Two beautiful posts from 1000 Friends of Oregon

The group that the Sprawl Lobby likes to call "1000 Fiends" has two fantastic pieces on their website -- one about the bogus growth projections that are being used to sell a gigantic "Bridgeasaurus Boondogglus" for Salem (top), and then another great piece on the underlying issue, how sprawl costs everybody money and demands a constant feeding of new money, depriving us in every other area of life (bottom).

Take a gander at these great pieces, and then think about joining Friends of Marion County (see below -- FOMC is not very websavvy -- could you help with that?) and making gifts to support 1000 Friends.

Remember, all that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.  Don't sit idly by and let the Sprawl Lobby rob you and your family of hundreds of millions that you'd rather spend on yourself or on providing a better community.

Click on each picture to take you to the actual page, both of which have good links from there:

Friends of Marion County generally meets at 7:00 p.m. on the second Wednesday of the month in the Salem Public Library Anderson Room. Board meetings are held the first Wednesday of the month. If you are interested in helping the Friends of Marion County, please E-mail: rkaye@OregonVOS.net. The Friends of Marion County does not share its mailing list with other organizations or individuals.

Our mailing address is:

Friends of Marion County

P.O. Box 3274

Salem, OR 97302

The annual dues are:

Friend $35

Family Friend $50

Hall of Fame Friend $100

Corporate Friend $250

Other Friend $________

Board of Directors

Roger Kaye, President
mailto: rkaye@oregonVOS.net
Joe Kuehn, Vice-President
mailto: kuehn20@comcast.net

Richard van Pelt, Secretary

mailto: rvanpelt@comcast.net

Susan Watkins, Treasurer
mailto: susanwat@open.org
Board Members are the above officers plus:

Linda Peterson

mailto: joylin@open.org

JoAn Power

mailto: jobilp@aol.com

Kasia Quillinan

mailto: qe2@open.org

Carla Mikkelson
mailto: carlamikke@yahoo.com
Laurel Hines
mailto: laurelhines@att.net

Sign the Petition to Help Keep Bridgasaurus from Stomping Salem!

There's a petition against the Bridgasaurus that threatens to stomp treasured Salem neighborhoods, Wallace Marine Park, and our already-on-life-support transit system into oblivion!

The petition is to the governments that make up "SKATS" (the bureaucratic jargon for the Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study -- that's the "metropolitan planning organization," the committee of local governments that allocates all the federal funding for transportation projects), especially to three of the most important local governments who sit on the SKATS board:  The City of Salem, Cherriots (Salem-Keizer Mass Transit District), and Salem-Keizer School District 24J.

By their own rules, the SKATS agencies only act with unanimous agreement, so the two local governments who have been most rocked by round after round of funding shortfalls, Cherriots and SK Schools, will be fertile ground and, we hope, receptive listeners for our message, which is that Salem can't afford to repeat the mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s, bulldozing neighborhoods and businesses to make room for extravagant and wasteful gigantic elevated freeways.
 
Let your voice be heard, sign the petition to Stop Bridgasaurus!  Just follow the link.

A Scorecard for the City Council Boondoggle Worksession on Wednesday, 11/28, 5:30 pm

For reasons unclear, the City Council has moved their worksession away from Council Chambers (and the CCTV cameras) so you'll have to come out to the Anderson Room at the Salem Public Library this Wednesday, 11/28, at 5:30 p.m. to see whether the City Council intends to do its job and subject the most expensive public project proposal in Salem's history to the kind of serious, skeptical scrutiny that it deserves, or whether they just hope to let the Concrete Lobby roll by them.

Remember, this is a council that devoted HOURS and HOURS to public meetings and multiple public hearings to whether Salem residents could keep a few chickens in the yard.  This is a decision with a million times more magnitude, so this merits at least dozens of times the level of investigation.

Here's a scorecard for you for Wednesday night, so you can see which council members take their responsibilities seriously (by demanding serious, research-based answers on each issue):

How many of these critical issues does the Salem City Council address at its November 28th work session on the Third Bridge?

c     The Council discusses a plan to pay for the 3rd Bridge, acknowledging that it will involve considerable local revenue from tolls on all bridges, a property tax ballot measure, or a gas tax increase.

c     The Council discusses the fact that traffic on the existing bridges is at a 10-year low and that this trend is likely to continue with increasing gas prices and other changes in people's driving habits.

c     The Council discusses the fact that the 3rd Bridge will require purchasing 75 acres of new right-of-way that will displace over 160 homes and businesses.

c     The Council discusses the fact that the 3rd bridge will create visual and noise pollution through neighborhoods for 2.7 miles from West Salem to Highland when these residents find themselves under the longest elevated freeway in Oregon.

c     The Council discusses the fact that the 3rd Bridge will reduce the size of Wallace Marine Park and destroy the beauty and natural setting of much of the park.

c     The Council discusses the fact that planning for the 3rd Bridge is $5.5 million over its original $2 million planning budget and is four years late.

c     The Council discusses the fact that a financing package was promised in August of 2008 and that it is highly unusual to wait until a design is approved before deciding how to fund it.

c     The Council discusses the fact that after six years of meetings, the preliminary preferred alternative (4D) for the 3rd Bridge did not receive support from a majority of the Salem River Crossing Planning Task Force.

c     The Council discusses the fact that all three of the Neighborhood Associations that are in the path of the 3rd Bridge are on record as opposing it.

c     The Council discusses the fact that the 3rd Bridge will take retail business away from Salem by making it easier to get to Keizer Station and the Woodburn Outlet Mall.

c     The Council discusses the fact that plans for the 3rd Bridge plan ignore less expensive options to relieve peak hour congestion, such as off-ramps to fix the ends of the existing bridges with better traffic flow to Glen Creek Drive and Front Street north, and bike lanes and better transit to West Salem.

WORD: 3d Bridge a Gigantic Boondoggle

Oregon State Highway 22 (Willamina-Salem Highway) intersects Oregon State Highway 223 in Polk Station. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What's most interesting is that the most-reliably anti-tax groups in Oregon, the Chamber of Commerce and the Homebuilders -- two groups that fight ferociously against taxes usually -- got up and waved their hands about "future growth," and made empty claims about the need to build this monstrosity for the vague "future" needs.   Thus, they showed their true colors:  they aren't against making you pay higher taxes, just taxes that provide you with services.  If you have to pay higher taxes so they can make a lot of money, hey, they're all for that.

That tells you just about everything you need to know about this project:  It's nothing but a money grab by land speculators and developers who are salivating at the thought of sprawling all the way to Dallas and all the money they can make if they can buffalo the people of Salem into building them a bridge (and paying for it!) that will only hurt Salem and benefit them.

Not only do we not need this project, it's the epitome of making the problem worse at great expense.  Traffic counts over existing bridges are already declining and will continue to do so, and Salem's congestion problems are not a function of how many lanes go over the river but the idiocy of how we handle the traffic at each end.

Moreover, the Highway Lobby's refusal to apply least-cost planning methods to what little congestion we face in Salem for a couple of brief periods daily tells you everything you need to know -- this isn't a solution to a problem, this is a profitable project that they want to ram down our throats regardless of all other considerations.  If Salem had a serious congestion problem, it would be greatly reduced if not eliminated instantly just by staggering the start times for state government workers and offering good cross-river transit options.  A "fast-pass" electronic toll collection system on the existing bridges would not only provide all the money needed to address the problems with the existing on and off interchanges, it would also encourage carpooling and other reductions in cross-river trips.

Of course, these wouldn't put millions of dollars into the pockets of the land speculators and the concrete lobby businesses who care about nothing but taking your money and making it theirs.

Bridge project is a $687 million boondoggle

On Nov. 5, dozens of Salem residents filled the City Council chambers to say no to building a $687 million bridge and freeway from Highway 22 to Interstate 5.

Their testimony was eloquent and convincing about the fact that this project is destructive, too expensive, not needed and should be rejected by the council. They said we can relieve congestion by fixing the bottlenecks at both ends of the bridges and by improving transit, all at a much lower cost.

Alternative 4D, as the third bridge is called in the staff report, will not relieve congestion on the existing bridges and will destroy 160 residences and small businesses.

The only testimony in favor of the third bridge came from the homebuilders association and the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, but when pressed by Councilor Chuck Bennett if they would be in favor of imposing tolls or raising taxes to fund the third bridge, they could not give him a straight answer.


The council will hold a work session on Nov. 28 and resume the public hearing on Dec. 10. I hope concerned citizens will mark their calendars and plan to be at the Salem City Council to continue to oppose this $687 million boondoggle.



Jim Scheppke
Salem

Hugely important as Salem squanders precious funds on 3rd Bridge Fantasies

All the nonsense in the draft environmental impact statement about the value of time saved is just that: Nonsense. Auto drivers want free lunches forever, and are not willing to pay anything like the costs of their autobahn fantasies. Given a choice, only a few will pay tolls to get somewhere faster.

This is a crucial article for Salem, given that our local transportation and construction moguls are dying to tap taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars to throw yet another auto bridge across the Willamette, based on imaginary increases in what counts as "congestion" in Salem and the supposed willingness of drivers to pay tolls.

Most importantly, notice that the planners' fantasy includes tapping property taxes directly, again showing that the line about "roads are paid from gas taxes" is complete and utter BS.

The project is a corporate welfare vampire that needs to be killed dead as soon as possible.

If you click on that table above it will take you to Boondoggle Central, the website for the scam, where you can play with various funding streams and see just how outrageously high tolls, registrations, and gas taxes would have to be to fund this one without adding yet more property tax burdens in Salem, where we already have insane numbers of people who are underwater on their houses and who will be foreclosed in increasing numbers if the boondoggle gets underway.

In fact, that's what people really need to understand -- when you build a boondoggle in a contracting economy, you not only waste precious funds, you drown people on the margin completely, people who would have been able to stay in their homes without the excess tax burden used to fund a wasteful scheme.

Salem's Disastrous Priorities: The Highway Lobby Runs Roughshod Over Librarians

Salem is busily undermining its library system, even as it is squandering the millions being poured into the hands of private contractors to engineer the environmental impact statement for the boondoggle on the Willamette, the third auto bridge that has no rationale other than lining the pockets of the road gang and proving that no amount of data on declining vehicle miles traveled and permanently higher gas prices will penetrate the dense fog of lies being generated to sell this monstrosity. 

Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay

Word: In Salem, as in Portland, the Megabridge Dreams are Simply Pork for Contractors

WORD: The Madness of a $500 Million+ Rivercrossing Project

Cops, psychologists, and lawyers and all the others whose professions bring them in contact with people at their worst become acquainted with the ravages that people can inflict on themselves when in the grip of addiction. Addicts often squander thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and waste years of their lives, rather than admit that they can no longer service their addiction and that they have to change their self-definition.

Multiply the losses by 10^6 when a city is in the grip of addiction and denial, desperately seeking another fix of mainlining concrete, even as the children are ill-fed and the schools keep on advancing to the rear, cutting libraries and teachers.

Madness indeed.

http://breakfastonbikes.blogspot.com/2012/02/city-council-feb-13th-madness-of-500.html

Will Cherriots be Around in Five Years? What About 10?

Image via Wikipedia

Salem-Keizer Transit is asking the public for input on its strategic goals and projects for the upcoming year.

To participate, you are encouraged to fill out a survey online at www.goo.gl/LXxJ5 or at Cherriots Customer Service.

The survey provides an opportunity to rank the importance of specific goals and offer ideas for future strategies and projects. Salem-Keizer Transit will use the survey information to update the Strategic Plan for the fiscal year beginning July 2012.

The Strategic Plan, adopted in July 2011, provides a vision of transportation services for the next twenty years. This high-level document serves as a guide for decision-making, budgeting, and
operations of Salem-Keizer Transit.

The survey will be available through the end of January.

Contact Info: Steve Dickey
503-588-2424

The unintentionally revealing lede

The lede that says it all explains why the Kroc Center will forever struggle. As the real estate cliche has it, Location, Location, Location. A fitness center located in a bike and pedestrian hellhole is like an AA meeting in a saloon.

"It was a healthy way to spend a part of the day, beginning with a healthy walk from the parking lot."

The peak oil crisis: the energy trap

http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-10-26/peak-oil-crisis-energy-trapImage via Wikipedia
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-10-26/peak-oil-crisis-energy-trap

Here it comes

A scary preview of what's in store for a lot of American cities and counties. Especially those who think we can keep on pouring pavement and building things for cars and drivers,

Noticing the Naked Emperor: Traffic Projections are BS

Harry Truman used to say that "A statistician is someone who can draw a straight line from a prior assumption to a foregone conclusion." Nowhere is this more true than in the hocus-pocus field of traffic forecasting to justify new construction projects, which is to real statistics what homeopathy is to medicine (you can get whatever result you want just by wishing!)

Here in Salem, the Highway Lobby and its pet politicians have been pushing to waste millions to see if they can push through a third auto bridge at the cost of hundreds of millions ($600 million and up), even as usage is declining on the existing bridges and peak oil means that vehicle travel is on a permanent downward trend.

Luckily, we are so broke in Oregon that Portland area folks are starting to choke on the absurd proposal to spend $10 - $15 billion (with interest and completely predictable overruns included) on a monstrous highway megabridge, the big brother of the same kind of absurd thinking here in Salem.

Best of all, there are enough people appalled by this fantasy that they are starting to notice reality before it's too late. Like the reality that the numbers being used to justify all this spending are total bunk.

Even more important, it absolutely wouldn't even matter if they were using honest numbers, because the end of the auto era is upon us. The only thing building a few last highway megaprojects would do is speed us up right at the moment of impact at the other end. In other words, spending more money trying to deny that the auto era is ending is like, as Bill Cosby put it, "leaning into a left hook."

For a great primer on where we are, the estimable Gail ("Gail the Actuary") Tverberg's "Our Finite World" blog can't be beat. All her stuff is worthwhile, but see especially her posts here, and here, and here, and here, and here. Locally, the Salem Breakfast on Bikes blog has started to do a good job on the whole insane disconnect between what Salem says it wants for itself and what we actually plan to spend money on (money we're not going to have anyway). I stole the photo above from Breakfast on Bikes blog.

Related articles

• Report: Project for new span overshot toll figures (bendbulletin.com)

The evil of the "Health Insurance" mafiosi

There are no words to fully capture the evil of the health insurance gangsters who have worked tirelessly to line their pockets at the expense of the rest of us, producing things like this: forcing people to hold bake sales and benefits to help pay for the medical costs of accident victims.

Two things to note:

1) Cars are deadly weapons. Inattention, fatigue, zoning out, cell phone conversations (hands free or not) -- all these things can make you a murderer or a person guilty of disfiguring and maiming someone else.

2) The suits in the insurance industry, every last one, should tremble at the thought that there might be a just God in Heaven. For, if so, they will all fry in Hell for eternity for conspiring feverishly to preserve our "free market" health care financing system, where the only "free market" is for those with the cash to pay their bills.

As on the Columbia, so too here in Salem on the Willamette

Image via WikipediaThe Highway Lobby just never met a huge boondoggle it didn't love. Everything described above in that story to the tune of around $4 billion (liar's budget before overruns start) is proposed for Salem's new third auto bridge too, liar's budget about $600 million.

They're sure hoping you won't mind paying tolls even as gas prices are peaking over $4 and will never drop again for any sustained period (unless the economy collapses even further due to high gas prices) -- and they also hope you won't notice that people are driving less, not more. And that fewer and fewer young people bother with cars in the first place.

Megabridges are Megadisasters

Someone who cares did a great job warning the powers that be about the upcoming disaster if plans to build a megabridge over the Columbia proceed (pdf).

We need a similar study for the ongoing waste of money called the Salem River Crossing, a dreamed-of third auto bridge.

WORD

Image via WikipediaA perfect description of our ongoing highway-building folly:

Everywhere along the route, shovel-ready highway improvement projects from the late stimulus crusade were now underway, and you wondered exactly what kind of future they were intended to serve -- or was it all a kind of weird national potlatch ceremony in which we were literally throwing away our wealth to memorialize what seemed normal the day before yesterday and never will be again.

The Looming Third-Bridge Nightmare

Although it's less likely to be funded or occur than its bigger Columbia River sibling, anyone who cares about Salem should know that there is still a lavishly funded effort afoot to destroy downtown Salem's livability to promote more auto commuting (to what?) by ripping a gargantuan third auto bridge right through the heart of Salem.

You just need to go to the Gilbert House on Front St. to get a sense of what a charming addition this bridge would be -- a brutal, looming monstrosity that would not only cause the destruction of many homes but also of the waterfront.

The photo (from the linked story) is probably a good predictor for Salem --- because of our railroad tracks and the existing buildings near the Willamette, a third Salem auto bridge would essentially be a gigantic flyover bridge that would look like a piece of central LA from a gangster thug movie plopped down into Salem.

What the future has in store for Salem

Image by Welfl via Flickr

James H. Kunstler hits it over the wall again (all illustrative links added here at LOVESalem, not part of JHK's essay):

. . . The true destination of the US economy is to get smaller and for two reasons mainly:

1.) Capital ("money") is vanishing out of our system steadily and rapidly due to a massive collective failure to repay money owed on loans, mortgages, debts, and assorted obligations.

2.) Access to the primary resource we depend on for powering the economy (oil) is increasingly beyond our control -- even worse, under the control of people who would like us to eat shit and die.

We really have a choice between two ways of dealing with this. We can downsize and re-scale consciously and coherently, or we can continue to chase after the phantom of growth and allow the nation to fall into a shambles of desperation. So far into this long emergency of an economic fiasco, we seem to have chosen the pursuit of a phantom. That's what President Obama was doing last week in Detroit, shilling for a new electric automobile which, he said, will make us "energy independent." If Mr. Obama believes this, then it isn't a very good advertisement for an Ivy League education.

I'd like to know how many Americans believe that electric cars run on virtually free energy (but I don't have pollsters on my payroll). I'd bet a lot of them do, including President Obama. Sorry to rain on this uplifting parade. At best, such a car fleet would run on coal -- that is coal-fired electric power plants -- but even that is a ridiculous fantasy when you actually pencil-out the details. Not to mention that a nation full of people with dwindling or vanishing incomes won't be in a position to fork over forty-grand for one of those new pseudo "green" vehicles. Also not to mention -- wait for it -- that due to rapidly vanishing capital there will be far fewer car loans available. The only thing growing in this part of the picture is the number of Americans who cannot possibly qualify for a car loan under normal terms that would require regular repayment of interest-and-principal. (Plenty of Americans qualify for the new "innovative" kind of loan -- the kind that you never have to make payments on, but for the moment, the banks are choking to death on them, so additional approvals may lag for a time.)

It's instructive that so much current hoopla about economic growth revolves around the issue of cars. For, if anything, reality is telling us very clearly that the mass motoring paradigm is near its end. Our determination to prop it up at all costs, despite the grave impairments of available capital and energy resources is a symptom of our detachment from reality. It's also a fine illustration of the psychology of previous investment, which prompts a desperate society to squander its scarce remaining resources on the very things that are putting it out of business.

We don't need need more highways. We're about to find out that we don't have the money to keep up regular repairs on the highways we already have. The hundreds of millions of "stimulus" dollars that President Obama flung into "shovel-ready" highway projects was among the more tragically dumb mistakes he made early on, and he has apparently learned nothing along these lines since then.

Interestingly, NPR ran a local story over the weekend -- an obscure little item -- saying that Amtrak was determined to raise the average speed of its passenger trains running north from Connecticut through Vermont from 40 miles-per-hour to 60mph. That would be some triumphant accomplishment! It would bring us back to about an 1860 level of service. Of course, I happen to believe that we will be lucky in a few years if we are able to enjoy an 1860's standard-of-living, so maybe this little side venture in public transport is perfectly in tune with America's future. . . .

Road funds wax fat while funds for human needs slashed

Image via Wikipedia

Oregon's constitution is immoral. It privileges and protects a certain class of spending -- for "highway purposes" -- above all others. Meaning that we've got money for paving the streets we'll be tossing seniors into, the streets that kids who have no summer jobs will hang out near, the streets where the homeless vets will beg for spare change.

If we can't eliminate this immoral and unwise limitation, then we ought to at least have the sense to amend the constitution to force the roads to live within their means -- that is, if the gas tax can only be used for roads, then there can be no spending on roads but through the gas tax.