Q&A With John Fregonese
The Oregonian
February 25th, 2007
Note: This article was featured as a sidebar to the ""Everyone's Visioning, is Anyone Focusing?" article published on the same day.
Q: Oregonians supposedly live in the Eden of planning. Yet, 35 years after the city and the state launched their legendary planning, things aren't going so well.
A: Plans go stale because people forget what they were for. There've been real successes at both state and Metro level. At Metro, they're recalibrating, starting new initiatives and shedding some that don't work. The state has never had a vision or a plan. It's had a series of policies. It's become calcified with bureaucracy and procedure. People have forgotten the original purpose.
The state's planning program was designed to protect things. It's good at that but not really good at providing an infrastructure for cities to do what they want to do.
Q: What would be a concrete example?
A: Hillsboro. They have a dynamic view of their city. They have progressive ideas. And yet they're always on edge about the state's rules. Bend has been poorly served in that the state hasn't really prevented sprawl nor has it been the cause of their vital downtown. Medford, too.
The state embodied state-of-the-art planning in 1973, but it hasn't been updated. The nature of planning has progressed. The kinds of urban form have progressed. But the state's goals haven't changed.
Q: You've put together an all-star team for the Big Look's visioning process: John Parr who oversaw Denver's noted Vision 2020 and Robert Grow who ran Envision Utah.
A: These guys have been successful in states that don't use a lot of regulation. They've done as good of a job as we have with different systems. Certainly, if you look at Denver and the transformation of the Salt Lake Valley in the last 10 years, they've made huge progress. It's important to learn what allowed them to progress and maybe even things they do better than we do and adapt our system.
The Big Look's point isn't to dismantle our system, but to give it a good ol' rebuild: Replace parts that aren't working, add some new ideas, maybe jettison unuseful ideas.
Q: Didn't Measure 37 signal a reinvention is in order?
A: Parts need reinventing, parts need to be preserved. Measure 37 is a case of not dealing with a looming storm that has been coming for a decade. There's an innate sympathy for people being able to do something with their land --at least build a house or two. It's turned into an open gate for huge developments that most people don't support.
Oregonians have a libertarian streak. It has to be expressed in the land-use program as well. This is not Germany. Some part of Measure 37 is going to be with us forever.
Q: Oregon's most effective era of planning in the '70s focused on big problems: Gov. Tom McCall on the despoilation of the Willamette Valley and the coast, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt on the failing of downtown and migration of families out of the city. Are there any problems big and simple enough to rally and focus the public?
A: The financial systems used to fund the whole metro area are gone. We replaced them with these weenie systems-development charges. There's really no system to bring new communities on line that meet our expectations. We have no viable ways of funding infrastructure. It's not for lack of money. There's plenty of money that, if you had the right systems, you could use to fund infrastructure.
Q: Examples?
A: Different public/private partnerships, capturing value from new development to cycle it back into infrastructure. We can do it for South Waterfront, but it doesn't make any sense that we can't do it for Pleasant Valley.
We've thought through infill development way better than the expansion. Even though the Oregon program was never against expansion, in a lot of people's minds, it's a bad thing: evil sprawl. We need to grow up and look at expansion as a necessary part of our planning program.
Q: So is the dramatic expansion of Metro's urban growth boundary to Damascus, then, a wise planning decision?
A: Yes. Without a plan, it would urbanize in a haphazard way. But it will grow a lot better if people give it 50 years instead of trying to force it in 20. And it's going to take some help. If Metro is a region, Damascus is a community project. The region is depending on it for its future.
Q: You were an important author of Metro 2040, the region's game plan for growth. You've turned that process into a national career. How would you rewrite Metro's vision now?
A: It doesn't have an economic development component. In the end, it became too regulatory and not adept enough at moving with private initiatives on the ground. Take the town centers idea. We identified them from history. Some work, like Lake Oswego. Some haven't. Gateway is coming along. But Murray Hill will probably never happen. It's time to move on. It might have seemed like a good idea in 1992, but what's around now?
A lot of economic growth has happened, for instance, in business parks. So, OK, that's how things happen. How do we make a livable community out of that? How do we design transportation systems for what's happening rather than what we wish would happen? At some point planners have to deal with reality. On the other hand, it opened the door for higher-density development. When we did Metro 2040, there were two choices: single-family homes and garden apartments.
Q: But we still can't get any multistory, mixed-use (housing or office atop retail) to happen outside of central Portland without heavy subsidy.
A: People need to be more realistic. There's a lost form in single-story mixed-use of a traditional town. It works just as well.
Multistory mixed-use is maybe something that should happen as a second phase. Maybe you need to build the bones so it will work when it comes.
Q: Tom Potter wants 100,000 Portlanders to participate in Vision PDX. Metro President David Bragdon has said he doesn't think the New Look and Big Look need the "cheerleading" public involvement. How much and what kind of public involvement is meaningful?
A: Of the three, Portland is really trying to establish a vision. There's no document to go to in the city that says, "What's the point? What are we trying to do? How are we going to balance these conflicting goals?" That's something where you need a lot of public involvement because visions are about principles.
If you look at Metro 2040, there's a tradeoff between density and expansion. That was a big battle in 1995. But now it's entered the public psyche. The trade-offs are well known. You don't have to go back and refight that. With the Big Look, maybe we don't need the usual public hearings. But you certainly need public buy-in. I don't know how you do it without extensive public participation. It won't pass.
Q: All three efforts rely heavily on written and Internet surveys. Is that really an effective way of involving the public?
A: I like to do scientific surveys at the same time. We just finished an online survey in Louisiana where we got 23,000 respondents. But we also did a 1,000-person phone survey with the same questions to see if there was a difference.
The good thing about the broad survey is that it puts the basic questions into the mind of the public. Even the people who don't fill it out start to understand what the trade-offs are. Hopefully, it becomes part of the political agenda that people have to take a stand.
Q: Goldschmidt and McCall were both astute in their political use of demographic projections to engage the public in the problems ahead.
A: I'm a big believer in scenarios. You can use tools to actually build a future and examine it, like Sim City on steroids. We want to do that on a state level and say: "Here's an inevitable destiny" and "Here are some choices." There are things you can't change. You have to learn to accept them. Scenarios give you not only an intellectual but a visceral understanding of where you can affect the future.
Q: Has the long arm of Oregon regulation retarded our use of other methods to preserve farmland and open space, like selling transfers of development rights or buying land through community trusts?
A: Development-rights transfers are one of those holy grails that never seem to work. There's two or three active programs in the U.S. that have preserved a few thousand acres. Community land trusts are a much better option.
People have rested on their laurels because they thought regulation was going to protect critical farmland. You can't protect it all, but in certain vulnerable areas they would work because you can use not just regulation but a property right to preserve important areas of farming.
Q: A rebel in Shakespeare suggested, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." What do you do you think: Has Oregon's system become too legalistic?
A: Yes. Not only is it too legalistic, it's given rise to a body of planning and planners that deal in jargon and accomplish things by speaking a special Oregon language. It doesn't translate outside the state. Sometimes I don't even understand the point.
That said, I'd trade California's system any day for Oregon's. Planning costs twice as much there because you have to do an environmental impact report. It's hugely expensive.
Q: Should it tell us something that planners like to visit Orenco Station and Beaverton Round while investors prefer places like Bridgeport Village and Tanasbourne?
A: That's important. You've got to deal with market forces.
Q: Speaking of market forces, your contract with the state of Oregon is for less than a million dollars, a third of what Louisiana is paying.
A: In Louisiana, we're spending $1 million on public outreach. We're doing full future scenarios and transportation modeling and engaging thousands of people. But the point of Big Look is not to redo the state plan, it's to give it a tune-up and come up with new ideas. I think we'll be able to make most people happy with a not-earth-shattering series of changes.
Q: There's a fine line between happy and complacent. A Portland State University poll taken a few months after Measure 37 passed in 2004 showed that while Oregonians supported land-use planning and farmland and open-space preservation, they opposed sacrificing personal rights for the common good --by roughly the same margin that passed Measure 37.
A: That's something that's always true in planning. I don't think the state system was making people happy. I don't think Measure 37 did either. We've got to balance the scales at a different point. Humans are full of contradictory goals. The art of planning is balancing them.