City Council, July 27th - State Street and State Hospital

On the Council agenda for Monday there's a lot on redevelopment studies. Much of it are updates for Council on matters already discussed at advisory board meetings or in other City public meetings, but the information on the State Street Refinement Plan is totally new here.

The old ice cream factory on State Street for sale

I have to say, I'm pretty excited by the State Street study and also the way the City has started with it here. For the first time, I think, the whole study contract is being posted as part of the Council agenda. I don't remember other recent TGM grants and other studies having the whole agreement made public. This is a new bit of transparency and is a great thing to see. (Is this an initiative of Kasey Duncan, our interim City Manager?) Or maybe it's a return to older forms of transparency. Anyway, you can read the agreement, see what the overall plan and deliverables are, and come to your own conclusions about it if you like.

State Street study area

Here's are the high-level project description and goals:

The State Street Refinement Plan Project is intended to revitalize a section of State Street in the City of Salem ("City") into a vibrant, attractive, walkable mixed-use corridor through planning for coordinated land use and transportation improvements. Zone changes, land use regulations and design standards will be developed to encourage pedestrian-friendly and mixed-use development or redevelopment. The zone changes and land use improvements can influence the creation of alternative street design cross sections within the constrained right-of-way on State Street that can accommodate facilities and amenities to make people walking and biking feel welcome and comfortable.

At this point I don't know that it's necessarily very interesting to drill into detail, but there will be opportunities to circle back to it as the study gets going.

The important part is to remember that every study is essentially a blank slate: We can make as much or as little of it as we like, and we can then fund it as much or as little as we like.

This was my fave political cartoon we ever published. Was right after passage of 2030 Bike Plan pic.twitter.com/McgTtdthrJ

— Jonathan Maus (@BikePortland) April 23, 2015

Here's a list of all the TGM grant-funded studies in Salem, and its length may astonish you, especially when you consider how much funded change actually resulted from them.

Initial recon and then the public project kickoff are scheduled now for August - November of this year, with final recommendations and Council adoption for mid-winter 2017.

Yaquina Hall, 1946 - looks to be saved

An update on the State Hospital North Campus confirms in detail what we pretty much already knew in general.

On July 6, 2015, the Oregon Legislature passed SB 5006 [actually HB 5006, I think] providing $8.3 million to DAS for "demolition and site improvements" on the North Campus. The funding for this and several other capital construction projects is available immediately and must be expended by 2021. It is expected that DAS will utilize the funding to complete environmental remediation and demolition of all structures, except the Dome and Yaquina buildings, and environmental remediation and "mothballing" decommissioning of the Yaquina building to reduce ongoing utility and maintenance costs once the building is vacated and until the property is sold.

Proposed park in white, preservation in green, demolition in red

So in the northwest quadrant we have a proposed park, in the southwest quadrant we have Yaquina and the Dome buildings for preservation and reuse, and in the eastern half we have demolition and site prep.

But why is Yaquina rather than Breitenbush getting the love? Is it just because it falls between the proposed park and the Dome building, and therefore makes a neat half-and-half development plan on either side of 25th Street?

Is this the absolute best we can do? Almost assuredly not. But at the same time it seems like a compromise, imperfect it's true, that's within the range of what reasonable people can disagree on.

Half of Belluschi's Breitenbush Hall - A shallow strip, super wide
and a good distance from the sidewalk across a lawn

I will mourn the loss of another Belluschi building, and I think that we are cavalier about them as they go one by one. But in the context of this particular site and this particular building, there are some real challenges, and where Howard Hall was small and it seemed like there were any number of different ways to reuse that building, Breitenbush is large, very strictly configured, and seems much more difficult to imagine in adaptive reuse. It is not possible to be certain or dogmatic on this, I think.

Other Stuff

Council will get an update on the West Salem Action Plan and hold a work session, but there didn't seem to be anything new in it. (See notes on the Edgewater District for more discussion.)

There's an update on the Portland Road study. It also is a summary rather than something new. (See notes here.)

The Public Hearing on new ordinances for Uber and other "transportation network companies" will be held. It appears Uber has already abandoned the Salem market, at least temporarily. The proposed rules include:

• Yearly vehicle safety inspections
• Increased commercial automotive and general liability coverage
• Requires City background checks on drivers

See notes on the last meeting for more on why these might matter. It will be interesting to see how strongly the companies contest these, or if Salem at present is not a big enough market on which to spend resources.