On Monday, the Southwest Corridor Plan Steering Committee approved five project bundles for evaluation and public review. Evaluation will determine how well the transit, roadway, bike and pedestrian improvements would perform if built. Major evaluation measures will include costs, effect on the distribution of housing and jobs, and supportiveness of local development aspirations.
The bundles use potential high capacity transit options as their starting point and then add in sidewalk, bicycle access and intersection improvements to areas served by the transit option and other important destinations. Larger roadway improvements are dispersed across the bundles. Parks and nature-related projects will be added for the evaluation process, starting with the best opportunities to leverage transportation investments represented in the approved bundles.
"We looked for the best way to get the information the committee will need to create the best investment package," said project manager Malu Wilkinson. "Basing it on the transit options and spreading out the larger roadway improvements like this allows us to maximize the information from our modeling work. We will be able to see the differences in how these bigger investments perform."
Metro Councilor Bob Stacey emphasized that these are not set packages that the committee will have to choose from. For the final package, "it'll be a process of mix and match, taking the parts that work best from each," said Stacey.
City of Portland Commissioner Amanda Fritz questioned the role that the public played in determining what went into the bundles, "It sounds like there was a great process to get the big list [of projects] and discuss the big list but then, as far as staff putting together the bundles, there hasn't been really any feedback on whether anything's been missed."
Wilkinson explained that the public approved the process for narrowing the wide range of potential projects and that the values expressed through the recent Shape SW public input tool informed and will continue to inform the priorities of the plan. She emphasized that the public will be asked to respond to the evaluation of these bundles to help determine what should be in the final package and that part of that process would be to determine if anything was missed.
Metro Councilor Craig Dirksen pointed out that the wide-range list included $4 billion worth of projects that were "identified by someone as necessary and vital. So in trying to pare this down to something that's serviceable, that's functional, not all projects are going to be able to be addressed as part of this plan, and we're not going to be able to find funding for all of them."
Dirksen refocused on the goal of reaching a final package that works for the corridor in order to maximize funds that might be available. "By all of us agreeing on a shared strategy and all agreeing that the projects identified here are valuable not just to our jurisdiction but to this corridor [gives them] more weight when we go to the state or federal government looking for money," he said.
Fritz insisted on specific information on projects that were not included in the project bundles. "What I would like… is to have a list from staff as to what input they have received from [each jurisdiction] on the project lists… and then your response to that as to whether it's been added to the bundle or not added to the bundle," she said.
Wilkinson agreed that the full list of projects and their scoring would be made available. Stacey stated that any feedback on specific projects collected by the local jurisdictions would be considered by the committee moving forward.
The committee unanimously agreed to move the five project bundles forward for performance evaluation and public review with understanding that, for the final package, the committee could re-add projects from the wide range of potential projects.
Project staff is working through the evaluation and modeling and will present the results to the committee and public this spring. Information from the public will help the committee determine and refine the investment package for a final strategy this summer.