Designating the Civic Center as Local Historic Resource: At the HLC

From Liberty Street sidewalk connection, 1972

Next week on the 19th the Historic Landmarks Commission will conduct a Public Hearing on the proposal to designate the Civic Center as a Salem Local Historic Resource.

Hearing Notice

In November of last year the National Parks Service already accepted the Civic Center's Nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, so it is highly unlikely any impediment will stand in the way of this listing as a Local Historic Resource.

Start of Nomination

Instead, here is a complaint about process.

This Public Hearing for designation as a Local Historic Resource should have preceded the Nomination to the National Register, which was done a little covertly, without any public process. Salemites should have been given more of an opportunity at the HLC and at Council to weigh in on the Civic Center. I do not think the outcome would have been different, but it would have been good to give more attention to the way the Civic Center does and does not function as a place, and to spend less time on it as some wonderful aesthetic expression of brutalist design and autoist land use. The local action should have been preliminary to the national action, and public process would have been better served by Public Hearings before the National Register Nomination.

Sliding in the airport money before budget meeting

The backwards sequencing is a little like what we have just seen on the airport. On Monday Council voted on over $2 million in spending for it. Two days later, on Wednesday as members of the Budget Committee, Council heard more about, as Salem Reporter cited, steering the budget away from the cliff. It was as if proponents of the airport knew they needed to keep Council and the Citizenry away from the full context of the spending decision and the prospect of deficits.

Additionally, the Neighborhood Traffic Plan is also in stealth mode without public materials or fully public process.

Maybe these are all coincidence, but on the surface they are a pattern of moving forward on things without meeting the spirit of transparency and public process.

At next Tuesday's Work Session, one of the potential items for the Policy Agenda identified in the Staff Report is on communications:

A comprehensive engagement and communications plan is expected to result in strategies to tell our story, increase awareness of the impact the City has in day-to-day lives, and increase civic participation and diversity in participation, enhance our volunteer base, expand Neighborhood Associations, advisory boards and commissions, and benefit talent acquisition and recruitment strategies. This work is underway and is anticipated to be completed prior to July 2023.

The City continues to frame a communications problem as one of Public Relations and Marketing, and not one of actual Public Process and substantive information. But again it risks being too much talk, and not enough walk.

On the Civic Center see previously:

• "Hyping the Charmless Concrete Bunker: The Civic Center at 50"
  
• More on the National Register Nomination, "City Council, May 23rd - Eco-Earth and Civic Center Historic Designations"
  
• "MORE PARKING!!! won't Solve Peace Plaza's Deadness" (2021)
  
• "Move Peace Plaza! It Doesn't Work - In Fact, It's Broke!" (2013)
• "Two Police Stations: Eugene's Car-Dependence and the Civic Center's Desolateness" (2013)
• "A Postscript on Peace Plaza: The Library Remodel Broke it!" (2013)
• "Pringle Creek Urban Renewal District Nets Little over Inflation" (2012)