PDX Planning Commissioner

Send a message to planningcommission@ci.portland.or.us if you would like your agenda e-mailed to you.

Here’s the e-mail staff sent to interested parties outlining what’s coming back to Planning Commission on January 12th and what will happen between now and then.

Update on Schools and Parks Conditional Use Code Refinement Project

On November 10, 2009, the Planning Commission took the following actions on the Schools and Parks Conditional Use Code Refinement project.

• The Planning Commission recommended that City Council approve proposed code language amendments for Topic 1: Enrollment Fluctuations and Topic 4: Conditional Use Status of Vacant School Property. Here is the link to report with proposed amendments: http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=49671&a=259586 A City Council hearing date has not yet been set.

• The Planning Commission voted to revisit Topic 2: Grade Level Changes at their meeting on January 12th and asked staff to prepare language/commentary that would require a conditional use review for schools that transition from grades K-5 or 6-8 to a K-8 school.

Continued Work on Recreational Fields.

Portland Parks & Recreation, working with staff from Bureau of Development Services and Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, is currently preparing proposals for revisions to recreational field regulations. PP&R will be hosting a community workshop to gather public input on these proposals Wednesday, December 2nd Thursday, December 3rd 6:30 – 8:30 pm at Beaumont Middle School, 4043 NE Fremont. Childcare is available by calling 503.823.5113, before November 30th. If you are interested in learning more about the work on recreational fields please contact Brett Horner, Portland Parks & Recreation Strategy and Planning Manager, at 503.823.1674 or Shawn Wood, Bureau of Planning & Sustainability at 503.823.5468.

Upcoming Planning Commission Meeting January 12, 2010

The Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the recreational field proposals and make a final recommendation on Topic 3: Grade Level Changes on January 12th . Unfortunately, due to the Planning Commission’s extremely full schedule, this is an afternoon meeting which typically starts at 12:30 pm. In an effort to try to accommodate more people, arrangements have been made for this meeting to start later in the afternoon at 3:00 pm. We anticipate the start time for this project to be around 4:00 pm; please confirm with Joan Hamilton prior to the meeting (503.823.5772)

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Also please note that this e-mail update has been sent as a courtesy. If you have questions about the status of a project being reviewed by the Planning Commission the most reliable way to find out the Planning Commission’s schedule is to call Joan Hamilton at 503.823.5772 or visit the Planning & Sustainability Portland Online website http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=33998 and follow the link to ‘Upcoming Planning Commission Schedule’.

Julia Gisler, City Planner
Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability
1900 SW 4th Avenue Suite 7100
Portland, Oregon 97201
503.823.7624

We have a bit of a paradox – schools are a key piece of urban infrastructure. They are tremendous generators of social capital, often serving as the heart of a neighborhood. And they have significant impacts on transportation, generating hundreds (in the case of some high schools, probably thousands) of trips per day. I think everyone who listens to traffic reports on the radio knows that when school is out, our streets and freeways are less congested.

The paradox is that the government entity tasked with delivering urban services, including local transportation – City Government – has relatively little say over school planning.

Since at the Planning Commission meeting coming up on November 10th, we’re going to take another crack at discussing schools zoning issues, and we hope to make a recommendation to City Council on 3 out of the 4 issues in front of us (the 4th issue needing more work is the use of athletic fields at schools for non-school activities), I thought it would be useful to prompt a little discussion about this issue. But really I hope this discussion will help inform some of our work on the Portland Plan, which I suspect is the best vehicle to address the relationship between the City of Portland and the school districts that are partially or completely within the boundaries of the City. And I’m going to use several documents, historical and contemporary, to help outline the basis for that discussion.

First of all, if anyone has any doubts that the physical arrangement of classrooms in the city can have impact on educational outcomes, you only need to read Beth Slovic’s recent, excellent “Left Out” cover story in Willamette Week to understand that the impact can be huge.

Let’s go back in history to look at how we got many of the school buildings we have today. A report (part 1 and part 2 – both PDF files – thanks to Beth Slovic for pointing me to this report) from 1957 prepared by the Planning Commission for Portland Public Schools looks at post-war birth rates and predicts the rise (and projects the later decline) in school-age population and suggests areas in which the school district should acquire land for schools. The contrast is fascinating – in times of growth, the school district looks to the City for planning assistance, but I’m not aware whether the school district has ever had a conversation with Planning Commission about how to plan what schools to close (someone please correct me if such conversations have occurred).

By 1979, things were different and the school-age demographic was already in decline and the Goldschmidt adminstration adopted a schools policy (PDF file) for the City that includes criteria for closing schools – but as far as I can tell, this policy was entirely aspirational, it included no agreement with PPS for a City role in making these decisions. The policy also includes many aspirations for how the City and School District (and County) could cooperate on a number of fronts. I suspect many of us would agree that the goals of this policy are still relevant today. Of course the landscape in which these issues exist has changed a lot in the 30 years since. A partial list would include:

• In 1983 Resolution A established distinct roles for the City and County around urban services (City) and social services (County) putting the delivery of social services through schools in a different context (the Sun Schools program attempted to re-unify this to a degree, but has suffered from cutbacks in a difficult funding environment).
• 1990, voters adopted Measure 5 that had the dual impact of largely decoupling schools funding from property taxes while capping property taxes overall. This has led to funding constraints for schools and both the City and County.
• Since that time dramatically fewer children walk or bike to school. Current efforts at “Safe Routes to School” programs are working to reverse this.
• And of course the demographic trends in school enrollment have come to pass.

Finally, many of those schools built post-war now have historical significance and PPS has released an Historic Building Assessment.

So where does that leave us? On the 10th, we’ll talk about the zoning code provisions for schools. But the bigger strategic conversation will happen inside the Portland Plan. What kind of partnership do we want to build between the City and its school districts (not just PPS!) as we develop our strategic plan for the next 30 years?

As part of the RICAP 5 process, we recommended that City Council change the minimum bike parking ratio for multi-dwelling units (apartments and condos) from 0.25 spaces per unit to 1.1 spaces per unit.

How did we get there?

The original 0.25 ratio predates the original 1996 Bicycle Master Plan. That plan recommended updating it to 1.0, but that effort failed to gain approval in the late ’90s. As we all know, cycling has taken off dramatically since that time.

During the 1st hearing on the RICAP package, we got testimony that some central city condos were seeing demand for bike parking of up to 1.8 bikes per unit and we asked staff to research the issue.

PBOT staff came back with a recommendation of 1.5 spaces per unit and we tentatively agreed to it at the last meeting, but it was clear that the Commission had some reservations based on a couple of things:

1. The magnitude of the change from the prior standard (RICAP is supposed to be the home to relatively minor changes to the zoning code)
2. Developer John Carroll (who developed The Gregory in the Pearl and the Elliot Tower downtown) testified in favor of increasing the ratio but balked somewhat at the 1.5 number.

At tonight’s meeting it was suggested that we scale this back to 1.0. I suggested a compromise at 1.1 on the basis of the following math (developed by PBOT):

An average of 1.64 people per unit x 69% of Portlanders owning bicycles = 1.12 bikes/unit.

The more aggressive 1.5 number additionally factors in a percentage of folks who own more than one bike. My support for the lower number has several rationales:

• John Carroll did an additional assessment of his existing buildings and communicated to me that he thought he could fit additional bike parking to get to about 1.0 without adding to the building floorplate
• From a sustainability and affordability point of view, I was reluctant to create a minimum standard that might increase building size and cost (and through size, environmental impact)
• I was concerned that with a jump all the way to 1.5 we might see developers doing things with unintended consequences to meet the standard
• I’m not sure we automatically want to accommodate multiple bikes/person in multi-dwelling units (just as I wouldn’t want to a minimum standard to accommodate multiple cars per person). Living compactly involves some trade-offs!
• With anything beyond 1.1, I’d want to start thinking about trade-offs with reducing auto parking, and that was beyond the scope of this process

So with 1.1 accommodating one bike for everyone who owned a bike, I thought we were at a good compromise point.

There may well be areas of the City or other specific circumstances where more parking might be desirable. But I don’ t think we can get there without some additional research and RICAP is not intended to be the umbrella for significant policy investigation.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing preventing a developer from creating MORE than the minimum number of spaces (indeed, there are even some incentives). Let the market speak!