Cloud-based governance needs no advice
Editorial
Those who advise government officials can offer two things, though not at the same time. They can convey their honest opinions and criticisms or they can bestow loyalty, cheering pronouncements from above with nods and amens.
A good advisory body may take either path at different junctures, but its praise is reliable only to the degree that each call is an independent judgment. If every response is thumbs up, nothing is added other than flattery.
Criticism, on the other hand, usually contains a kernel of truth that would otherwise be missed, given every leader’s tendency to believe in their own ideas. Critics may exaggerate faults, but in so doing they force introspection. Plans may be amended and strengthened, even if not exactly in the way suggested.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation has shown itself to be a crude partner in this dance of give and take with the Northwest Parking Stakeholders Advisory Committee, which advises the bureau on transportation spending in the Northwest District. In recent years, it has taken increasing control of the committee, selection of its members and defining its mission and bylaws. Most disturbingly, it has driven out individuals with connections to the community and knowledge of how government works.
Resistance to the committee’s independence has been met with more authoritarianism, culminating in a six-month shutdown of monthly meetings announced to shocked committee members. Efforts to meet with PBOT officials or Commissioner Mingus Mapps were rebuffed for five months. Finally, an official SAC meeting was called last month and a long history lesson handed down.
The problem, from PBOT’s point of view, is that the committee has not understood its limited advisory role, causing needless frustration.
PBOT has hardly been above that confusion. The letter announcing the hiatus charged the committee with blocking decisions and important projects. But how could a body having no binding authority stop anything? The SAC cannot at once be powerless while also being responsible for stifling a large agency.
PBOT is required by city ordinance to spend half of the net revenues from paid parking in the district on transportation projects that benefit the district. The central role of the SAC is to recommend such projects.
But PBOT overrides the committee to dip into the local share of the pot, advancing projects that meet its own priorities, such as getting people out of automobiles, while also shifting staffing, administrative overhead and consulting studies onto the community’s shoulders whenever possible. Most of the local share is spent on alternative transportation programs of dubious effectiveness, such as discounted passes for transit, bikes or e-scooters. Traffic barriers and bike lanes are other pet local projects the SAC did not initiate.
Such projects are put at the top of the SAC agenda, while community generated projects are slow-walked. Very little has trickled into things neighborhood representatives ask for, such as better pedestrian lighting at crosswalks, stop signs at dangerous intersections or more off-street parking.
There is something PBOT needs from the SAC but will not acknowledge. I call it legitimacy. Neighborhood representatives bring expertise, local knowledge and a citizen perspective that can improve the performance of government. In past decades, PBOT seemed to understand the relationship.
Why does PBOT now orchestrate this sham of public participation to predictably poor results?
I have a theory. The people behind the city’s most tone-deaf bureau think they can seed a City Hall-friendly vanguard. By selecting and indoctrinating transportation activists on bodies such as the Northwest Parking Stakeholders Advisory Committee, they hope to birth a grass-roots ally to spread their vision and turn public opinion. If not winning hearts and minds, at least grinding down the resistance over time.
Incompetent, heavy-handed governance has many blind spots, but we must understand that its gaze is locked upwards in the clouds.