Coalition for a Livable Future has a range of concerns on future growth
In one of the more wide-ranging discussions to date on the proposed Community Investment Strategy, members of the Coalition for a Livable Future queried Metro’s staff director about his proposals at a Tuesday morning meeting.
Metro Chief Operating Officer Michael Jordan was giving the presentation as part of his visits with numerous stakeholder groups – more than 20 to date – explaining the recommendations he’s made to the Metro Council on the strategy.
Most of those stakeholder organizations have asked about things like a proposed task force to target investments, or a suggested urban growth boundary expansion.
But Coalition members were interested in issues like equity, affordable housing and the Columbia River Crossing.
The latter was particularly frustrating to Nick Sauvie, executive director of Southeast Portland-based ROSE Community Development. With Jordan saying the region will need $27 to $41 billion in infrastructure improvements in the coming decades, the bridge stuck out as a major expenditure with limited impact.
“Why are we spending between one-tenth and one-sixth of our entire infrastructure needs on something that, I think, make all six of your outcomes worse?” Sauvie said, referring to things like walkable communities, economic competitiveness and clean air and water listed as desired outcomes in the draft strategy.
Jordan wasn’t about to weigh in on the controversial Interstate Bridge replacement plan. But he did point out that some of the issues he’s raised about thinking more holistically about investments and job growth might have been enough to head off some of the costs of the project linked to its proposed size.
“This is a classic example where if we did a better job, we might not have done this investment at all – or at least a much smaller investment,” Jordan said. “We ought to care about production of jobs in Vancouver. If we had a better jobs and housing investment in Vancouver, we might not need this.”
An example of new ways of thinking about infrastructure was brought up by Kathie Minden, chair of People for Parks. She mentioned how groups in east Multnomah County worked together and with a local auto dealer to develop a RecMobile.
“We are connecting the public sector and private sector, and we can expand on it,” she said. “It’s still a work in progress, but we discovered by being able to leverage those resources we can expand.”
That’s right up the alley of what Jordan has talked about with his proposed task force, a group working on linking public sector investments with where they can leverage the most private sector return.
“They’re usually micro examples,” Jordan said. “We need to learn from those and expand those and make them the norm, rather than the exception.”
One of the areas some think the region could do a better job is with tax-base sharing, where cities with a healthy tax base of industrial properties (which require less services, and thus, are cheaper to maintain) would share property tax income with residentially-heavy cities. Those cities, like Cornelius, have asked for urban growth boundary expansions to increase their industrial tax bases.
“One of the things Robert (Councilor Robert Liberty) brought to the Coalition for a Livable Future is tax base sharing, on the Minneapolis-St. Paul model, or some sort of model that the incremental increase in the tax base from commercial and industrial development is shared regionwide,” said Mary Kyle McCurdy, an attorney with 1000 Friends of Oregon.
McCurdy also suggested the region would benefit from an inclusionary housing policy.
Jordan, emphasizing he was speaking for himself and not the agency he manages, pivoted back to the point he made Monday evening to representatives from the Special Districts Association of Oregon.
“For my money, the hardest part is herding people into the box canyon,” Jordan said. “Folks who do what we do for a living are really good at slipping punches and not facing the really hard questions, or sliding around it and making it look like they solved something but didn’t really get at the real nut.
“We’ve got to start facing each other and our disagreements and resolve it and move forward somehow,” he said.