opposed annexations on the edge of town. Or the parents in Beaverton who see new neighbors moving in but no new schools getting built, because Oregon’s system does not allow new growth to pay for new schools. Or the Mayor of Sandy who sees Gresham still creeping over the hill toward her while Sandy also expands toward Gresham, even though both city councils say they don’t want this. Or the young woman in Oregon City who has to drive all the way to Hillsboro to find work. She hasn’t found an answer to her problem in the 2040 booklet yet either.

Even some of the experts, who could recite the 2040 plan in theory, have valid unanswered questions about reality. Like the visiting urbanists from Vancouver B.C. On their way in from PDX on light rail, they pass through the Lloyd District and scratch their heads and say, “I was told Portland has a lively, urban center: what are these vacant lots of asphalt doing here? If this were Vancouver, we’d build a ten story glass condo on this block and a day care center and greenspace on that block…and put all these parking lots underground.” Their Portland hosts can only sheepishly say that while the 2040 concept says we should make that neighborhood work, the concept lacks a financial chapter that tells us how to make it work.

Each of those anecdotes is a good reason to take a new look at the 2040 concept. But the best reason to take that new look is to figure out how to make the concept work. There are also a million more reasons: updated population forecasts released last year, which predict that a million more people will be here 25 years from now – the population my predecessors projected for the year 2040 will actually arrive here early, more like 2025.

How To Accommodate a Million People

My colleague, Councilor Brian Newman, recently researched what it took to accommodate one million people in the manner we have been doing it. He discovered our region added our most recent million residents in a roughly 40 year period from the late '60s until now. Brian recently challenged us to pretend we were the Metro Council of 1968 – if there had been a Metro Council then, which was especially hard for Brian to imagine, since he hadn’t even been born yet then himself – and to ask whether Metro Councilors then would have anticipated the changes coming. His real question, of course, is whether we can correlate the magnitude of those changes, in 1968 terms, to the magnitude of the changes we might see, in 2006 terms.

From the mid 1960s until today, the region did a lot of things that shaped how those million people lived, worked, and got around. Some of those things were:

Completed Interstates 5, 84, 405, and 205, including the Marquam, Fremont and Glenn Jackson bridges – every inch of which were paid for with a ratio of one thin local dime for ninety cents of federal money. Think of it: ten cents on the dollar built the basic skeleton of our region. Hundreds of miles of arterials were widened, also funded by enormous infusions of federal cash and increasing state gas taxes. Gas itself was 34 cents a gallon in 1968, and most of it came from friendly, stable places like Texas and Oklahoma – states (unlike our oil suppliers today) that not only had democratically-elected governments, but even had democrats back then (yes, even Texas). Light rail was not even on the drawing boards in the late '60s, but within 35 years, four lines got built. Rivergate in North Portland and Ronler Acres near Aloha, which were marshes and farms in the mid-1960s, became Oregon’s major centers of international trade and employment, all because private activity followed public investment. Tremendous wealth was created for the state as a result.

There were other changes: All the top ten private employers in Oregon in the late 1960s – every single one – has vanished from the top ten list today. some, like Pacific Power and Tektronix, just dropped down below 10 in the rankings, others, like Georgia Pacific, moved, while others, like Evans Products, disappeared altogether. Intel did not have a single employee in Oregon in 1968 and Nike did not exist. Nor did public institutions like TriMet, statewide land use planning, or the urban growth boundary. Driving from the eastern border of Portland, around 50^th Avenue, to Gresham then felt somewhat like driving from Portland to Estacada feels today. Gresham was then 9,000 people, while today it is 90,000.

The median price of a house in 1968, regionwide, was $16,200 – just over a two-to-one ratio to the median average annual income of $7,700. In other words, two years’ salary roughly equated to the price of a house. In the mid-60s, Portland State rejoiced at being upgraded from lowly state college status, perhaps not even imagining it would someday be not only a state university but also the state’s largest. Virtually all the community college campuses in our region were conceived, planned, funded, and built during this period too.

And, unthinkable as it seemed at the time, somewhere along the way, women were admitted to the Portland City Club.

Creating the Future

Councilor Newman’s story was not intended as nostalgia. His point is that to not merely accommodate one million people, but to be economically competitive and livable, the region both consciously and unconsciously transformed itself: created brand new institutions, invented new public policies and new ways of doing business, and invested billions and billions of dollars in public and private money.

Today we can look back and say some of those investments were wise ones we’re grateful for and that others weren’t so wise and that we now regret them. And we can also think of investments we wish had been made. Brian’s point was that the way growth expressed itself on the landscape was not random (though it sometimes looks like that) but the product of national priorities and funding mechanisms of the 1950s and 1960s. Both deliberate and implicit choices shaped growth – and the city changed as a result.

The magnitude of those changes could not have been foreseen, let alone mandated, by whoever was speaking at City Club on the last Friday in June 1968. Similarly, all I can predict today is that over the coming decades we will either passively undergo or decisively lead transformations of a similar or greater magnitude, that no single one of us can entirely formulate today. New institutions will be born and others will need to die. Old funding mechanisms will be exhausted and new ones will need to be created.

Some of you may find it disconcerting to hear the head of our revered planning agency confess that our foresight is fallible – though others may find the novelty of that confession from Metro refreshing. Either way, we ought to follow Peter Drucker’s advice: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

That’s my main point today – and what taking a new look at 2040 really means to me. It’s what makes the current Metro Council’s efforts distinct from past Metro Councils: we’re not predicting the future, and not just abstractly planning for it. Instead we’re hungry to engage with willing partners who can help create it.

Collaboratively creating rather than unilaterally planning means we will have to be even more innovative for our time than our predecessors were for theirs – and they did a lot of innovative things. In particular, I’ve become increasingly convinced that success depends more than anything else on becoming much more strategic about investment forces – public, but mostly private, and the interaction of those public and private forces for the common good.

As Homer Williams says, the public sector has some types of currency to spend and the private sector has other types of currency to spend, all of it limited – the public has the currency of regulations which can be tailored, or taxation which can be modulated, or infrastructure dollars and publicly-owned amenities which can be spent one place or another. Private citizens have different colors of currency: dollars they can invest in Portland real estate or Oregon high tech start-ups or Swiss treasury bills or second homes in Colorado or Asian mutual funds. I think it’s the choices about how all that currency gets spent, and how the public and private choices influence each other, that will define where the action is in the future.

There are two opposite, but equally mistaken, reactions to that history I just told – and those two different but mistaken perspectives are holding us back now. Those who hear that history of the late 20^th century and mistakenly conclude the answer to our 21^st century challenges must be to just get on a plane to Washington D.C. and somehow obtain another 90-10 deal to widen all the highways, and encourage Gresham to spill into Estacada, are missing the lesson, and don’t have much of a grip on what is realistic or sustainable. But those who devoutly believe we simply need to keep uttering ritual incantations to bring Tom McCall back from the dead are going to continue to be disappointed too. Neither 34 cent a gallon gas nor Tom McCall are coming back. Get…over…. it!

New and Innovative Investments

So here are three things we are going to do, as we take a new look at the future:

One, a capital investment and fiscally-oriented growth management strategy that induces the outcomes we want with financial tools that are far more powerful than the purely regulatory tools we have been using. The old fiscal systems of financing growth are broken, anyway. 800 acres of land north of Beaverton we brought into the urban growth boundary in 2002 is still sitting there, not even annexed to a city, undeveloped because neither the property owners nor the local governments are willing or able to pay for prerequisites like the estimated $240 million that it will cost just for the arterial roads to link the proposed new subdivisions to Highway 26 – to say nothing of the hundreds of millions more for water and sewer pipes, schools, parks and fire stations. (So the next time you hear grousing about the costs of jump-starting development at South Waterfront, remember there are big price tags on other styles of development, too. They’ve just been better hidden.) For decades, federal subsidies to new suburban water and sewer systems and highways underwrote those expansions at the edge, even while the capital needs of existing systems and established neighborhoods were being starved. In Oregon, local governments used to be happy to extend services into newly annexed areas, figuring new property taxes ultimately make it pencil out. But federal deficits, Measures 5, 47 and 50, changes to annexation law, and voter attitudes have changed all those equations for good. The old way of paying for those things (which were hardly the free market some would have had us believe they were) is dying, but we haven’t invented the new ones yet.

I can’t predict what that new invention will be, but with our partners in local government and industry we must reform our broken systems of public finance and municipal governance, specifically as they relate to growth management, both at the edge and in the centers – and try to replace the old tools that used to underwrite the type of growth they wanted in the 1950s with new ones that underwrite the type of growth we want today.

Again, I don’t know the substance of the outcome today, but my hunch is those new fiscal and taxation tools might include ones like expanded use of tax increment financing, transfers of development rights, more local improvement districts and system development charges, or tax programs like the Vertical Housing Development Zones that Gresham and Milwaukie are using to revive their historic downtowns. Oops, sorry, that was a bunch of technical terms – I hate it when I do that – in lay terms, let’s just say we’ve got to find the financially-oriented tools needed to develop and redevelop the town centers that the authors of the 2040 concept quaintly hoped would bloom simply by virtue of designation on a map. Now that we know making 2040 work is not a matter of regulation (guarding against the bad) but a matter of investment (building the good) we need to get the forces of the dollar to work on it.

Second, we’ve already started on the primary component of that new capital strategy, an innovative update of the regional transportation plan, led by Councilor Rex Burkholder. Until this year, transportation planning was founded on underlying assumptions from the 1950s that are in fact no longer operative today. Specifically, we are still planning and engineering as if dollars still cost a dime, as they did when LBJ was president. As a result, we have planned road and highway systems that would cost twice the amount of tax revenue we can realistically foresee we will have, as if in denial of the fact that voters have emphatically turned down gas tax increases. Now, under Councilor Burkholder’s leadership, we are doing what a business would do: basing our projected expenditures on a realistic revenue forecast, and trying to target investments to the highways, roads, bridges or transit lines where the overall return on investment is highest, for example in terms of leveraging economic growth. It is an ROI approach that, strangely enough, has not been tried before.

Third, this fall we’re going to ask the voters to make a targeted, specific investment in another of our region’s most distinctive systems: to protect key natural areas and streams. Our November ballot measure will direct the acquisition of key parcels of natural areas and stream banks, to protect our water quality and connection to nature. Finally, an environmental measure the business world should be enthusiastically for. It’s an investment that will last forever, and a yes vote this November will help keep this region the special place it is.

Partnerships Across the Region

Those are some of the “whats” we are doing. The “how” is as important. Another difference about the Metro Council today is that we realize we cannot do any of this work unilaterally. When we recognized that our challenge is not developing a vision but making that vision work, we also recognized we needed to make new alliances with those who have the ability to turn vision into reality.

Here are four practical examples of how we have been doing that, examples from just the past six months:

One, we recently teamed up with the Portland Business Alliance and the freight industry on a cost of congestion survey, to identify the most important hotspots for the shipments that move our economy. If Metro Councilors want to write a transportation plan that emphasizes economic return, we figure it’s probably more useful for us to listen to Teamsters than to each other.

Two, my colleague Councilor Rod Park showed us how both crafting our natural areas ballot measure and re-orienting some of our illegal dumpsite clean-up efforts gave us several new opportunities to partner with neighborhood non-profits in new ways. We’re providing seed money which unlocks volunteer efforts and youth education along streams all over the region. Again, it was a case of realizing there are better ways to do things and involve more people.

Third, we developed an agreement with the construction and development industries that says July 1 – tomorrow – they will start paying a small new construction excise tax (yes, a new tax, which they asked to have imposed on them) in order to fund the planning needed to prepare new sites for development. We reached the solution only by bringing all the parties together for some pretty frank negotiations, but we got to a conclusion industry and local government both like.

Fourth, as another unusual example, we and the Homebuilders Association jointly hired a specialist in green building techniques – she works for us and for the industry in promoting the use of environmentally-friendly construction methods.

In the end, it’s about getting good things done. That brings us back to where we started this talk, in Chicago. Some of the lessons my colleagues and I learned there need to be applied here, to change our modes and expectations of what planning can mean in Oregon. When Chicagoans say, “make no small plans,” they don’t mean, “have no small hearings.” By “no small plans” they don’t mean, “print very thick volumes of complicated zoning code language.” When Daniel Burnham exhorted Chicagoans to stir peoples’ minds, he didn’t mean endless public involvement processes to write vague platitudes on butcher paper with different colored magic markers. No, when Chicagoans say “make no small plans,” they mean: make plans that lead to the construction of great buildings; they mean: make plans that speed up intercity freight and create economic opportunity; they mean make plans which lead to a beautiful park on Lake Michigan; they mean make plans which produce affordable housing. They mean make plans in order to get something done.

To make those sorts of not-small plans here, and truly implement them, regional planning can no longer belong exclusively to the Metro Council. By the very act of taking a new look at 2040, we are also sharing ownership of it – sharing ownership especially with those people who have a piece of carrying it out, whether it’s the people on that hardworking Planning Commission in Tigard, that downtown development association in Gresham, the Johnson Creek Watershed Council or members of the Teamsters Union – because they are going to be the ones who help shape the world of the year 2040 and need to be involved in it now. The term “involvement” can no longer be a monopoly for a handful of self-appointed activists, who may ably advocate for desires but are not accountable for results. Instead, the Metro Council needs “involvement” to mean the commitment of representative leaders and organizations across the region, willing to engage with us to not merely make no small plans, but to carry them out.

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