Maximum fuster and cluck (Jack Bog's Blog)

Great news! The Portland Plan is now being implemented! Having just concluded a full complement of plan adoption activities, the city's legion of planners are now busy preliminarily implementing plan actions:

The City’s Office of Equity and Human Rights is now up and running, and the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability is reaffirming commitments from local agency partners and drafting intergovernmental agreements. BPS will also be coordinating with other City bureaus to ensure their budgets are aligned with Portland Plan principles, goals and objectives.

Well, all right! And of course, there's no better way to implement a plan than with a comprehensive plan update:

In addition, the Portland Plan is being implemented through the Comprehensive Plan Update, which is currently underway. The Comprehensive Plan helps the City prepare for and manage expected population and employment growth, as well coordinate major public investments. The equity framework and three integrated strategies of the Portland Plan will guide the Comprehensive Plan Update. Eight Policy Expert Groups (PEGs) have begun to meet and are advising staff in multiple policy areas. Please see www.portlandonline.com/bps/pdxcompplan for more information.
These are just a few early steps. More implementation activities will continue throughout the summer. And over the next year, we’ll keep you up to date on all implementation activity. So stay tuned.

If only we had a choice.

Comments (6)

Great to know our city hall can neurotically catalogue and detail almost every conceivable element of the city of Portland, and control almost every move a citizen makes, but that same city hall can't even take care of its own front yard:

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/07/protesters_at_city_hall_to_sta.html

What a costly embarrassment.

Posted by PGXLifer | July 2, 2012 11:46 AM

"More implementation activities will continue throughout the summer" I assume that one of the PEGs will conclude that they need at least 5 more PEGs to adequately "advise staff" Eight cannot possibly be enough. If they had only conducted a few more charrettes, they would have already known this

Posted by cass | July 2, 2012 11:54 AM

Translation...

"By keeping ourselves busy, we get to keep snorting and snuffling at the public trough".

Posted by Mr. Grumpy | July 2, 2012 11:55 AM

Definition 2:
If we keep using long-winded jargon, maybe the public won't figure out just how useless we really are.

Posted by nolo | July 2, 2012 12:00 PM

Portland and Oregon already had one of the byzantinely complex and costly government processes in the country. No other City or State has chosen to emulate this costly bureaucracy.

If this plan is implemented without elimination or streamlining of other hurdles to economic development, Portlsnd will not need to plan for job growth as its 30 year death spiral will continue. Portland's control of every aspect of life will drive residents and their incomes to Hillsboro, Vancouver, Boise, Salt Lake City and Austin.

Posted by Brian | July 2, 2012 1:20 PM

Part of this review, which state law required the city to do every (I think) five years, will be to update the comprehensive plan policies. The right comprehensive plan policy can direct or prohibit development and have non-obvious effects; for example, far-seeing citizens in this process might push to include a policy on economic development that (a) recognizes that ocean-going shipping is a vital driver of our economy, (b) recognizes that ships are becoming fewer and larger, and therefore (c) declares that the City will never construct or allow marine obstructions on the Columbia and lower Willamette that reduce clearances below their present levels. One side effect of this innocuous statement would be to kill the CRC project.

Posted by Isaac Laquedem | July 3, 2012 6:11 PM

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Monday, July 2, 2012

Maximum fuster and cluck

Comments (6)

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