Next Up at City Council 11/21/07

The most controversial item is early on Wednesday’s Portland City Council Agenda. That, of course, is the renaming of 4th Avenue and the proposed Code amendment to allow the Council to initiate and pass street renamings top-down, in this and future cases. The agenda item title and ordinance still calls for the renaming of Interstate, but as Anna Griffin reported in yesterday’s Oregonian, that was an error which can be fixed by parliamentary procedure. It’s a Second Reading, so likely no debate.

I wasn’t aware of the related Code amendment until I read Amy J. Ruiz’s Blogtown post and Anna’s newspaper article, after writing my analysis yesterday. It allows the Council to rename any street they want to. It was an item on last week’s Agenda which required “Suspension of the Rules” for the Council to consider and pass it to a vote.

Hoo boy.

I didn’t post Next Up at City Council last weekend, as it was the last few days of my parents’ visit and I relished every minute spent with them. And I didn’t see any attention to this proposed Code amendment, in the controversy over whether to rename Interstate, 4th, or any street.

This new Code section will permanently change the process allowed for future street renamings. And this new process is one future Councils might actually follow, because it allows them to do whatever they want. Under it, Council can propose a street rename (prohibited in current Code). They can approve a name change with few restrictions, after sending the proposal to the Planning Commission for a token public hearing. As with other issues, the Council doesn’t have to accept the Planning Commission’s recommendation.

Adding a new Code section with no public process for reviewing the language (other than the hearing on Thursday when people had bigger topics to talk about, and the Code proposal had been out for less than a week) is not a good way to amend public policy standards in the Portland City Code.

The ordinance, sponsored by Commissioner Saltzman, essentially says “Council can name streets and there’s nothing citizens can do to stop it even if you show up at a Planning Commission hearing and City Council hearing”. Since this is a Second Reading to vote on the new Code language, I don’t know if there will be an opportunity for citizens to comment on it this Wednesday. I would like Council to make a minor amendment adding a sunset date, so this is the only street renaming allowed under the new top-down process. The City Council should either honor the current Code regulations, or stop renaming streets.

OK, back to the rest of the Council’s Agenda for Wednesday. It begins with Citizen Communications, which is where anyone can sign up to talk to the Council for three minutes. There are five spaces available each Wednesday morning. This week, four citizens from SW Portland will talk about the “4T Trail”, and one at-large person is signed up to address a change in the Sidewalk Obstruction ordinance. The 4T Trails concept uses (MAX) Trains, Trolley, Tram and (walking) Trails. Check out that link, it looks entertaining and useful.

Other items of interest on the Regular Agenda:

* The vote on banning smoking outside City buildings

* Extending the moratorium on commercial and industrial development on Hayden Island

* 1391 Authorize a major encroachment to bSide6, LLC to install, use and maintain building improvements in the airspace over a portion of the E Burnside St right-of-way at SW corner of SE 6th Ave and E Burnside St (Previous Agenda 1314) The developer gets to add tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of additional square footage in the building, in return for $1 per year. The City couldn’t get more than a dollar for use of the airspace over the sidewalk, apparently.

* *1395 Authorize Intergovernmental Agreement with the State of Oregon, Department of Corrections to provide work crews to PortlandParks and Recreation through the Inmate Work Program

The emergency ordinance (“emergency” because the crews are “needed for fall park maintenance work” – apparently fall came at an unusual time this year) says that “minimum security” prisoners will be working on landscaping in Portland’s parks. The ordinance says the contract price tag of $180,000 results in “substantial savings in labor costs to the City”. Hmm. So instead of paying Portland-area residents who haven’t committed crimes and aren’t incarcerated to work in our parks, we plan to bring in prisoners from state facilities. Have inmate crews finished pulling all the ivy at Tryon Creek State Park and Forest Park? There is plenty of work needing to be done in those areas, to provide meaningful community service tasks for prisoners. If the City wants to pay for prison work crews “for a public benefit while learning work skills and habits”, which is a worthy goal, it should do so to get some of those hard, additional tasks done, without taking routine fall maintenance jobs from regular and seasonal employees.