Details starting to emerge on non-governmental task force to help bring jobs
We’ve got Metro working on infrastructure and planning issues from a government level. And we have groups like Greenlight Greater Portland, a private-sector led nonprofit working on attracting industry to the area.
But do we need a group to bridge the gap?
At meetings with regional stakeholders this summer, Metro Chief Operating Officer Michael Jordan has been pitching the creation of a team of 15 to 25 community sages who could tackle projects government and business alone can’t handle.
Details of the group were a topic of conversation Wednesday morning in Lake Oswego, as Jordan presented the Community Investment Strategy to the directors of the Clackamas County Business Alliance.
Many of them have heard the basic pitch from Jordan in one of the 15 previous times Jordan has presented the strategy – targeted investments, infrastructure shortfalls, public-private partnerships, urban growth boundary expansions. But the new task force drew some queries from Clackamas County leaders.
Burton Weast, the Clackamas County Business Alliance’s executive director, is part of an exploratory committee working to establish the group.
“We’re in the business of ensuring that when Greenlight finds a company interested in Portland, they’ve got 10 sites to see and the infrastructure is there,” Weast said. “It’s a 1-2 punch.”
As far as employment land goes, there’s not a lot to choose from for prospective employers interested in the region. While many cities have plenty of industrial land, it’s either tied up in multiple, small lots (which are very hard to put together with multiple landowners involved) or face environmental challenges and cleanup costs, keeping them from being turnkey at this stage.
The group – a name for it hasn’t been decided yet – would be charged with putting the pieces in place so that potential employers can peruse the aisle of industrial sites, so to speak, instead of having to take whatever Portland happens to be selling at the moment.
And, it’s possible, Weast said, the group could also encourage cities to streamline their permitting processes.
“One of the things that’s driving this group is a recognition we’re not getting anything done,” he said.
The group is likely to apply for nonprofit status, and could be funded through a number of mechanisms, Weast said.
“It could run, from using existing local governments’ bonding, all the way to creating a new type of special district,” he said. “It wouldn’t have an elected board, but it would have the ability to collect money, hold money, disperse money – the whole gamut.
“I would say also this group isn’t fixated on raising money. That’s only one tenth of the whole spectrum of the things this committee’s looking at,” he added.
As for the make-up of the group, it would include both private and public sector representatives from a broad variety of perspectives, ranging from former Washington County politicians to business leaders from downtown Portland.
Clackamas County Commissioner Ann Lininger encouraged Jordan to ensure her county was represented proportionally on the group.
“It’s easy to find people who people know well in downtown Portland, but this is regional, and we need to have regional voices,” she said.
Jordan deferred to Weast, who acknowledged the challenge of finding high-profile candidates from the suburban areas.
“All the media’s centered in Portland,” he said. “We’ve had a real struggle. Not that there aren’t a lot of great people in Washington County and Clackamas County. We’ve had a real struggle to find people who aren’t elected officials.”
Not everyone was on board with the idea of yet another layer of government and planning bogging down the region’s economy. David Marks, owner of Clackamas-based Marks Metal Technology, said government should be getting smaller, not bigger.
“One more open-ended process – I’m becoming pessimistic. Ten years ago, when we started this group, certainty, predictability, confidence, those were all the keys we were seeking,” Marks said. “They’re still elusive. The economy – not the agenda-driven economy but the economic capital economy – does not have the confidence and no momentum to bring us out of the bucket.”
“I’m open to your ideas,” Jordan said.
Marks: “You just heard them,” referring to notions that government should get smaller.
Jordan: “So we should stop?”
“Where is the certainty of conclusion? When are we going to know we’ve resolved this?” Marks said. “I’m not seeing where the public side is grasping where the momentum is drained from the economy.”
Jordan said he’s heard that frustration often.
“Along with being the West Coast distributors of great plans, we’re the West Coast distributors of long processes,” he said. “If we move from this place out of this hole, no one entity will do that. Metro won’t do it, no city or county will do it, no corporate sector will do it. It will take, to some degree, a consensus effort to move us out of this and to fundamentally change things.
“If you’re looking for fundamental shifts, more streamlined processes, some level of certainty in these things, the only way those kinds of changes come is when a fairly substantial consensus of the community says we have to change,” Jordan said.
This story was not subject to the approval of Metro staff or elected officials.