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Metro Council President David Bragdon's 2007 Connecting Green speech

Planning and conservation  ›  Natural areas, parks and trails  ›  The Intertwine  ›  Connecting Green 2007 event summary  ›  2007 Connecting Green speech

On June 28, 2007 David convened elected officials, business and non-profit leaders, and citizens and issued a challenge to take the necessary steps to develop the best system of parks, trails and natural areas in the world

Flora, Fauna and Turf 

The first thing I want us to do is to take a look at this gift.

Look: it is a metropolitan region in an exceptional natural setting.

Surrounded by hills and mountains.

Laced with rivers and streams.

Look at this gift.

In and around the region, even in its most urban parts: stands of ancient trees, valleys and little canyons, forested buttes.

Now look around this room for a minute: this region has a lot of human resources too. This unusual region is populated by people who love the place. They have an ethic about taking care of it.

Look at this map and you'll also see that human beings create human institutions: political boundaries, agencies, acronyms. U.S.F&W, T.H.P.R.D., P.P.&R, W.E.S., B.L.M., O.D.F. & W., ODOT, POVA, ORPA! County and city boundaries drawn in the 1850s, congressional districts, a state border.

In some ways, the boundaries are helpful in organizing ourselves - in other ways they keep us apart.

Today is about making natural connections: not just connections with nature, but connections among human organizations. Today I am going challenge you to cross artificial boundaries - public/private, state/local.

Today is about flora and fauna but also about bureaucratic turf.

From the foothills of the coast range on the west, to the banks of the sandy river on the east, from the fifth plain of the Columbia to the French prairie of the Willamette valley -- we live amid remarkable landscapes.

We could sit back and boast that when the glaciers receded, nature gave us more stunning natural gifts than what Minneapolis or St. Louis or Chicago got. But today is not just about what nature gave us - it's mostly about what we do with nature. About not squandering the gift.

Our friends who are here today from Columbus, Ohio or St. Paul, Minnesota or Chicago don't wake up to find alpine streams or towering fir trees in their cities. They don't get to live near the Clackamas River rushing down from the cascade foothills, they don't get to gaze up at the Chehalem Ridge or the Gresham-boring lava domes. The mayor of Chicago has a very impressive city hall, but i bet he doesn't get to see many great blue herons fly past his window the way the mayor of Portland does.

But, my smug Oregonians (and Washingtonians), our visitors today do have some things we don't have. Let me be frank about what they've cultivated in their regions. They have three things:

• The ambition to be the best they can be,
• The creativity to innovate across artificial boundaries,
• And a willingness to spend money on their parks, and leverage it - with methods of measuring their performance and return on investment.

Here's the big difference between us and them: Chicago plays to win, by improving on what nature gave them; while we Oregonians simply play to not lose what we have. If we change one thing by the end of today, let's change that.

Let's not squander the gift.

Let's talk about what we start with:

In this greater region we have over 60,000 acres of land owned by the public - owned by you. If you walked into the assessor's office and asked to see the deeds, the paperwork on about 10,000 of those acres would say Metro Council is the owner, the paperwork on other acreage would say City of Portland is the owner, some would say U.S. Fish and wildlife service, a few belong to Oregon state parks, many acres would say city of Tigard or city of Fairview or Tualatin hills park and rec district - I could go on, but really the deeds on all of those acres should more accurately say the owner is you.

You enjoy other assets that don't have ownership deeds - like the Tualatin River, or the view of Mount Hood in august. Or the osprey who had breakfast at Smith and Bybee lakes this morning, and will have lunch at Oaks Bottom this noon. Or the steelhead that just finished a good overnight rest near Sellwood and better start swimming upriver toward Gladstone, because if he meets the osprey at lunchtime it's not going to turn out well for the steelhead.

Now, not to be rude to our visitors, but what natural resources did Chicago and St. Louis have to start with: some cornfields and a few ponds? (well, O.K., Mayor Daley, sorry, I guess Lake Michigan is more than a pond, I'm exaggerating.) But look at the gifts we have to start with here. Hills and buttes with views in all directions, 855 miles of rivers and streams, trees that grow taller than the lights at Wrigley Field, more than 75 extinct volcanoes (at least we think they are extinct), 333 playgrounds, thousands of picnic tables, several of the best international public gardens in the world, a nationally-acclaimed arboretum, and the one and only public plaza in America where kids play in a fountain with a LEED-gold certified city hall on one side and century-old giant sequoia trees on the other. That's downtown Hillsboro in the picture, with the giant sequoias reflected in the energy-efficient windows - shouldn't every community in the region have a plaza like that in its downtown?

When you size it up, we have a lot of natural heritage. But another way to put that is that we have a lot of unrealized potential. Unlike natural systems, sometimes our governmental systems don't work in rational ways. And I am concerned that the way we are organized now, our fragmented non-system will not deliver on the rare promise that this region has for exceptional parks and natural areas. There are so many oddities in how we do things. The "regional" government, 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. Meantime, the most truly regional park, Forest Park, is run by a city government, whose unwittingly generous taxpayers provide that free present to the thousands of users who come from all over the region. Our biggest unit of government, the state, runs only two small parks in our region, a few hundred acres, even though 45 percent of the state's taxpayers live here. And Uncle Sam? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service owns lands along the Tualatin river on our west side and the U.S. Forest Service owns lands along the Sandy River on our east side - but they are each part of different cabinet departments, uncoordinated with each other, and uncoordinated with us.

Our public expenditures and investments are fragmented and rarely leveraged, even though we are already spending good money on good things. When you pay your property taxes, you pay a portion of the cumulative $159 million a year that local governments in our region spend on parks operations, though most of the mayors here this morning could show you they have a backlog of deferred maintenance because those parks are being loved to death. You also pay school taxes which fund (unfortunately shrinking) environmental science and outdoor school programs in those parks.

When you pay your sewer bill in Beaverton or Tigard, some of your money ends up in a tree planting and stream restoration capital fund, well managed by clean water services. When developers in Sherwood and Oregon City and nearly all other incorporated cities in our region obtain building permits to construct new houses, they also pay system development charges to pay for parks improvements.

When you take out your garbage each week, you pay a small excise tax that helps repair the picnic shelters at Oxbow, and when you buy a lottery ticket a few cents go to state parks. When you pay your electric bill there's a surcharge that goes to the Bonneville Power Administration for salmon and riparian restoration.

But as these various intermittent streams and trickles of public money wend their independent channels across the landscape; let's ask ourselves if they are they converging into a common watershed - one that will produce the best network of parks and natural areas we could have. Well, not to give away the ending, but my opinion is that the way we have been going about it will not get us there.

Meantime, on the private side of the ledger, our personal budgets are an even better reflection of how much we value the outdoors. Our private spending is growing rapidly, and without regrets - now the recreation industry in Oregon generates $4.6 billion in retail sales each year. We willingly buy lots of expensive bicycles, hiking boots, baseball gloves, birding binoculars, and soccer balls. In fact, we are much more freewheeling about spending money in our personal budgets than we are in our public budgets. What lesson do I draw from that fact, as someone who is responsible for a public budget? The lesson I draw is that obviously those of us in the public sector need to improve the value proposition our citizens see when they evaluate government spending.

That's why I asked you all to be here today - to form a virtual network to make the most of what we could have, instead of muddling through with what we inherited. To not squander the gift.

I use the word "network" deliberately.

A network is interconnected and shared, and consists of different components that can be joint, several, independent and interdependent all at the same time. Nobody is "in charge" of a network - a network is not about centralizing control, or creating some top-heavy mega-authority - a network is about optimizing overall function, while maintaining variation and specialization among the parts.

What is the Air France logo doing on the screen? Unfortunately, it's not because they sponsored this conference and we are giving tickets away as door prizes - they didn't and we're not. No, this logo represents a parable from the world of business.

Air France has a distinctive image, a geographic territory, a loyal clientele, a certain way of doing things.

So does Aeromexico. It's a very different company from Air France. Different customer base, different territory, different image, different way of doing business, different unions and so on.

Delta Airlines is different from either Air France or Aeromexico. In fact, Delta competes with air France and Aeromexico in some markets but connects with them in others. Different nationality, different corporate working style, different logo. Delta is far more different from Air France is than Clackamas is different from Beaverton, if you see where I am going with this parable.

So here's the interesting part: those three companies chose to have something in common: Air France, Aeromexico, and Delta (for all their differences) voluntarily joined an alliance, called Skyteam - a virtual organization with no planes or employees of its own.

Air France, Aeromexico, and Delta did not give up their own distinctive corporate cultures and ways of doing business. Nobody took over anyone else, and nobody worried about turf.

They came together for mutual benefit - to schedule connections, share benefits, agree to handle one another's baggage. Why? Because the alliance made each of them stronger without anyone giving up his autonomy and distinctive specialty because making an alliance served the customer better. The customer.

Let's think about the customer.

Here is our customer today.

When she and her parents head out for a walk on Saturday morning, does she know the difference between the City of Gresham parks and the City of Troutdale parks? Probably not. Does that mean the City of Gresham parks department should merge with the City of Troutdale parks department, or (perish the thought) be taken over by Metro? Not at all. Air France did not have to merge with Aeromexico and Delta to create a virtual network that improved all three distinct companies -- and served the customer better.

Here is another of our customers.

He has very sharp eyes, but when he circles to land near Forest Grove, will he tell the difference between the wetlands owned by the sewer agency, the wetlands owned by the regional government, and wetlands owned by the city or federal government, who all own adjoining parcels? No, the heron's just looking for clean water. The human agencies are starting to think that way too - the City of Forest Grove, the Metro Council, and Clean Water Services have all recently mutually undertaken to work together to create an emerald necklace, which will help make the Forest Grove area one of the top sites in the Western United States. For birds and the exotic humans who like watching them. The governmental system can begin to emulate the natural system.

Today, let's look at our region with the freshness of that child in Gresham and with the perspective of that heron circling forest grove, and with the kind of thinking that led three distinct airlines to form Skyteam.

Let's not squander the gift.

With the natural resources we inherited and the human resources we could marshal, I believe our region possesses the ingredients for something quite astonishing: the best urban parks and natural areas network in the world.

I invited you here this morning, to gather with the other people who have chosen to be in this room, because you can make that happen, if you want it.

So, are you ready to begin?