Portland Business Alliance leaders critical of lack of dedication to paying for public works; Metro chief says new strategies needed
Can the region’s stakeholders – and in the end, its voters – be convinced to spend money to keep what they have?
It’s a question Metro Chief Operating Officer Michael Jordan was faced with Tuesday in a conversation with the Portland Business Alliance’s land use committee.
The stop at the regional chamber of commerce was at least the 14th time since Aug. 10 that Jordan has presented his proposed Community Investment Strategy to interest groups in the area. With only four members of the alliance attending the lunchtime meeting, Jordan’s oft-repeated stump speech on the plan quickly turned into a question-and-answer on some of its key points.
Significantly, who pays for the $27 to $41 billion Jordan says the region will need in the coming decades to build and maintain the infrastructure needed to accommodate Portland’s growth?
“The role of government and how to deliver public services is going to have to be fundamentally rethought,” Jordan said. But, with voters setting priorities on public investments such as prisons and health care, the discussion is going to have to be comprehensive, he said.
Kelly Hossaini, an attorney at Miller Nash, was critical of legislators for putting off infrastructure funding.
“Whether we think we’re flush with money or whether we think we’re broke, we don’t do it,” she said. “There never seems to be the will to really truly reprioritize how we spend our money.”
Jordan said local governments have been hamstrung to find funding sources for programs, although he cited Washington County’s Major Streets Transportation Improvement Program as an example of a government trying to deal with the problem.
Still, only so many innovative solutions can be developed, Jordan warned.
“Voters keep passing things,” Jordan said. Elected officials, in the wake of Measure 5, have been using “duct tape and Band-Aids to keep making stuff happen… have we reached the end of that? There’s no more mirrors. You can’t put up any more mirrors to make this thing run anymore.”
Ed Trompke, an attorney at Jordan Schrader Ramis, was looking for more political will from the Metro Council to force the issue of infrastructure funding.
“You guys went off on a lark, I feel, because all you focused on was the environmental protection, environmental protection, environmental protection, and that’s a reach,” he said, citing Metro’s role in its charter. “Politically, the council decided it would be wonderful to go chase butterflies.”
He said the Metro Council has the political tools to force cities to make infrastructure investments, if it has the political will to do so; he added that the agency needs to build trust in Clackamas and Washington counties to get those governments on board with a regional funding solution for infrastructure problems.
Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder, who attended part of the meeting before the afternoon’s council work session, said coordination and collaboration need to expand. But he also pointed to problems faced in Clackamas County as the county tried to get Milwaukie residents to pay for a greater share of sewage service costs.
He also pointed out the steady decrease of infrastructure spending as a percentage of gross domestic product – infrastructure spending has decreased from 3 percent of GDP from 1950-1970 to 2 percent of GDP in the last 40 years, according to Jordan; in China, 9 percent of GDP goes to infrastructure projects.
“Other things are taking up those dollars,” Burkholder said. “Entitlements. Education, medication and incarceration takes up 95 percent of the state’s budget.”
Long-term, Jordan said, the region would like to have a tool to target investments, be it a tax or some other mechanism. That isn’t happening anytime soon, because of various legal restrictions on Metro’s authority.
The agency is convening a group of one to two dozen leaders (business leaders, community activists and retired politicians who no longer have a constituency) to analyze regional investments, find ways to get new revenue streams and determine how to integrate such a strategy across the private and public sectors.
In the meantime, Jordan said, local governments need to be more aggressive in pursuing public-private partnerships, even if they don’t always pan out. He cited the Pearl District as an example of reaching across the aisle, so to speak, to formulate solutions.
“Our role is to force people into these hard discussions and not let them slip the punch,” Jordan said. “Facilitation to an actionable conclusion is different from turning the lights on in a room and buying coffee. It’s a lot harder than people think.”