Position Available: STRONG Salem editor/curator (aka blogger)

Your humble reporter is relocating from Salem soon, so this blog will either have to retire or to find a new editor/curator/writer/activist to take over.  A collective of people would be ideal.

With the advent of corporate-controlled social media that monitors your every online moment and monetizes it for the benefit of advertisers and the social media channel, blogs may have seen their best days in the past; however, for those who value a true local perspective without the loss of privacy, local blogs are ideal.

If you (singular or plural) are interested in assuming the editorship/curatorship of this blog and continuing its mission to put people ahead of cars in Oregon's capital city, drop a comment.

Well Done to the Salem City Council for Refusing to Throw More Good Money After Bad

Congratulations to the Salem City Council for being willing to walk away from a sucker’s deal on a fancy new bridge, with a liar’s budget of $425 million.

Like the people in Congress brave enough to point out, in advance, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq would not solve the problem it claimed to address, would cost a fortune, and would only make things worse in the region where we were supposedly “helping,” those council members who did the right thing will face a lot of bitter hostility from a deluded “Build it Now’’ cult that claims that the secret “silent majority” opinion in Salem is pro-bridge — even though the council members opposed are a solid ⅔ supermajority of the council.  A fan letter to the council majority who stood tall tonight:

Tough crowd, tough vote, but I hope you all know you did the right thing. You won’t be thanked enough by those who appreciate what you did, and you will be bitterly and unfairly criticized by those for whom “come together” meant “Do it our way.” 

The philosophy of this project has always been to get the camel’s nose under the tent, and you are the first folks to stand up and say “No.”  

Good for you — regardless of how much hate and discontent is thrown at you, you should feel good about yourselves for having the courage to go against the boom boom boom of a wrongheaded drumbeat trying to stampede you down the wrong path.

Letter to the Mayor and City Council

9 February 2019

Honorable Chuck Bennett, Mayor of Salem
and the Salem City Council

RE: The Need to End the Salem River Crossing EIS with “No Build” Decision and an Official Lessons-Learned Inquiry Into the Project

     Time is short before your Monday meeting, so I won’t repeat the many objective reasons you should end the Salem River Crossing EIS with a “no build” decision. Suffice it to say that its most adamant bridge boosters doomed the SRC at the very start by their absolute refusal to deal fairly and honestly with alternatives for dealing with cross-river traffic. That key failure destroyed all public confidence in the SRC oversight team and its technical management staff and, therefore, all sense that the EIS process had any integrity.

     The inherent flaws in the SRC project and oversight team approach are so common in government projects and were so glaring that they jumped out at me in 2007 when I arrived in Salem as a complete newcomer, having no preset ideas about a bridge. But I moved here from Lansing, Michigan, another capital city of similar size, which suffers terribly from highway projects that were sold as “revitalization” and “progress” but that only served to hasten and deepen the city’s decline.

     So, while new to Salem, I  knew that projects sold as “vital” for “progress” may just be ways to burden city residents to benefit wealthier suburban and rural neighbors and development interests. In Salem, there were enough red flags to make me investigate more closely, and I soon saw virtually every hallmark of a classic highway boondoggle.

     The money spent on this project is a sunk cost, and the pain stops as soon as the spending does. But there is ongoing pain that has not stopped, pain caused by the deep corrosion of trust in the network of city, county, state, and local government officials and staff who have managed the SRC EIS process. Thus, even after ending this EIS by adopting a “no build” recommendation, there is more you need to do to address the forces that made this process go so expensively haywire.

     To address that collapse in trust, I urge the Salem City Council to commission a “lessons learned” inquiry into the SRC EIS by convening and funding a serious independent panel with expertise in public policy, project management, and public involvement to study the project from start to finish. The goal would be ensure that the complete record of this project is preserved and that everyone connected with it is interviewed, so that a penetrating, unvarnished history and analysis can be published in two to three years.

     We need such an inquiry because we very much need to understand the root causes that made the SRC process go so badly astray. Right now, Salem is updating its comprehensive plan and wrestling with structural deficits caused by past unproductive development decisions, so we should understand the weaknesses in how we make such crucial decisions.

     If we can identify what caused the Salem River Crossing project to go so badly and expensively off-course, we may be able to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future and to help all Oregon.

     We are coming into an era of unprecedented challenges and painful consequences felt from decisions made long ago. So we have neither the time nor the money to repeat the mistakes that plagued the SRC in the future. We face serious, rising environmental threats, systemic and growing fiscal shortfalls, and ever-wider and deeper inequality and poverty in our city. Thus we cannot be satisfied just to pull the plug on the SRC. We must also seek to understand what kept the SRC on the front burner of city politics for over a decade, consuming resources and attention needed to address many more serious problems in our community.

     After your meeting Monday, I expect I will be able to give two loud cheers for your decision to select the “no build” option as the outcome of the SRC EIS. For the full three cheers, and for the benefit of all Salem, please also commission a post-mortem study of the SRC EIS project, so that we may salvage some learning from the SRC process and do better in the future.

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Stay Tuned for Similar Analyses for Salem

Terrific article at StrongTowns.org about an analysis a guy did for Denver, CO, showing that, surprise! The downtown neighborhoods pay the freight for the much wealthier suburbs.  Two graphs (one of tax revenue per square foot (by neighborhood) and one showing costs for infrastructure in those same neighborhoods) speak volumes.

Bottom line, our autosprawl development pattern -- the same one replicated all over America -- from Denver, CO to Dover, Del., from Anchorage AK to Miami FL -- isn't just hurting our health and the environment; it's also the reason that cities everywhere are broke. We've taken an inheritance of productive development and squandered it on low-productivity development modes that essentially punish the people who impose the least costs on the public fisc and make them subsidize those (usually much wealthier) people who impose the greatest costs.

Property tax paid per square foot by neighborhood.

Click to view larger. Neighborhoods above the break even line generate enough tax to pay for their true cost of infrastructure. Neighborhoods below the break even line create annual infrastructure liabilities for the City of Denver, despite their property taxes.

LOVESalem morphs into STRONG Salem

Now that it appears that the threat of the gigantic billion-dollar-boondoggle of the "Salem River Crossing" is finally going to go to the graveyard of bad ideas, all the energy and effort that has been properly spent opposing that disastrous plan can be put to better use.

Thus, it's time for the people of Salem, Oregon, to start creating a positive agenda for a better Salem, a Salem that can afford nice things (because it has stopped developing in an unproductive way that only benefits developers and burdens the rest of us with the costs they have externalized while grabbing all the profits for themselves).

And so this blog, first created to raise the alarm about the dinosaur-thinking behind that "Salem River Crossing" -- the "Bridgeasaurus Boondogglus" -- can now morph into a blog with a much greater positive focus and provide a place to promote ideas for a STRONG Salem, inspired by the brilliant work being done by the group STRONG TOWNS (StrongTowns.org). STRONG Salem will now focus on being the "localization hub" for applying STRONG TOWNS thinking to harness the opportunities and solve the problems we face here in Salem, Oregon.

If you want to become a contributor, drop a comment and let me know how to reach you.