City Council, November 21st - Work Session on Strategic Plan and Policy

Council meets on Monday for a formal Work Session on the Strategic Plan, review of 2022 Policy, and starting to set the Policy for 2023.

Is transparency really a priority?

The first thing that comes to mind is the disconnect on transparency and secrecy. There are more than a few disconnects, in fact. There is too much on mood and appearance, and not enough on measurable policy outcomes.

Open data or Salem city secrecy?

One of the policy goals is to "Share performance measures and metrics."

What happened to the ones from Our Salem, eh?

Part of a Report Card concept in 2019

Maybe these will be incorporated into the new "web-based access point." But they were conspicuously absent during the final adoption phase for Our Salem, and make no appearance now in the Strategic Plan and any Policy Agenda updates.

The City is also still mystifying the Climate Action Plan. The City keeps repeating the claim that "Salem greenhouse gas emissions shall be reduced to 50 percent of...the baseline year of 2016." In legal documents, "shall" is mandatory language!

Big disconnects on Climate

Meeting that goal does not seem very likely at the moment, however.

The Climate Action Plan Committee has hardly been making recommendations on implementation. They have had instead a passive role, listening to updates on action taken by others. They are not initiating much action.

The description of progress is even more overheated. As we've documented here, "many of the strategies" do not in fact have "high potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

You may recall:

By my count and including the October items, the committee has now looked at 52 separate policy strategy concepts. Of those six only were rated with "high potential" for reducing greenhouse pollution.

Six of 52 hardly constitutes "many." This is very close to an outright lie. It is false. It's not at all close enough to be a plausible difference of opinion and defensible instance of spin.

The City really should rewrite its review of the Climate Action Plan in 2022.

There may be other sections of the Report that are false or materially misleading.

Community Satisfaction Survey

The other half of the Work Session is on the annual community satisfaction survey.

Here's another reason we desperately need a return of the metrics. In the survey, 50% of people said it was "very easy" or "somewhat easy" to walk or bike in Salem.

Ease of walking, biking, and driving

But if this is true, why are we so far from reaching our goals for walking and biking?

We are failing badly on walking and biking
(Those indicators from Our Salem)

There's a real disconnect here between what people actually do, and what they say or feel. The argument here is that what people do is more important. The survey should also ask respondents, "when was the last time you walked?" and "when was the last time you biked?" A good part of the response is almost certainly people who feel it must be easy to walk or bike, but who have not themselves done so recently or do so frequently. (Crime is another category on which the data is not consistent with sentiment.)

The survey analysis does note a decline in satisfaction.

Decline in perception of safety for walking and biking

But did conditions objectively decline between 2021 and 2022? Hardly. There is a meaningful difference between 2019 and 2020, between pre-Pandemic and our Pandemic Times. But from 2021 to 2022 is mood. And we pay too much attention to mood, and not enough to what people actually do. Our policy goals should be oriented less to mood, and more to actual travel choices. (Which is also consistent with our goals on climate pollution, which require action, not merely sentiment.)

Gender split on safety

There was a gender split on safety called out, interestingly. This should be old, old news to people. Bike counts have nearly always showed a split larger than 11 percentage points, often a ratio of 2:1 men to women. See this Scientific American piece from 2009, "How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road: To boost urban bicycling, figure out what women want." Women on foot talk about the cat-calling and harassment problem. The observation on a gender split is old enough now that it is now being critiqued, refined, and revised. It is not something that should be presented as some novel insight in a survey.

Four total pages on art in a 32 page report

There are many other items in the update report on the Strategic Plan. Others will focus on the response to our housing crisis, which is a large and important part of the report.

But the final impression here is that at least four full pages are devoted to Public Art. More art is great! But as for its actual policy impacts, this is very disproportionate coverage, really underscoring appearance and mood rather than empirical data and policy outcomes.

See previous posts on the Strategic Plan here.