City Council, May 16th - Bond Work Session

Council meets on Monday for a formal Work Session on the proposed bond concept and project list. They could move forward and proceed to place it on the November ballot, or they could ask for further revision.

Streets and sidewalks categories
(revised from City numbers)

As we noted last week, from here the streets and sidewalks portion is not persuasive, hardly responsive to climate and our need to reduce miles traveled by car.

The Pringle Creek path really should be under parks

There is a fake "bike/ped" category in it whose projects fit much better in other categories. State Street should be an urban upgrade rather than "bike/ped" project. The path project belongs in the parks portion with other paths, and does not fit as a "street" or a "sidewalk." The bridge railings does seem to have been reassigned. Between a new street and those "urban upgrades," there is too much capacity increase, about 2/3 of the subtotal. The City could also make better use of urban renewal funding for the McGilchrist project instead of using bond proceeds. Altogether the current proposal does not make significant progress on reducing driving and making walking, biking, and busing, or other non-auto travel easy and attractive. It's improvement on the edges only, not yet structural and anything to meet our climate needs.

Why isn't there better alignment on climate?

There are other reasons to question the whole, not just streets and sidewalks:

• Have we fully thought through changing needs in the Fire Department and its response? There has been no public discussion of truck side, station location, or how we staff more efficiently for medical response. There's too much reliance on a 2018 plan that was never subject to any public review.
  
• The amount for affordable housing seems very small. $10 million in "gap funding" to support private developers.
• The Library portion doesn't get us very far: "Purchase of two sites for mixed use affordable housing and library branches. Funds include predevelopment costs for one of the sites."
• On the Civic Center, the renovation of Peace Plaza has seemed likely to include an unneeded parking lot. It mentions the possibility of removing the atrium also. Should we have a firmer plan, with more public process first?
  

The big pitch behind the bond proposal from the City seems to be "you won't feel a thing":

We have a one-time opportunity to invest in critical projects to improve streets, sidewalks, parks and public safety without increasing the City's property tax rate....Several previous bond measures will be retired and removed from the tax rolls over the next decade, providing up to $300 million to invest – without increasing tax rates. Bond funded projects would take care of what we have, saving money currently spent on repairs and maintenance of outdated facilities and equipment, and improve energy efficiency.

But does that alone make it compelling? From here it has seemed to lack "a strong thesis statement" and the process has been a little rushed in order to meet a November deadline. The project list carries forward older, unfunded projects conceived under 20th century assumptions, and many of them need a 21st century perspective and revision instead.

In the first tranche of letters to Council on the bond proposal, there's a gratifying number of letters in support of including the protected bike lane proposal of Councilor Stapleton (et. al.), which so far is not included. There were also three against, but the ratio was strongly in support.

Among those letters, in a larger proposal for a 21st century bond, one person wrote:

In 1990 before Salem started painting lines on arterials, Salem had 1% of commuter trips by bike. In 2019, after painting 120 miles of bike lanes, the city has 0.5% of commuter trips by bicycle. Obviously the painted bike lane program is a failure.

They are right. The policy of paint-only lanes on busy streets has not been enough for anyone outside of strong and confident cyclists. The commute rate has basically held steady. (To say it declined from 1% to 0.5% is likely too precise; that decrease is within the margin of error on the sampling. See notes on city rankings and on bike counts for more on this. The important point is that we have utterly failed to increase by a statistically significant amount.)

Another person makes a great point about reasons for riding in the parks (and indirectly about the city adopting policies that degrade parks for people on foot, who end up having to dodge people biking too fast). If we degrade anything, it should be the preferential treatment we have given cars, lethal and polluting! We need to decrease driving, not decrease walking, biking, and busing. Additionally, with gas prices so high right now, we should be interested in providing safe and pleasant alternatives to driving. Make it easy for people not to drive, easy to feel there are realistic choices.

I spend a lot of time bicycling around Minto-Brown Park on my ebike. I see many other bikes riding the same paths I do. How do these bicyclists get there? Some, like me, brave street traffic from wherever they live and make their way. Others most certainly pack their bikes onto their cars and drive to the parks to enjoy riding them. But doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose? Such bicyclists are still driving cars and pick up trucks that contribute to climate change, increasing downtown traffic and increasing the demand to parking. The bikes are there, the people want to ride them, and in doing so will improve the quality of life in Salem, but people don’t feel safe on the streets of the community they wish to ride in. Encouraging bicycles to travel to downtown with its businesses and Riverfront Park is clearly a win-win.

Apart from the specifics of the protected bike lane proposal and better aligning the whole "streets and sidewalks" package with our climate needs, the whole thing just seems too random and ad hoc. More time and consideration might yield a better total bond concept. With inflation rising, too, maybe now November is not so propitious for a large bond measure.

Probably there will be more letters and comment, and it will be interesting to see if a consensus emerges.