Congestion Task Force to Meet Friday, Discuss Preferred Options

The Congestion Relief Task Force meets on Friday the 20th, and they'll be looking at an analysis that has winnowed down the solutions packages to a pair of preferred choices. The Task Force agenda is to make a decision, presumably to confirm the preferred choices, and advance the proposal for more detailed study. (Summary of the packages here, longer presentation here. This is the first time the materials have been posted meaningfully in advance, and it is nice to be able to review them.)

There appears to be consensus on restriping existing bridge decks to add an additional auto travel lane at the cost of sidewalk on Marion and sidepath on Center bridges. The sidewalk on the Marion Street Bridge is so narrow, even though some people do use it, it's hard to see many really feeling much of a loss. The sidepath on the Center Street Bridge is a different matter, and though the Union Street RR Bridge has better air and better views, the Center Street Bridge is a more direct connection to Wallace and Edgewater, and speedy cyclists often prefer that. But if the crossing of Wallace along the Second Street alignment is a part of the package and trade-off for closing the sidepath, the loss of the Center Street sidepath is defensible.

Eliminate sidepath for new auto travel lane

Eliminate sidewalk for new auto travel lane

There are new proposals (or maybe just variations on previous proposals, depending on how you look at it) to widen Front Street and Commercial in downtown along with two key intersections.

Capital Manor Expansion to Demolish Entire Street of Housing

You might remember the move to vacate Paradise Court NW or the approvals for the Planned Unit Development at Capital Manor in West Salem.

Or you might not. They had seemed like ordinary expansion for a retirement community and an ageing population, and did not seem to merit much attention.

But holy smokes! There's a flurry now of applications for demolition permits on Paradise Court. And it's not merely the case that Capital Manor is expanding onto land that was undeveloped or under-developed. Paradise Court looks like an actual neighborhood.

Crush all the houses! Paradise Court NW
via Streetview (from 2014)

Earlier this month: Apps on 29 demolition permits
via City of Salem (partial list)

From the land use approvals

And Capital Manor has filed applications for flat-out demolishing an entire street's worth of what look to be mostly duplexes.

NEN to talk North Campus of State Hospital; CANDO on old Greyhound Station

CANDO and NEN meet this week and there are several items of interest on their agenda.

Northeast Neighbors, the Englewood/North High area neighborhood Association meets Tuesday the 17th and they have a very interesting item of citywide significance:

• Mountain West, Richard Berger, Conceptual drawings for OR. State Hospital property.

This is adapted from an earlier Mountain West Proposal
for the North Campus. (Comments in white and red added)

I have not been following NESCA, the neighborhood to the east of NEN, and it turns out they've had a lot of discussion of it recently.

Though there doesn't appear to be an executed sale yet, everywhere you turn it's talk about Mountain West, as if they are the only ones negotiating with the State now. So this makes it look like we are heading towards a more cookie-cutter three-story walkup apartment complex rather than a more urbane plan with generious "missing middle" types and more mixed-use on Center Street. This is looking like monoculture and big parking lots. (Of course the neighborhood wants monoculture at the other end of the scale: abundant single-family housing.)

Here is an excerpt from the February NESCA minutes with more:

North Campus Update (Darrin Brightman, DAS)
The North Campus project will be proceeding without the segments that face onto Center Street. Currently working on designs for street improvement, with RFPs out for bid. Until this is completed, the sale of the property can not be closed. Darrin reported DAS hopes to have this completed by June or July. At that time DAS can then proceed on contracts with Mountain West (4 parcels), the Housing Authority (Yaquina Hall), and the City of Salem (D Street Park). Darrin mentioned that the D Street park property has not yet been officially transferred to the City as it can’t be finalized until the street improvement designs are completed, probably June or July with the rest of the property. Darrin also provided information about the Dome Building repairs that are being done (roof, etc.) Corrections would like to paint the building to match the “J” building and the South Campus. As the building falls within NESCA and is on the historic register, they are unable to proceed with changing the paint color without the approval of NESCA. A motion to allow Corrections to change the paint color from the current cream color to match the South Campus buildings was made, seconded, and voted on. Motion passed....

A new paint scheme for the Dome Building indeed
(See notes from April)

The complete removal of the walnut trees on 24th was brought up and the question was asked if this is a possibility for the North Campus walnut trees. Darrin said that the 24th Street trees were the responsibility of the hospital administration, not DAS. DAS learned of their removal at the same time as the rest of us. He said that the North Campus trees will likely all come down EVENTUALLY as there is disease in some of the trees and those trees will need to be removed sooner or later. But, he stressed they will not be done all at the same time as was done on 24th and, when a tree (or trees) is taken down, there will be succession planting. He was unsure of the type of trees to be used as replacements but believed the plan is to use White Oak.

Richard Berger: Mountain West
Richard said that the same basic plan as presented to NESCA in November is still in place. The question was asked if the “integrity of the single-family homes” stated for D Street has been given any consideration as was requested for the single family homes on Park Avenue. He said there has been discussion and we will have more opportunities to discuss it before any actual construction is started. They are hoping to begin construction sometime in early 2019.

So I don't know. It's the sinking feeling of disappointment and having to see reduced ambition.

Hopefully there will be a more definite proposal made public soon.

NEN will be the best opportunity for the latest.

City Council, July 16th - State Street Study and Public Hearing

Council meets on Monday for a special meeting and formal Public Hearing on the State Street Corridor Plan. There is one item only on the agenda.

As new comment has come in, mostly it's a rehash of support or opposition, trading more on sentiment than fact or probability. There's a lot of fear and anxiety around change.

A couple of new items might be worth noting, however.

The current study repeats a lot of themes!

With their formal letter of support, SESNA cited a 1995 study that shows the pent-up, long-standing desire for a better State Street. I hadn't seen this called out before.

A group of Salem Area Realtors seems to echo this, but crucially they display our autoist incoherence, supporting the zoning changes but not road design.

Save $2M? Ditch the Costly Structured Parking!

City wants to use $2M in Urban Renewal Funds

The City's been a little stingy on posting updates more detailed than breezy "building buzz" videos on the new Police Station, so it was interesting to read the article about the value engineering and proposed new funding. (They finally posted the basic plan and survey results. The construction cam has seemed to be stuck for several days now, and is not updating.)

One item of context left out is that on the $100 million road bond in 2008, the City consistently secured bids under budget. In total bids seemed to come in at about 80% of the budgeted amount. This 20% gap allowed the City to rope in a bunch of smaller projects and by count (not by dollars!) added about 50% more projects.

That was smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession.

Now things are different, and it's no surprise that we see the opposite in this latest bond project.

Maybe there's a story of mismanagement or error here, but at the moment this does not seem to rise to that. Instead it looks like a story of the cyclical vagaries of our economy.

Moreover, the value engineering and proposal to use Urban Renewal Funds to fill a gap actually look to be within the range of things on which reasonable people can disagree.

From the paper:

As city officials try to make the place more useful to locals, the largest chunk of the July request — $1,197,000 — is poised to pay for a big community room at the station. Other expenses include public restrooms ($398,000), a plaza ($250,000) and artwork ($240,000), bringing the grand total to $2.085 million....

Officials had earlier allocated $4.3 million from the area's urban renewal fund for street improvements, such as opening portions of Division Street NE and Liberty Street NE near the facility to two-way traffic....

It is not outrageous to think the community room, public restrooms, plaza, and artwork in the public space (not anything on the interior!) could meet standards for urban renewal funding.

Death on Foot: Too Much on Distracted Walking Canard

There's a classic "balanced" piece of "he said, she said" journalism on walking deaths in the paper today.

It comes from the Detroit Free Press, and it really exemplifies how difficult it is going to be to get incisive reporting on autoism. Is a paper in Detroit going to go all-in on a critical approach? And more generally, given how dependent are newspapers on car advertising, would they be willing to upset key advertisers?

So it starts with an "expert" saying it's bad actors. It's people. Cars are safe.

the answer to it is really social patterns, you know, having very little to do with cars. Because cars are so expensive.

What? The safety features primarily benefit those inside cars, not those outside. This conflates safety for drivers and passengers with safety for other road users. It also conflates safety with the signalling functions (even conspicuous consumption) of our car purchases and the system of wealth checks we use to weed out non-car owners from jobs and housing.

Focusing on bad actors behind the wheel is just another form of victim-blaming.

Ice-Skating Pond at Court and Liberty Leads Old-timer Recollections in 1918

Was a pond: Looking east on Court Street from Liberty, 1912
(Composited from this high-res and this low-res image;
though they were scanned separately, clearly they are a pair.
Salem Library Historic Photos)

July 1, 1918

Back on June 29th in 1918, Salem held a Homecoming for old timers in Willson Park. Organizers had sent out a call for people with automobiles to pick up attendees, mostly elderly, at the train station and ferry them around town.

The first was the automobile excursion about Salem to the visitors changes that have taken place since they moved away....Mrs. Hallie Hinges Durdall, who as a girl delighted the men and women of Oregon with her songs, appeared before them again Saturday, and many said that her voice had lost none of the richness of years gone by.

There is a thirst, maybe even a desperateness, in the nostalgia and wish to show off hometown pride. The background of World War I seems to give a different mood to the festival relative to ones from just a few years earlier, which have seemed less fraught and more playful in news accounts.

July 10th 1918

Some who could not attend the homecoming later sent in some of their own memories, and one of them was later published in the paper several days later (links added).

BUSINESS CENTER OF SALEM WAS ONCE A FINE SKATING POND
Charles Bagley Recalls Some Incidents of Boyhood Life In Capital City

There was a nice little pond extending from about where the Roth grocery is now located, diagonally cross the street toward the Meyers' department store and then on across Court street including the present location of the Steusloff meat market. The skating was fine on this pond along in the early '60's and Court street was such a slough that a bridge was built connecting the Meyers and Steusloff corners. A. N. Moores had the time of his life skating on the Meyers corner and he well remembers the wooden bridge across Court street at the Meyers location.

Charles B. Bagley, who is with the department of public works in Seattle, was an old timer in Salem, dating his residence here from 1852 until about 1860. Regretting that he was unable to attend the Homecoming recently held in Salem, he writes Mr. Moores in part as follows: