City Council, August 28th - Parking at the Airport

As we see real signs of our climate crisis in smoke, heat, and fire, and as we debate a municipal budget problem and a deeply contested payroll tax, it is not surprising the City's proposed use of the utility fund to finance parking lot expansion for the airport prompts questions.

Wildfire right here, Friday

Yesterday's paper

Council meets this evening, and a set of four interlocking agenda items to fund more parking at the airport looks a little odd.

• "Resolution No. 2023-26, Fiscal Year 2024 Supplemental Budget (1), increasing Airport Fund and Cultural & Tourism Fund resource and expenditure appropriation authority"
• "Purchase and Sale Agreement and lease assumption"
• "Resolution No. 2023-28 authorizing a transfer of appropriations within the City’s fiscal year 2024 budget"
• "Resolution No. 2023-27, approving an internal borrowing from the City’s Utility Fund to the Airport Fund"
  

Front page Saturday

That our Climate Action Plan contains no provision to evaluate new Council actions and decisions in terms of greenhouse gas emissions shows its designed limits. It's not a very flexible and useful policy document for novel events and future-facing decisions outside of its listed "strategies."

Silent on evaluating novel actions

In the face of the budget problems, if borrowing from the Utility Fund is no big deal, something routine, the City should have made a list of previous borrowings from the Utility Fund and the purpose of each instance. The City merely says, "the Utility Fund has maintained unrestricted reserves which have been used in recent years for other internal borrowings." A little more detail would be helpful.

The whole transaction appears to be structured so that parking rent from meters is supposed to provide an annual payment of $210,620 to replenish the Utility Fund.

But what happens when the airline follows Delta, Seaport, and others who abandoned Salem and parking demand at the airport plummets?

Some have argued that the lot and building would be an asset that could be repurposed or flipped and perhaps this is true. But the City Staff Report should discuss that as a realistic possibility.

Maybe this is a reasonable thing in light of the current commitment to the airport, but the timing and lack of detail make it look like a risky concept in many ways and it deserves more scrutiny.

Downtown Parking

Meanwhile, the Urban Renewal Agency proposes to create a new project in the downtown Urban Renewal Area, and formal amendment to the corresponding plan, for the on-street parking conversion.

With the recent change removing the requirement for new housing development to provide one parking space for every housing unit, residents have less parking available to them on-site. This has resulted in an increased demand for on-street parking spaces reducing the number of on-street customer parking spaces for downtown retail, food/beverage and commercial businesses. More than 326 units have been built or are under construction in the downtown core with more housing anticipated in conjunction with the redevelopment of Block 50 and 280 Liberty Street NE. The recent completion of the 100+ room Holman Hotel has also impacted the number of on-street available spaces.

The addition of a Paid Parking Technology Infrastructure Project in the Riverfront-Downtown Urban Renewal Plan will allow Riverfront-Downtown Urban Renewal funds to be used to support costs to implement an on-street performance-based system, including financial analysis and community outreach consulting services, which will help meet the objectives of the Plan that downtown be the dominant retail center for the City.

The focus on housing is quite right, but the last sentence about downtown being "the dominant retail center" looks like grasping at an outdated vision from the past. Retail generally across the country, in very structural ways, and downtown specifically is changing fast! Nordstrom, JC Penney, TJ Maxx (soon to be a Dollar store, not exactly dominant retail!), you know. The sentiment in the Staff Report certainly is an expression of downtown as a drive-to destination like a mall, and over and over we are seeing that downtown needs to be understood as its own neighborhood rather than as a mall.

Also this vision may not be coherent with plans to designate downtown as a Climate Friendly Area.

From Technical Memo 4

If we actually achieve all this housing downtown, where's all the drive-to retail going to be? There will be walkable retail for residents, but not so much room for a "dominant retail center" and its parking lots. Besides, as the City promotes or allows areas near the new Costco store and Amazon warehouse, all that big new development around Kuebler, it's siphoning away retail from downtown.

The City may need to shift the dominant frame for downtown from "dominant retail center" or "regional shopping center" to "climate friendly area" or even just "central neighborhood" full of homes and walkable commerce.

Other Items

Council will adopt the final order for the apartment complex near Orchard Heights and Doaks Ferry.

In a piece earlier this month, Salem Reporter quoted Councilor Varney and the Mayor:

“The applicant has failed to do their due diligence and consideration and evaluation of all potential alternatives for tree preservation, stormwater mitigation and (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessibility. I do not believe the applicant has met the burden of proof showing that there are no reasonable alternatives other than what they have proposed,” [Councilor Varney] said during the meeting....

Mayor Hoy said that he agreed with many of her points, but ultimately voted to approve the decision saying he didn’t believe the council had the authority to reject it.

“That’s one of the things about land use and our quasi-judicial role that’s really both frustrating and bizarre about our laws is that as elected officials in this role, we’re supposed to take the facts and apply the rules and make a decision. And we’re used to making more political calculations rather than these kinds of decisions,” he said during the meeting, and that in the past similar decisions have been overturned by the state Land Use Board of Appeals.

For some more general notes on what we might need to do to manage projects like this better, including the possibility that Councilor Varney's statement is in tension with what LUBA has said about any City duty to require detail on "reasonable alternatives":

• "Details in Statute too often keep Values Merely Aspirational" 
• And an earlier discussion from May, "Apartments near Doaks Ferry and Orchard Heights," with links to even earlier discussions of the property, including the period when a new mixed-use zoning was developed for it.

The project seems likely to be appealed to LUBA and there might be more to say later.

Areas for small easements and bites of property

Finally initiating some routine property and easement acquisition for sidewalks and crosswalks and curb ramps:

• Macleay and Caplinger Roads (For more on the project see "Salem Area Looks to Win Six Grants for Safe Routes to Schools Projects" (2020)
  
• Far out South Commercial (This is a pavement rehabilitation project in the big bond. Information in the packet suggests Cherriots has not yet completed purchasing property for the forthcoming South Salem Transit Center.)