Cherriots New Long-Range Plan Omits Our Salem and Climate Action Plan

The Board for Cherriots meets on Thursday the 15th and they look formally to adopt the Long Range Plan, lightly revised from the November draft.

Draft Long Range Plan

It is so very strange.

In November at one of the meetings for our Metropolitan Planning Organization, they indicated that the timeline was such that the planning and zoning changes from Our Salem could not be discussed or incorporated into the plan. Neither is Salem's Climate Action Plan discussed.

Our Salem not in Cherriots Long Range Plan
November 8th TAC meeting

The coordination meetings when Cherriots met with the Climate Action Plan Committee in July and when Cherriots met with City Council in September do not seem to have borne much fruit.

• "Climate Action Plan Committee: Cherriots and the Long Range Plan" (July)
• "City Council, September 19th - Joint Work Session with Cherriots"
• "Cherriots Board to Start Review of draft Long Range Plan" (November)
  
• "Placing the SRC in the MTP and Review of Cherriots Plan: At the MPO" (November)

Of course every planning process has to stop at some point, and there's always some new thing in process that has to be excluded in order to finish. But the magnitude of Our Salem and the Climate Action Plan were known, coordination meetings scheduled, and it is just utterly baffling that Cherriots has not adjusted the timeline in order to absorb them better. 

In this light, the work session on Board function and dynamic is also odd.

A little tautologous?

One of the slides seems be a tautology: High impact boards do high impact things. How is that a useful analysis or tip?

The shift to an appointed Board has yielded a younger, more dynamic set of members with a wider interest in 21st century transportation. But it may be also that we are seeing some inexperience.

A thing for low wedges at Pivot?

Finally, the Board looks to select a Eugene firm, Pivot Architecture, for work on the South Salem Transit Center project, for

environmental review, property acquisition assistance, design and engineering, and construction management services, for a not to exceed amount of $1,700,000?

Pivot worked on the Keizer Transit Center a decade ago, and have done work on the rapid transit line EmX in Eugene and work for Trimet in Portland. The rhyming patterning in the Hood River and Springfield stations is interesting, and the 2005 Springfield Transit Center has mixed uses. And more generally, they would be aware of the co-location of the Eugene downtown Transit Center across the street from the main Library.

Springfield Transit Center area with restaurants

They look on the surface like a firm able and willing to think about coordinating the transit functions with housing, a library, or other mixed uses.

Now if we can just get bicycling properly integrated into a Transit Center.

The Board meets on Thursday the 15th at 6:30pm.