Shirley Craddick knows the routine – a drive or MAX ride from Gresham to Portland's east side, a day of poring over technical data and collaborating with far-flung colleagues, a return home after a long day.
This January, after she’s sworn is as the east metro’s next Metro Councilor, she'll be back into that routine for the first time in eight years.
The practice will be the same, but the field will be entirely different for Craddick. She retired in 2003 as a registered dietician and researcher at Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research on Interstate Avenue. Now, a couple of miles southeast, she'll be poring over data about land use, transportation, garbage rates and elephant habitats, and collaborating with the eight cities and two counties in her district.
About Shirley Craddick
- Registered dietician
- Retired researcher at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research
- Elected to Gresham City Council in 2004
- Council President in 2007
- Alternate to Metro Policy Advisory Committee
- Elected in 2010 to replace Rod Park on Metro Council Click here for the City of Gresham's full Craddick bio
"Even though the field is much different, how we get our work done is very similar," Craddick said. "The only way you get your work done is through relationships."
Until recently, serving on the Metro Council was not a goal for Craddick. She and her husband retired seven years ago, and she said she was looking to try something new.
About that same time, development was proposed for some of the buttes that surround her home south of downtown Gresham.
"I knew we would have lots of trees coming down, and many houses, so I got involved with a group of people who were also not interested in having this happen," she said.
At the same time, she said, discord on the Gresham City Council left her unhappy.
"There didn't seem to be anybody on the council that had those values that were important to me," she said. She was elected to the council in 2004.
Aesthetics and land use are a common theme for Craddick. She said the development that occurred on the buttes was "respectful and ended up being quite responsible." As the city council's liaison to the planning commission, she began pushing for higher-quality development across the city.
"A lot of the development that has occurred has been built without much character, a lack of quality, and I really think that undermines the economic vitality of the city. We've had a lot of schlocky development over the years," she said. "As this city grows and continues to mature, the development that goes forward is going to leave behind a better city."
The eye on development led Craddick to start attending Metro Policy Advisory Committee meetings.
"I enjoyed listening to the different conversations and discussions a lot," she said. "Rod (Park) and I became acquainted. I liked the work he's done. He and I are aligned pretty much the same."
Craddick's path had crossed with the Park family for decades. Park's wife, Joy Guidry, and Craddick were members of Kappa Kappa Gamma at Oregon State University; Craddick has worked with the outgoing councilor's mother, Rockie, on work with Gresham's sister city in South Korea.
Councilor Park said he encouraged Craddick to run.
"Her motivations will be different but the outcomes will be similar," Park said when asked to compare himself to his successor. "From a farmer's perspective, I understand the better we do in the boundary, creating the livable type spaces people want to be in, the less pressure it puts on putting the boundary outward. I believe City Councilor Craddick understands the better environment you build inside, the healthier people are.
"The result of creating nice, good, walkable communities is the same but the motivation is different – which actually kind of fits Metro," Park said.
But Craddick is going to face challenges in the district that's benefited the least from the region's urban resurgence of the last 20 years. The Silicon Forest of the west side provides jobs for residents across the region, but the long commute makes it difficult for Gresham, Fairview or east Portland to attract workers from Intel and Nike as potential home or condo owners.
"We need jobs closer to home. Most people in the east part of the region commute 10 to 15 miles a day," Craddick said. "We need jobs to keep people in the same area."
While acknowledging that Washington County has advantages – namely flat land – that the east region doesn't have in attracting large employers, she said she'd still like to see Metro and the cities use their tools to bring new employers to the other side of the region.
"My job is to help find and make industrial land become available to the east county. From there, it's up to the cities to take it from there," she said.
She said she understands trepidation about the costs of redeveloping brownfield sites for large employers, but questions whether those costs truly outweigh the burdens of greenfield development.
"For Gresham to bring in a sewer line for the Springwater area is $30 million," Craddick said. "That's not water. That's not the road. So how can that cost be any less expensive than reviving a brownfield?"
The highway connectivity to the Springwater area is one of the key issues Craddick will be faced with in her new role. The planned industrial area straddles the U.S. 26 expressway near 267th Avenue, but lacks a good road connection to the region's freeway network thanks to the abandoned plans for the Mount Hood Freeway and development eating up potential rights-of-way for a direct connection to Interstate 84.
"Years ago, we tried to make a single highway like Highway 217 and it would destroy neighborhoods. It destroys cities," she said. "You don't want a six-lane highway through the middle of the city. We need to find other routes to make it happen."
Of course, Craddick isn't only thinking about roadways. One of the region's top two transit priorities, as identified in the most recent version of the Regional Transportation Plan, is a transit corridor along Powell Boulevard. She's also thinking about an extension of MAX or a streetcar that could connect MAX to Mount Hood Community College and the three Interstate 84 cities – Fairview, Wood Village and Troutdale.
"What do we have to do to set the stage to make it happen?" she said. "What do the cities have to do through zoning, through their plans? It's not a politician's job to plan the route but I'd like to ask what we need to do if we want that to happen."
Her other priority is collaboration among cities, pointing to Clackamas and Washington counties' coordinating committees as examples that Multnomah County should follow.
"It's going to be up the cities to make that happen," she said. "I sure will try to facilitate that as best I can. We have this behemoth of Portland. Then we have Gresham, the (state's) fourth largest city. Then we have this cluster of smaller cities. Also, my district crosses two counties. The cities have vast differences in their interests and what's important to them, so that makes it pretty challenging."
But Park said his successor should be careful about being "one of the boys."
"One of the difficult tasks for being a Metro Councilor is the position you're put in as trustee of the rules of the game," he said. "Part of our job is to enforce that. Take a sports analogy. There probably are not very many pro baseball players that become umpires, and there's probably a good reason for that. When you're in that particular position, you can be friendly with everybody, but you really can't be friends and then enforce the rules. Otherwise, it's perceived, no matter what, you're showing favoritism."
Park pointed to Troutdale's lack of compliance with Title 13 of Metro's Urban Growth Management Functional Plan as an example.
"But the other cities are (in compliance)," Park said. "Do you give (Troutdale) a pass and say 'You don't have to do it,' but the rest of them did? Or do you say, 'Hey, you know, the rest of the players are playing by the same rules.'
"She's going to have to find her own way in that, and say 'Sorry, I gotta call it fair for everybody,'" Park said.
Craddick emphasized that she wants to see the conversation go both ways, particularly in Damascus, a city where many residents have a strong anti-Metro sentiment after the controversial 2002 urban growth boundary expansion there.
"It'll be my job to develop relationships and begin to help see that show that Metro's role is being driven by other factors," she said. "It's is not the seven-member body that sits back and makes these decisions without engaging the region."