Thinking about Governance Structure and Cost Escalation: At the MPO

The technical committee for our Metropolitan Planning Organization meets on Tuesday the 13th, and there are a number of items to note in passing.

New website and home page

The Council of Governments, which hosts and staffs the MPO has a new website. It's optimized for mobile devices, and seems to load very slowly on a desktop. The first two things, finding the TAC meeting notice and the new location for the area bike map were easy enough, though. Maybe as we use it more there will be more to say.

On the meeting, as the MPO continues to grapple with cost escalation, centered on immediate needs for the Verda Lane project and then rippling out to other projects, a source of value engineering on the McGilchrist project may be in play. One of the proposals is to shave $4 million from the first phase, the intersection with 22nd. That may be of interest to critics of the McGilchrist project.

A way to shave funding for McGilchrist?

Other possible effects include pushing off the new sidewalk for Commercial Street SE between Vista and Ratcliff from 2026 out to 2028.

More general is the conversation around "MPO Membership and Voting." With the need to add Aumsville to the MPO, there is an opening to reconsider the basic governance structure.

Voting and membership discussion

You may remember a report from the Safe Routes Partnership on MPOs.

From Safe Routes Partnership on MPOs

In it they discussed the structural problems of MPOs as they are constituted.

MPO boards simply are not structured to adequately represent the needs of central city residents...urban jurisdictions received 29 percent of MPO board votes but contained 56 percent of the MPO area population.

We have the same issue. Votes do not correspond at all to population. On SKATS, Turner and Polk County have one vote each, the same as the City of Salem.

Population disproportion in 2021

In the packet is a overview of local MPOs and a few others across the country. Some use weighted voting schemes to make things more representative. One nearby is in the Corvallis area:

[T]he Policy Board includes representatives from the cities of Adair Village, Corvallis, and Philomath, Benton County, and ODOT. They strive for consensus and have a process if that cannot be attained....Corvallis has three votes, everyone else one...while Corvallis has 3 votes, there are four other members of the Policy Board so Corvallis could never unilaterally make an action that affects the region.

It is good the MPO is finally having this conversation, and it will be interesting to see how it works out. Right now the voting structure is weighted too much for rural/suburban/county representation, and not enough squarely for urban representation.

This disproportion has seemed to have real consequences in the way the MPO has been slow to grapple with climate and emissions. Marion County, in particular, was for many years a vocal climate denier, and this meaningfully chilled analysis, debate, and then action.

The discussions will filter up to the Policy Committee for adoption/enactment and there will surely be more to say later.

The TAC meets at 1:30pm on Tuesday the 13th.