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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