The next SALC sponsored Tucson Town Hall event is scheduled for Dec. 3rd. It’s guaranteed to be an action packed conversation on Land Use planning in our region. Land use and zoning plans are where our government entities garner most of their power.  Board of Supes and various city councils can change peoples lives and make people a lot of money with the single vote.

Land planning choices impact our region and influence everything from Rio Nuevo to the Sonoran Desert Conservation plan to Oro Valley’s decison to annex the Arroyo Grande development. 

What we can learn from Portland -

Opinion by Sam Negri

Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.12.2007

One of the least-known cottage industries in this very civilized city amounts to a tutoring clinic for other cities experiencing growing pains or merely having an identity crisis.

Portland’s leaders are considered national experts in the art of building a city that works. In the City of Roses, we are told, everything is rosy.

The reality is not as tidy as the illusion. Portland’s rebirth came only after a slow and painful incubation, but in recent years most cities are more impressed with the end result than with the contentious process that produced it.

Many of the groups come from cities like Tucson that have reached a population landmark and are faced with decisions about future growth.

Late last year, according to urban planners’ estimates, Pima County hit the 1 million mark.

Planners believe Pima County has enough private land to accommodate another million, depending on the availability of water.

While there are those who would like to lift the drawbridge and keep that second million from coming, Tucson’s historical growth patterns indicate that growth is inevitable.

Tucson leaders look ahead

How does Tucson prepare for it? Last week, about 50 Tucson-area residents representing business and the governments of Marana, Oro Valley, Pima County, Sahuarita and Tucson came here looking for clues. The trip was sponsored by Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc., or TREO, the local economic-development agency.

The message they took home is remarkably basic: Civic engagement makes public policy work. Portland works because it had a leader that inspired consensus. Tucson has no equivalent.

It does, however, have some things going for it. As TREO president Joe Snell put it, “Tucson has amenities that Portland will never have.” The big one, in his view, is our proximity to Mexico and Southern California. It makes us a good choice for companies wanting to provide goods and services to those areas.

“Portland does a really good job of planning and recognizing that you need multiple pieces working together to make the whole place work,” but at a hefty price, Snell said.

Over the last three decades, the majority of Portland voters have approved taxes to finance the lifestyle they want. They boast that there is no sales tax in Portland, but Oregon residents pay a 9 percent personal income tax, third-highest in the nation and double Arizona’s rate. They also pay a mass transit tax and fees for almost everything you can think of.

Trust is key factor

Participants from the Tucson area to whom I spoke shook their heads and noted that in our area there was no possibility that large numbers of people would support higher taxes and fees to fund the multiple layers of government that keep a place like Portland functioning.

Nobody questions that Portland is a vibrant and attractive city that works. It has a well-run mass transit system with light rail and a modern streetcar, a downtown that once was on the ropes and is thriving, and a booming economy in which environmental sensitivity is an essential ingredient in all policy-making decisions.

But Portland, unlike Tucson, is the crown jewel of a progressive state government that is an extension of the local culture. And while some of Oregon’s private-property laws are as conservative as those in Arizona, there is widespread acceptance of the value of land-use planning. Portland voters accept that growth must be tightly controlled and always integrated with transportation systems, and that communities should exist in harmony with their surroundings.

They know that life in Utopia is not free.

Two factors separate Portland (and the rest of Oregon) from Tucson and Arizona: First, the population understands that everything comes with a price and they’ve voted to share that cost as a community. Second, there is a general acceptance that its politicians are in sync with the attitudes of their constituents and can be trusted to do the right thing. Maybe that’s why their council members get paid $94,000 a year and ours get $24,000.

That trust wasn’t always there. As Portland Metro Councilor Robert Liberty told me, “Oregonians have long been distrustful of government.” But, he noted, that began to shift in the 1970s. One of the keys to that shift was the emergence of a gifted and dynamic leader, former Portland mayor and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt, who had the talent to bring disparate groups together and focus them on a common goal. No such Moses has surfaced in Tucson.

In the Tucson region, public disengagement is more typical than engagement. As Tucson City Council member Shirley Scott observed, more often than not our residents come together to complain rather than to build.

Locally, the creation of a Regional Transportation Authority last year was one of the most dramatic reversals of that trend, and one that offers some hope that collaboration has not been completely expunged from the local vocabulary.

Portland residents are nearly evangelical in their zeal about creating habitable neighborhoods that are close to nature and close to the bus or streetcar. Oregon state law created an urban growth boundary around the city to separate it from the fertile farmland and rural communities at its periphery.

In addition to a city council, Portland has a metropolitan government that, among other things, directs the densities of suburbs within the urban growth boundary. The goal is to build communities where residents can find everything they need no more than 20 minutes from home, so that traffic congestion, air pollution and other urban problems are eliminated. That goal remains a work in progress. Rush-hour traffic is still a mess.

Redevelopment takes time

The closest innovation Arizona has to an urban growth boundary is Pima’s County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, a blueprint for preserving wildlife habitat — and securing open spaces in the process — by buying up ranches at the edges of the Tucson metro region. That plan, the public policy decision with the most far-reaching implications for this region’s future, is still unfolding and may not be complete for another generation.

By Portland’s standards, a generation — typically 15 years — is not very long. Most of the redevelopment projects, the innovative land-use plans and mass-transit systems, took roughly 30 years to become a reality.

Any Portland politician will tell you the process is slow because community participation is required by law. The bottlenecks are built in, and respected.

Tucson City Planning Director Albert Elias, who was here last week, is convinced that the kind of civic engagement that brought Portland to the status of a model city will soon emerge in Tucson because local frustration is reaching a tipping point.

“The part that’s missing in Tucson,” Elias said, “is the confidence and trust that, as a community, a diverse group of leaders can get together to solve anything. But I’m confident we can do it and will do it because the stakes (of inaction) are getting higher.”

About this series

Pima County’s population surpassed the 1 million mark last November, planners estimate. This report is part of a monthly series running this year on the impacts of our population growth.

Today: What Tucson can learn from Portland, Ore.

On StarNet: Read the series at go.azstarnet.com/onemillion

Contact editorial writer Sam Negri at 573-4238 or snegri@azstarnet.com.

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