PDX links for July
City Council continues to suck + more
Still traveling. I’ll be back in town (finally) come September. And get excited for next month’s round-up, where we can talk about pumping our own gas.
1: Old news but worth repeating: city council briefly considered trying to alter voter-approved reforms before backing down. Wild. The fact that two commissioners thought that overriding the will of the voters was a good idea… it’s galling and stinks of privilege. The people spoke. Accept it. Will the new system of governance be perfect out of the gate? Probably not. But it’s not obvious to me, yet, that there’s anything wrong with charter reform as written. So let’s implement the damn thing first and see what actually breaks before we try to fix it.
2: Two commissioners have competing approaches for streamlining the permitting process. (Some additional background.)
The high level:
Everyone agrees permitting is broken.
Rubio thinks we need a single office to handle permitting.
Mapps thinks we need to review all the code line by line.
Everyone agrees these two proposals are mutually exclusive
And… maybe I’m daft but I have no idea why folks think #4 is true and that these proposals are mutually exclusive.
For those of you who haven’t had experience with permitting: Portland is unusually slow and arduous. Some of that is the raw complexity of the code. But a lot of it is the fact that nearly every bureau needs to sign off on many permits and there’s very little alacrity or accountability in that process. It’s byzantine, in the classical sense of the word.
It’s obvious to me that the code needs to be revised to adhere to more universal standards. It’s also obvious to me that we also need a single point of contact to streamline the process and ultimately improve the system. So once again this seems like a pissing match between commissioners and it’s serving no one.
3: 9-1-1 calls for overdoses visualized. No real surprises in the data but a helpful tool to see it. And soul-crushing to see how many.
4: Multnomah County loses $1B in tax revenue as residents moved away in 2020/2021. I’d be hesitant to draw any Portland-specific conclusions here as other cities (e.g. Boston) have also seen similar pandemic-related declines But either way, not great for the budget!
5: Traffic stops at a record low even as fatal collisions spike. Not a great look for the Portland Police Bureau. It also tracks with anecdotal post-pandemic experiences of more aggressive driving, here and elsewhere. Personally I’d rather better physical infrastructure (more bump-outs, diverters on bike boulevards and side streets) and more automated enforcement (speed cameras, for example) than more police stops. But automated enforcement is a tricky business; it’s only valuable if its used to improve safety rather than raise revenue. (Too many jurisdictions use it for the latter at the expense of safety.)
6: A lengthy read on how we can address the housing crisis. Ultimately the answer continues to come down to “build more units” but I always enjoy a good deep-dive.
7: The saga continues on the city’s ongoing failure to fully support Portland Street Response. To quote myself from ~2 months ago:
Sometimes it feels like everyone in this city is rooting for PSR to succeed except for the folks…whose work it is to actually enable them.
8: Ending on some happy news: Holman’s (SE 28th & Ankeny) has officially reopened under the Sandy Hut/Club 21 ownership group. Hooray!