Hall Monitor
NEWS
The Growing Legacy List
Sam Adams Wants to Be Remembered for Helping Fix the County by Denis C. Theriault ADD ANOTHER hugely complicated policy dream to the legacy list Mayor Sam Adams is working furiously to finish before his one and only term expires this December. According to a draft document obtained by the Mercury, the mayor’s office is actively looking to redraw the nearly 30-year-old contract that governs Portland’s relationship with Multnomah County. Essentially, Adams wants another go at how the two agencies divvy up—and finance— essential government services like housing, health care, transportation, and public safety. At stake is the fate of scores of government employees and thousands of residents who rely on the two governments either for direct aid or to quietly provide things like good roads and safe neighborhoods. And it’s not entirely clear if the mayor will get his wish. Beyond mending his sometimes-fractious relationship with county officials—the two sides have sparred recently over the Sellwood Bridge rebuild and plans to create a new library taxing district—Adams also must convince his skeptical colleagues in city hall. And, as time runs out for their boss, Adams’ staff is already knee-deep in several other difficult projects that the mayor is equally determined to muscle through: annexing West Hayden Island for the Port of Portland, fixing up the Rose Quarter and Memorial Coliseum, securing private cash for the proposed Oregon Sustainability Center, and defending the decision to fire the police officer who shot and killed Aaron Campbell.
“Sam characterized [the restructuring] as something he wanted to get done,” says Commissioner Randy Leonard, Adams’ strongest political ally on city council, adding that Adams mentioned it as “this thing I’d like you to comment on.”
Multnomah County Sheriff ’s Office. • Safety net services would not be listed as “shared” by the two agencies, even though that’s been an area, especially recently, where the two governments have worked in tandem. Adams’ staff has acknowledged the seriousness of the restructuring effort—taking time this summer to craft the draft document and then share it, quietly, around city hall. And Adams’ desire to slash costs in a time of budget cuts by coming up with regional budgets for transportation and public safety isn’t new. But his office—which initially declined to release the draft as a public record, saying it was too early to discuss it—wouldn’t comment or provide any specifics beyond what was written down. The response from County JULIA GFRÖRER Chairman Jeff Cogen’s office was Generally, the county handles social measured. County spokesman David Austin services programs, while the city tends to confirmed only that Cogen has had “minibrick-and-mortar needs—with a lot of awk- mal” discussions with Adams. ward overlap in between. Among the notable “We haven’t seen this document, but Jeff shifts pondered in the draft agreement, as has had discussions with Sam about how the described in a list delineating which services city and county can work better together,” each agency would either control or share: Austin says. • Portland would take over all transporAdams also has his work cut out winning tation oversight and maintenance, duties support in his own building. that are currently split between the two “There’s stuff missing here,” says a city governments. Portland has, for months, hall source. “It was something they were been trying to take control of Multnomah working on in a hurry. Not a surprise I guess.” County’s Willamette River bridges. But Leonard, when asked if Adams’ at• The city also would assume responsibil- tempt was futile, given everything else he ity for “public safety”—leaving the county in was working on, pooh-poohed the notion. charge of running the area’s jails and court “He’s focused on it,” Leonard says. “And system. That could involve taking over the what he’s focused on, he sees through.”
From Cars to Cafés
NEWS
City Program Converts Parking Spots to Outdoor Dining by Sarah Mirk THERE’S A HOT new place to eat ramen in town—between two cars, where SE Division eatery Wafu has converted a parking spot into a raised platform that’s a nifty outdoor extension of its café. Under a new city program, “Street Seats,” 15 parking-spot-to-restaurant-seating transformations are slated to pop up by the end of the year (the second has already sprung up outside the Pearl District’s Oven and Shaker). But while the program aims to help small businesses and make streets more pedestrian friendly, it also raises questions about the best use of public space. Portland’s pilot program is based on similar, successful ventures in New York and San Francisco. But in those cities, the space reclaimed from cars is made public; big signs note that anyone, not just patrons of a platform’s sponsoring restaurant, can use the tables and chairs. In Portland, businesses will shoulder the cost of building the café seating (Wafu’s cost about $1,000), pay for a $459 outdoor café permit, and pay the city market rate for any lost metered parking. In
exchange, the restaurant can claim exclusive use of the space for its patrons only. The program is similar to the conversion of the narrow stretch of SW Ankeny outside Voodoo Doughnut into carfree restaurant seating last summer. Businesses along the alley paid the city $8,472 in 2012 for the right to fill former public parking spots and roadway with private picnic tables that greatly expand their seating capacity. While carving out person-friendly space from cars is great, says Matthew Passmore of Rebar, a San Francisco-based design firm that’s been a champion of “parklets” nationwide, “if the city is giving the right to do commercial activity in the space and exclude people from that space, then the city should be charging market rate for that land. Otherwise, it’s a public subsidy for that restaurant.” Portland Bureau of Transportation spokesman Dan Anderson notes, though, that the cafés will be used daily by more people than the parking spots were, making the land arguably of more use to the general public. “Space in the right-of-way is no longer
SARAH MIRK
used for storing cars, but it really activates it for a lot more people,” says Anderson. In other words, instead of storing private vehicles on public land, the city is allowing the storage of private tables. Business owners wanted the spaces to be zoned as “sidewalk cafés,” not as public rights of way, in part because it means they can serve alcohol. Portland Architecture Editor Brian Libby says that while it’s good to be skeptical of giving over public space to private uses, parking spots are not the type of public land that people want to hang out in, anyway. “Putting in a few restaurant tables sounds like fun,” he says, “more than opening Pandora’s box. Streets and freeways still dominate the built environment in the United States and it’s right to reclaim some of that space.”
NEWS Willing to Keep Cops’ Secrets? by Denis C. Theriault THE DEADLINE for concerned citizens to apply for the police bureau’s new, much-needed Training Advisory Council came and went last Friday, August 31. That should have been a big day for police accountability advocates champing at the bit to have a real conversation with cop brass about how and what the bureau should teach its officers about community relations, mental illness, and the use of force [“To Be or Not to Be… Silent,” Hall Monitor, Aug 23]. But because of the secrecy provisions that govern the training council (members must legally promise, by signing a nondisclosure agreement, not to discuss their work without permission), two of the most passionate police watchdogs in town sent letters to Mayor Sam Adams explaining why they weren’t going to apply. “We would like to have a representative join the PPB [Portland Police Bureau] training council,” wrote Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland, explaining that “we would join because how the PPB leads, other Oregon police departments will follow... “Drop the requirement for the nondisclosure agreement to apply for the PPB training council, and we may join you.” A day earlier, Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch also tried to talk some sense into city hall—arguing that transparency might actually improve the training council’s work. “Perhaps sensitive material could be redacted so that the general public can access the same information that the council will be receiving,” he wrote, “thus providing more transparency and a broader scope of input than will undoubtedly come from the council under its current restrictions.” Handelman, bless his doggedness, also pointed out something else in the application process that I missed: Not only do applicants have to sign away their freedom of speech, but they also have to promise not to associate with known criminals and they cannot have ever had a serious scrape with the law themselves. “Putting aside whether people who’ve engaged in civil disobedience or been wrongfully arrested for whatever reason,” he wrote to Adams, the training council “actually could benefit from input coming from people who have been through ‘the system.’” As of press time, there was no word from Adams’ office, beset by vacations, on a response to those concerns. Nor was there word about how many people actually applied for the gig—although a spokeswoman for the office did say she was working to track that down. Which means we don’t know how many would-be applicants followed Renaud and Handelman’s lead—and whether, if enough people stayed away, the bureau might actually change course. September 6, 2012 Portland Mercury 7