Next Up at City Council, August 1, 2007

The Portland City Council Agenda starts in fine style with a Communication from one of Portland’s most excellent citizen volunteers. 925 Request of Greg Schifsky to address Council regarding tree preservation needed to preserve the heritage and watershed environments. Greg, with his volunteer group co-led by Steve Mullinax, the Bridlemile Creek Stewards, is a past Spirit of Portland Award winner. He is one of the rare people who combines diligent research and thought on policy with practical improvement projects in neighborhoods. He led an ad hoc group with fellow SW citizen Margot Barnett (since appointed to the Urban Forestry Commission), that reviewed all tree-related regulations and policies in multiple bureaus. That led to inclusion in the last Budget of money for staff in several bureaus to streamline and coordinate regulations, which will be better for people wanting to know whether they can cut/prune/plant trees, and likely to improve tree protection. I’ll be watching Greg’s comments on Wednesday, to see what concerns him now.

First up after that, 926 TIME CERTAIN: 9:30 AM – Establish employee-driven committee entitled Diverse and Empowered Employees of Portland for City employees as a means to enhance the City work experience through networking, resource and professional development and support. My first reaction after opening the file with the resolution is disappointment that throughout the document, the project is referenced by its acronym, “DEEP”. Way to take something that sounds important for generating good ideas among City employees, and turn it into a joke. “Yeah, that’s deep”. It sounds picky, but I find choice of words really does matter, in many different situations. Why didn’t they call it the Diversity/Empowerment committee? Those are strong words, with no need of abbreviation. I bet a group sat around for a while, after deciding on diversity and empowerment as two of the words, to brainstorm adding “employees” and “Portland” to make the real-word acronym. Oh well. I can’t quite tell from the Resolution exactly what this group is supposed to do. There is one rather unusual clause:

“WHEREAS, DEEP has no intention of allowing the affinity groups to create a public forum or platform, nor are they intended to establish or promote any political or social agenda. Rather, the affinity groups are designed to facilitate employee professional development, cultural connections, diversity and understanding within the City’s workforce.”

Somebody felt strongly about something there, in listing what it isn’t going to allow before what it is going to do. In concept, I’m glad to see City employees having the support of all five Councilmen in collaborating on the broad goals of diversity and empowerment. We have enormous wealth of experience, enthusiasm, and expertise in the ranks of our public employees, and from what I’ve seen, the avenues for the rank-and-file to give ideas and affect policy choices of management are insufficient. And as in the rest of Portland, improvements in cultural understanding and sensitivity are needed. I’m curious and concerned about that “whereas”, which suggests to me troubled waters swirling under the bridge.

Probably the most interesting item on the Agenda is 940 Clarify existing provisions and change reporting threshold for Lobbying Regulations (Ordinance introduced by Commissioners Adams, Leonard, Saltzman and Sten; amend Code Chapter 2.12). The Portland Mercury has been covering this issue well.

The second Time Certain is 927 TIME CERTAIN: 10:00 AM – Open Meadow Schools City Corps project marketing minority homeownership to youth. The report says:

“In the past five weeks, City Corps has been working with the Bureau of Housing and Community Development. They have been conducting research on the minority homeownership gap and have created a positive home ownership message to market to young people of color. They will be presenting their findings as well as recommendations to the Portland City Council.”

In concept, it sounds like a good idea to reach people to inform them about programs to assist them in buying a home, by using teens to tell other youth in the community. Kids have to go to school, and there find incentives to complete assignments. Adults don’t have to attend meetings, don’t have to read their mail, answer their phone, or talk to someone at the door. It’s possible the outreach strategy identified in this report will help inform the folks who need to know the information. And it’s good to see people who likely have experienced problems with buying homes giving the report on how to overcome barriers, rather than some affluent researcher of a different culture who can only review the topic academically. Still, I’ve observed over 20 years of participating in Portland’s schools that the quality of research and reports varies widely. So do the “How are the children doing?” segments which often kick off City Council meetings under Mayor Potter. Some are outstanding and highly useful, others more in the that’s-pretty-good-considering-their-age category. It will be interesting to see if this item is a Wow or not.

Here’s a seemingly-routine ordinance YOU need to know about, if you’re a driver: *929 Apply for a $300,000 Oregon Department of Transportation Work Zone Enforcement Program grant for officer overtime Driving home last night along I-5 near 217, there is a long work zone area, and it had heavy police speed enforcement. The speed limit is 45 mph, which in most cars/trucks feels really slow on the highway. The ticket for speeding in a work zone costs over $600. And that is likely because construction workers are killed relatively frequently by people driving too fast. Set your cruise control, move over into the slow lane, do whatever it takes to abide by the speed limit in work zones – unless you can easily afford that $647 ticket, and don’t care if you kill someone.

A couple more citizen volunteers appointed to City service: 941 Appoint Mark Edlen and Derek Smith to the Sustainable Development Commission for terms to expire August 1, 2009. Mark Edlen is Managing Principal with Gerding Edlen, the company which sold three blocks in the Pearl for $291m this week. I’m interested to see in that link to an interview with Mark, that he worked his way up from being a sales associate at Xerox. There are several people who come up in a Google search for “Derek Smith” Portland, so I’m guessing the appointee is this one – the “corporate sustainability manager for the catalog and retail company Norm Thompson Outfitters”.
Update 8/1/07: Willamette Week says this Derek Smith is employed at Yolo Colorhouse paints. Not sure if it’s the same guy, who moved on, or a different one. Not going to take the time to check, either. But in the interest of accuracy, there ya go.

All the above is on Wednesday morning’s Agenda – there are no afternoon sessions on Wednesday or Thursday. In reviewing City code on something else, I discovered it’s the third Wednesday of the month when Council “may” hold the second session in the evening instead of the afternoon. Looking at the “Upcoming Agenda Items” page in the Auditor’s site, I find on August 16, 2:00 PM Osterholm/SE 74th & Lafayette LU 06-181122 LDS DZ. The letters and numbers at the end indicate that it’s a land use case. I would like to see hearings like that held in the evening, in the neighborhood affected. Now, citizens who care one way or the other likely have to take time off work to attend an afternoon meeting downtown. Holding the hearing on location, in the evening, would cost more in City staff time and in logistics expenses. But wouldn’t it be worth it, to allow more citizens to participate?