80% of Success, Part 2: The other 20%

In most City of Portland projects, there’s a process and a product. Often, a good, inclusive, thoughtful process leads to a useful product. Sometimes, a botched process can still have a good outcome if someone steps in to fix the product at the end. In other examples, it doesn’t seem to matter who participated or how it was managed, somehow nothing gels when it’s all done. And there are times when the process is so inadequate, it’s no surprise to anyone when the product goes down in flames when reviewed by City Council.

In VisionPDX, the expectations for the product weren’t clearly defined at the beginning, or even by two-thirds of the way through. I asked in July, “Is VisionPDX writing a specific plan that we expect City staff/Important People/someone-else-not-me to implement? Or is the main point of the exercise to include more people in participating in City decisions, in the project and in the future?” And then in answering those who said then that the project should work on specific measurable outcomes, I said, “I believe Mayor Potter and his staff should focus VisionPDX on WHO will help shape the Portland of tomorrow, rather than what that will be.”

And as evidenced by the participation at the hearing Wednesday evening, that’s essentially what the Vision project staff did. I appreciate that. The Oregonian‘s editorial didn’t. I believe VisionPDX has been exemplary in reaching out to Portlanders to involve them in civic actions. I think 80% of the success of VisionPDX was the process resulting in who was at the hearing on Wednesday. Engaging new participants is enough of a product to make the project worthwhile, to me, as I noted yesterday morning.

But the VisionPDX staff and volunteers also produced a document they identified as their product on Wednesday evening, and there are problems with that. Its language is both too vague to satisfy the Oregonian‘s editorial board and other critics, and yet too specific to accept and implement without full public review from more than the VisionPDX staff and committees.

The VisionPDX document isn’t just a statement of shared values. It is also intended to define goals to set the direction for the Portland of tomorrow. And that’s where some significant issues arise. If the endpoint of VisionPDX is an implementable, written product, then the process fell down at the final hurdle.

My question to the Council in my testimony on Wednesday was, “Does this Vision document matter?” If it doesn’t matter, I said, and the main point of the project was to bring more citizens in participating, then they should just accept it as written and put it on a shelf. But if it does matter, if they intend for it to be used for policy guidance, then citizens should be given the opportunity to point out flaws and request amendments. Very much to my surprise, the Council indicated they would amend the VisionPDX language in response to my request to include reference to Portlanders’ shared value of wanting excellent public schools. I was astonished.

Despite fixing what I saw as the most egregious error in the Vision goals, I believe using the document now as a policy guide is problematic because of the error in public process at the end of this phase of the project. The VisionPDX team got the document 80%, maybe even 90% finished, then rushed it to Council two days later. That didn’t give the other 535,000 citizens who didn’t participate in the process a meaningful opportunity to ask our elected officials to refine it, with the 10% tweaks that are often (almost always) needed at the end of a long public process. The Planning Commission doesn’t expect the Council to adopt its visions and policy proposals verbatim, even in projects like the Southwest Community Plan which also took years and engaged thousands of citizens. Should any non-elected group expect to set policy for the entire City of Portland? I don’t believe so.

Key issues:

* In a respectful citizen engagement process, the final document is not released two days before the only City Council hearing on it. No matter how thorough and inclusive the committee’s review of comments on the draft from earlier in the year, there should always be adequate community review of a final document, and a real chance for citizens who haven’t participated so far to ask for changes in its policies at the Council hearing. VisionPDX’s goals are intended by project staff and volunteers to be policies. That’s a problem if they are now accepted as written, without community review.

* In a process that recognizes Portland has BOTH an amazing capacity for participatory democracy AND a solid representative democracy with leaders chosen by the electorate and empowered by voters to make final decisions on City policies, there must be capacity for refinements by those elected officials. Citizens other than those who participated have the right to disagree with proposed policies, and the City Council has not only the right but the obligation to amend them if they believe a different direction is better. VisionPDX was not a referendum, and 15,000 participants, even 150,000, aren’t charged with governing Portland. The five members of the Council are. They are elected to lead.

Sam Adams gave a great example at the end of the invited speakers’ presentations. He noted the VisionPDX goals call for converting brownfields to open space and natural areas. “What if I disagree with that? What if I want to clean some of them up and return them to industrial uses, providing jobs, instead of open space. How does that relate to the Vision goal?”, he asked. I loved that question (which wasn’t really answered over the course of the evening), because you and I know that no way is the City Council going to fund restoration and naturalization of all the many brownfields along the river – nor should they. Our shared value of infill within the Urban Growth Boundary means reusing industrial lands for jobs, in many cases, not turning them all into greenspaces.

* People who understand how participatory democracy in Portland works realize that no citizen can be deeply involved in every City process simultaneously. It’s simply not possible to take a significant role in refining the draft version of the Vision, and also be heavily invested in Sam’s transportation funding project, and the Planning Commission’s code rewrites, and parks improvements, and school funding/equity, and …..

It’s not fair to citizens who do want to influence the Vision document without spending “two years of my life” as one committee member said, that the VisionPDX plan was presented with almost no capacity to change the outcome. That was disrespectful to the very principle of citizen inclusion the project worked so hard to value. Surely the VisionPDX project doesn’t want to send the message that you must participate for two years in one project, in order to have standing to give input on the recommendation to the City Council?

If the VisionPDX document had only contained statements of values, two days’ review would be fine. “This is what we found are shared values” isn’t something others can argue with, much – especially when they’re phrased broadly enough that few Portlanders disagree with them. But the Vision accepted on Wednesday goes further. It doesn’t just state the values the process found Portlanders share, and stop, allowing future decision-makers to check proposed policies against agreed shared values. It extrapolates from the values to propose policy goals. I can accept that 15,000 respondents offered pretty much the same values. I find it very hard to believe there was consensus on some of the policies, such as encouraging growth and infill, and new designs next to historic buildings. And regardless of whether I (as one of the few people who had time to skim the proposal) agree with the policy goals or not, the process stopped short, by not allowing citizens to petition their elected officials to change them. People can and do have shared values, while disagreeing on goals and implementation strategies.

There are two things that may help salvage the VisionPDX document as a valid tool to use in future policy adoption. Wait, I said there were two …. but never mind, on the second. There is a page on the Planning Bureau site with a link to the VisionPDX and a comment form. But the link is a pdf, so I don’t recommend clicking on it unless you have patience and a super-fast computer. Instead, do the Portlandonline.com survey, and look for places to say “Stop posting things in pdf!”

So, the one avenue for making VisionPDX a valid document as well as an exemplary public process (up until so close to the end), is that the City Council is holding a worksession on November 14, at which Commissioners and the Mayor expressed intent to amend some of the policy language. They promised to respond to my amendment request for something emphasizing the value of public schools and calling for excellent public schools in every neighborhood, for example. So if there is Stuff in the goals you don’t agree with, contact the Councilmen and propose amendments. They “accepted” the document on Wednesday, but acceptance isn’t the same as adoption – the City isn’t legally bound to follow anything in VisionPDX. There is still time to get amended policy language inserted, which then will be used to guide future projects leading to adoption of legally-binding Stuff.