This Week in City Planning: Not Your Typical Skullduggery

City Council’s unanimous adoption of the East Portland Action Plan last week was a total love fest. The Council held a special meeting Wednesday night out at Midland Library and 125 people showed up to listen to the details of the plan, which okays $500,000 for development projects out in historically-neglected East Portland. While neighbors usually show up at City Council meetings to criticize the city, almost everyone at the EPAP approval session to put in their two cents about how the plan was a model ground up planning process. One perennial activist-complainer guy even approached the microphone and began his rant, “Tonight I’m not up to my usual skullduggery” and neighbors presented EPAP project manager Barry Manning a goddamn berry pie of appreciation.

State Legislator Jefferson Smith told some jokes and pointed out that there’s a lot more work to be done. Senator Jeff Merkley – an East Portland native – came out to gush about how the conversation over the EPAP has “dramatically changed the tenor of the conversation between Council and our part of town.”

The only neighbor who piped up criticism of the plan at all was one woman who said, “A lot of us like the suburban feel out here. I’m very concerned about the infill and ghettoization of the neighborhood.” It seems like the plan’s projects are upsetting just the right people.

So it’s good enough to earn a planner a pie and it’s obviously important enough to make City Council scoot all the way past 82nd Ave, but what, uh, is the East Portland Action Plan?

Three years ago, city planners launched into figuring out how to reverse years of neglecting East Portland and asked residents for ideas of things to fix in their neighborhoods. The neighbors came up with hundreds of ideas, which the city whittled down to 160 big ideas and it took until now to actually narrow that fat list to just seven “Action Items” which the PDC, Planning, ONI and ODOT are putting $500,000 toward. You can check out the whole plan here but the rundown is:

– $125,000 to fund storefront improvement east of 122nd
– $125,000 to hire a neighborhood staff person just for East Portland who can act as a liaison between (note: “budget covers salary, benefits and overhead” for 18 months… so hiring one neighborhood planner costs the city $125,000. That seems like a lot.)
– $50,000 to fund more studies of turning the 35 acres of land behind Rocky Butte between the freeways into “Gateway Green.”
– $40,000 to essentially plan for more planning in East Portland or, in city legalese, “target an area in East Portland for in-depth exploration of land use, urban design and economic development issues.”
– $50,000 creating a mini-grant fund for neighborhood groups and businesses
– $50,000 to study bike and pedestrian improvements on currently shitty shitty Powell Blvd.
– $60,000 for Safe Routes to Schools projects in East Portland, making crosswalks and hey! sidewalks and stuff so kids don’t get hit by cars.