City Council, April 25th - Disconnects on Policy to Statute

Several items are of interest on Council agenda for Monday. A theme in several of them is a disconnect between general policy language and its effectiveness and applicability in particular situations.

Blowing Past Speeding

On a Council review for a subdivision on Robins Lane, as with streets in and near the Meyer Farm, there are questions about the way we manage mid-sized streets. The Staff Report acknowledges a problem, but hides its magnitude in non-specific language, and ultimately dismisses the problem.

Along Robins Lane it is common for vehicles to exceed marked speed limits, for pedestrians to cross the street in unmarked areas, and for vehicles to park in bike lanes.

Staff Response: Robins Lane SE is designated as a collector street. It is posted 25 MPH with one sign approximately 100 feet Commercial Street SE for eastbound traffic and the other sign is located near the entrance to the Oak Hollow manufactured home park for westbound traffic. In September 2021 the City collected traffic data at two locations on Robins Lane SE. One near the intersection with Commercial, and the other east of Terrace Lake Blvd SE. The data shows there were about 2,500 vehicles per day on Robins Lane near the intersection with Commercial Street. The other count location shows there were over 1,000 vehicles per day. The data also showed the 85th-percentile speed of the vehicles on the road was over 30 MPH. Speeding vehicles cannot be attributed to cut-through traffic. Because Robins Lane is classified as a collector, it is not eligible for speed humps. [italics added]

This is language designed to evade the problem and protect the City. Total CYA language.

via Twitter, citing NY Times

Council should think more about all people who use roads, not just those driving cars on them. With a TSP revision coming up, we need to think more about ways we prioritize speed on our streets, especially mid-sized and larger streets, not just in a one-off way, but in a systemic way, so that neighbors who correctly identify a problem with speeding don't have to suffer this BS. The City likes to talk about safety, but when they get to granular examples like this, they turn away.

The former Mushroom Plant

The case at State and Cordon will probably turn narrowly on technical, legal issues. The question is whether a large apartment complex is an allowed conditional use under the existing zoning. Presumably if Council turns it down, the developer can return with an application to change the zoning.

State and Cordon designated Commercial (2019)

New proposal for Apartments
Gas station in lower left of 2022 inset

But the more interesting question is why the initial concept for a shopping center or other commercial uses has been a dud, and whether the ways we conceive of conditional uses as well as the notion of "compatibility" require more critique and revision.

From the Staff Report:

The purpose of the conditional use permit process is to allow uses that are similar to other uses permitted outright in a zone but because of the manner in which the use may be conducted, or the land and buildings developed for the use, review is required to determine whether the imposition of conditions is necessary to minimize the negative impacts on uses in the surrounding area.

The Hearings Officer found that the proposed multi-family residential use in this case does not minimize impacts and is not compatible with surrounding area....

The proposed site plan provided by the applicant indicates that future development of a gasoline service station and convenience will occur immediately adjacent to the proposed multi-family use.

Gas station and strip mall, SW corner (detail)

Again: Why are we doing anything for new gas stations?! We may be stuck with internal combustion engines for a while yet, but we should not be building new fossil fuel infrastructure.

But more generally, would a small grocery store or a cafe also present problems of "compatibility"? Calling for compatibility with existing neighborhood character is often a NIMBY move by opponents of housing for incumbency privilege, and we should work on reducing ways that "compatibility" can be invoked to oppose new housing or to oppose other changes to neighborhoods. Keeping things the same is often not a good option any more. Compatibility needs a thorough rethink as a criterion. Heavy industry is obviously not compatible with a neighborhood, but small scale business or apartments should be understood more generously.

It will be interesting to see how Council decides this one. The Hearings Officer may have made the right decision in the "old" framework, but in the context of our current housing crisis and the ways "compatibility" is harnessed so often to anti-housing and NIMBY ends, that framework may no longer be useful and may need revision.

Previously on the former Mushroom Plant:

• "Old Mushroom Plant Redevelopment Finally at the Planning Commission" (2019)
• "The Mushroom Plant and a new Traffic Light" (2019)
• "Read Mike Swaim's Reflections on the Mushroom Plant from 2001" (2019)
• and Swaim's piece, "If It Smells Like Hell, It’s Probably Pictsweet" (2001)
  

Wrapping the Meyer Farm Case

There is the final order for the Meyer Farm decision, but that seems sure to be appealed to LUBA and any further action on the dissolution of the trust could impact it also. So the matter seems far from settled.

But the disconnect between policy and statute is visible again.

Among the documents is "Supplemental Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law." It has a boatload of statements in the form, "concerns about such-and-such policy do not relate to the City's approval criteria."

Climate plan not relevant

We went through this with Bike and Walk Salem, and are going through this now with the Climate Action Plan and Our Salem. We write juicy policy language, people celebrate what seems to be clear progress in policy and values, and then when we face a particular opportunity and potential instantiation of the policy, we find the policy language has no teeth and is not effective statutorily.

Here at the Meyer Farm, some tried to harness goals of the Climate Plan to eco-NIMBY ends, or just to nudge for middle housing. This was maybe a stretch, not an especially helpful instance of invoking the Climate Action Plan. But we may find different situations where the Climate Plan is more directly relevant, and it will be baffled again.

Another example, back in 2014

Council should think more about the relation between policy language and statute. Perhaps by design, our policy documents are less powerful and less effective than sometimes they ought to be. This seems to offer flexibility, and the capacity to respond each situation individually, but it also drains the policy language of force. We don't end up with the outcomes we profess to want.

More MUHTIP Difficulties

Also on the  agenda is a "a ten-year rental affordability term for five percent of the development’s housing units" at the former Nordstrom site. "The City approved their portion of the property tax exemption, but the developer was unsuccessful in getting support from other taxing districts to exempt their property tax burden." As with 990 Broadway, it is another MUHTIP denial! 

From here, if the 990 Broadway project looked like it didn't exactly need the abatement, the project at the Nordstrom site looked exactly like the kind of project the incentive was designed for, and the other taxing districts now are making trouble. So it was good they had a Work Session last week, and hopefully all parties can find better alignment on when to grant and when to modify or deny MUHTIP requests. If we want more housing, those who build it - aka "developers" - need predictability, and the variation at each taxing district is not helpful now.

Other Items

(We already mentioned the airport.)

Summaries of two tranches of Federal funding: The 2022-2023 Annual Action Plan (AAP) for CDBG and HOME Funds and Amendment #2 to the 2021 Housing and Community Development Annual Action Plan. Downtown's Center for Hope and Safety gets money for the new mixed-use project on the site of the former Bus Depot as well as for existing programming. You may recall a couple of years ago neighbors used opposition to the plan for HOME funds as a backdoor way to flummox the German Baptist Church redevelopment for a while. I didn't see anything obvious that would occasion another round of criticism, but you never know. Others will have more to say perhaps.

In the quarterly Economic Development report there is news the City has commissioned more hype videos.

These videos will be 1-2-minute profiles that can be used to market Salem and highlight the high-quality goods and services offered here. Five videos have been shot or are already scheduled. These videos feature downtown co-working spaces, The Gray Lab and Co.W, Oregon Fruit, Fork Forty, and entrepreneurial events. The first round of videos is in editing and will be released soon. These videos will be shared on the City’s social media, new website and with partners and businesses. The videos can also be used for business recruitment efforts and by businesses for employment recruitment.

Once these are out, we'll return to them to see how they represent Salem. Do we recognize our city? Or are they fake dating profiles? Previously for comparison:

• "Performing our City: There's Something about Salem" (2016)
  
• "New Heritage All-Star Video Surpasses Sizzle Video" (2016)