City Council, February 26th - Union Street Bikeway and Airport

The main items of interest on the agenda for Monday's Council meeting were the former UGM site announcement and Front Street study. There are also some smaller transportation items of minor interest.

Buried in the administrative purchases are a couple of change orders on the Union Street Bikeway.

• Change Order No. 1 for $90,213 makes a conceptual change for the easterly end of the project that reconfigures the bikeway and how it interfaces with the roadway. 
• Change Order No. 2 adds $60,856 for an increase in project management.

Detail on curve showing buffered bike lanes only
(October 2023 Bond Committee meeting)

The change to the "easterly end," which I understand to mean the elbow curve down to Marion Street and the intersection of Marion and 12th, will be interesting to learn more about. Drawings shown to the Bond Committee in October seemed to show merely a buffered bike lane on the curve, and this did not seem adequate to meet any "family-friendly" standard, as drivers routinely go too fast on curves and cross over into bike lanes. I am hopeful the City is upgrading this.

There is a cluster of three airport items, including a request for $23,800 in subsidy from the City.

Avelo Airlines indicated that the first three months of operations in Salem were successful. However, the airline has requested $23,800 in funds from the $1.2 million Minimum Revenue Guarantee Fund for this period.

Asking for City subsidy seems ipso facto proof the first three months of operations were not wholly successful! Shouldn't we define success as not needing City subsidy? Adding the new flight to Sonoma sounds great, but the request for revenue guarantee funding deserves more attention. (And of course reviving commercial passenger service still deserves a climate analysis on emissions, but Council is just ignoring that.)

There's also:

• A Memorandum of Understanding with the US Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security on an awareness campaign about human trafficking, "Blue Lightning Initiative." Surely this is a bigger problem on I-5 than the Salem Airport?
  
• "Federal Aviation Administration Airport Improvement Program (AIP) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) grant funds to be used for security and infrastructure improvements" totaling a little over $1 million.
  

Wedge in black, just above the apartments

Part of an early phase of the bond-funded Marine Drive project is outside city limits and requires an intergovernmental agreement with Polk county. A new apartment complex is going in and it is convenient to coordinate this portion of Marine Drive with that construction ahead of the larger, main portion of Marine Drive.

Summary on the arts: Six takeaways

And a few items just to note in passing:

• The quarterly Economic Development report did not seem to have any new information of particular interest.
• A report and five year plan for the amphitheater in Riverfront Park. It also didn't seem to offer anything interesting or surprising.
• A report on the economic impact of arts and culture. It might be helpful to quantify dollars for philistine sorts who, for example, might think libraries are dumb frills and should be eliminated, but otherwise it's unsurprising.