Posted inCity Council City of Salem Steve Powers

With Powers leaving, time for a more dynamic City Manager

After six years on the job, Salem's City Manager, Steve Powers, is returning to Michigan -- where he served as the Ann Arbor City Administrator for four years before coming to Oregon. The most interesting thing about Powers' tenure as the most important City of Salem employee is how uninteresting he has been as City Manager. Sure, the blog posts I've written about Powers include a number of times that I've criticized him or called him a liar. But that comes with the territory at City Hall. All bureaucrats make mistakes and shade the truth now and then. And Powers…
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Posted inCity Council Climate Action Plan

Salem Climate Action Plan: controversial and good

Tomorrow, December 6, the City Council is getting an informational report on the long-awaited Salem Climate Action Plan. No action is being taken on the plan for now, because parts of it have generated a lot of controversy.  I see the controversy as a good thing. If everybody was fine with the plan, there wouldn't be any controversy -- and there also wouldn't be any strong greenhouse gas-reducing actions specified in it, since those actions inevitably are going to be opposed by those doing the greenhouse gas emitting. A call to curtail the use of natural gas in Salem is…
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Posted inChuck Bennett City Council Police reform

Unwise: Salem Mayor wants 60 more police officers

Of all the things that Salem needs, 60 more police officers should be way down on the priority list. But I've been told that this is what Mayor Chuck Bennett is calling for, apparently during a recent City Council work session about the 2022 Policy Agenda. Adding 60 officers to the force is a big deal that needs to be justified with extremely solid data and reasoning, not just because the Mayor or Chief Womack likes the idea.  Here's a thoughtful analysis of this seemingly unwise notion that someone sent to me. I would like to suggest that you snark…
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Posted in2022 election Chuck Bennett City Council

2022 Salem City Council and Mayor races get interesting

Even though we're still six months away from the May 2022 election that typically decides City Council and Mayor races (50 percent + 1 vote and you win outright, even though the election is a "primary"), things are already getting really interesting.  The Statesman Journal has a story that describes the current state of affairs: "Salem City Council set for a shake-up in 2022. Here's who's in and who's out so far." Tom Andersen, the Ward 2 city councilor, isn't running for re-election. He was the first progressive elected to the City Council and serves as the unofficial leader of…
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Posted inCity Council Homeless

City Council struggles with managing vs. ending homelessness

Tonight the Salem City Council had a work session on its 2022 Policy Agenda. I watched some of it, but I have a low tolerance for discussions of this sort that tend to have elected officials and staff talking at length without really coming to grips with key issues in a fashion that ordinary people can relate to. (If you have a high tolerance for this, the work session can be viewed here.) Of course, maybe I missed a part of the work session where city councilors did come to grips with the top priority of the City of Salem…
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Posted inCity Council Police reform

Crisis response team for Salem showing some life

Good news! City Councilor Vanessa Nordyke sent me a message today about state grant money being available for a Salem mental health crisis response team similar to Eugene's highly successful CAHOOTS program.  This comes after the crisis response effort Nordyke has been pushing for met with a setback in September, when the Marion County Board of Commissioners balked at allowing Salem to use state funds that went to counties for crisis stabilization services. As you can read below, $10.5 million in state grant money is coming directly to Salem, so Nordyke hopes a chunk of that can be used for…
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Posted inCitizen involvement City Council Police reform

Salem Police Department survey has problems, like the department

The Salem Police Department wants people to take a survey about the strategic plan being developed to guide how the department operates in coming years. I completed the survey today. And I could have completed it over and over, for as long as I wanted, because the survey allows people to respond more than once to it. This alone makes the value of the survey dubious.  Letting people fill out the survey multiple times makes it vulnerable to vote manipulation by vested interests -- either pro-police or anti-police -- who want to skew the results in their favored direction.  The…
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Posted inCitizen involvement City Council City of Salem

Homelessness is the top concern of Salem residents

Recently the City of Salem released the results of its 2021 Community Satisfaction Survey, which is conducted annually by contacting a random sample of about 400 residents.Download City of Salem 2021 Community Satisfaction Survey - September 2021 Not surprisingly, city officials put a positive spin on the results in their Salem Connection email blurb. Ah, note the mention of "core City services." It's true that most people, 70%, are satisfied with city services. But that's a big drop from the 86% satisfaction in 2020. Since Covid was with us in both years, the pandemic doesn't seem to be the reason…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Police reform

Setback for Salem mental health crisis response team

Led by Vanessa Nordyke, last June the Salem City Council appropriated $135,000 for a mental health crisis response team similar to the CAHOOTS program that has been a big success in Eugene -- where a medic and crisis worker handle about 17% of the police department's call volume, saving about $12 million a year at a cost of about $2.1 million a year. But now the Salem project is on life support, according to a Salem Reporter story, "Salem, United Way halt plans for mental health crisis responder program."  The city of Salem paused its plans to start a program…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Environment

City Council needs to strengthen Climate Action Plan

I admire how the Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger told it like it is in a recent post about the Salem Climate Action Plan that's up for discussion by the City Council on Monday. This is a devastating criticism from someone who knows what he's talking about. The Breakfast on Bikes blogger has followed progress on the Climate Action Plan much more closely than I have, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been a longtime crusade for him. So when he says it's a dud, the City Council needs to wake up and pay attention. There's still time to alter…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

Salem Climate Action Plan lacks urgency

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there's no time to waste. Everything I read about global warming is scary. The Earth's climate is changing for the worse considerably faster than scientists expected as little as a few years ago.  So everybody -- nations, states, cities, government, businesses, individuals -- we all have to do our part to keep our one and only planet habitable for humans and other life forms.  This month USA Today had a story, "Local climate plans a key to progress." Download Local climate plans a key to progress - USA TODAY Over the past three…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

“Slow walking” aptly describes what Salem city officials do

Let's be clear about the title of this blog post. I have no knowledge of how rapidly City of Salem officials such as City Manager Powers, Public Works Director Fernandez, and Police Chief Trevor Womack walk from place to place. But I do have considerable experience with city officials engaging in a different sort of slow-walking, defined as: For example, on May 17 I filed a public records request with the City of Salem, which, thankfully, gave me a fee waiver for the request: All emails, text messages, documents, and other communications between Peter Fernandez, Steve Powers, and Trevor Womack…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Steve Powers

Salem’s City Manager ignores calls for a fireworks ban

Recently city councilor Tom Andersen, along with several other councilors, called on City Manager Steve Powers to issue an emergency order banning the use of fireworks in Salem this Fourth of July. Yesterday Andersen shared a Facebook post where he said, "Other Councilors and I have asked that fireworks be banned in Salem over this weekend. Here is City Manager's response to the general public." I found the response by City Manager Steve Powers so clueless and irritating, I just had to comment on what Powers said in blazing red below. The message from Powers is in regular type.  What I…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Homeless

Salem’s homeless need Biden’s infrastructure plan

Whenever I read about Salem's homeless problem, I feel way more sympathetic toward city officials and the City Council than I usually do. There's simply no easy answers. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. Today's excellent story by Whitney Woodworth in the Statesman Journal lays out the "Mission Impossible" facing city leaders.  After more than a year, Salem officials are poised to end sanctioned camping for those living in Wallace Marine and Cascades Gateway parks starting June 1. But the problem that has plagued the city for years persists — there are not enough shelter beds, transitional…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Steve Powers

City Manager gives poor excuse for permitless Proud Boys rally

Ten days after the May 1 gun rally at Riverfront Park where gun-toting Proud Boys threatened citizens and journalists with expulsion from the park, city officials keep changing their story about why a permit wasn't required for the rally. As I said in "Typogate" adds a twist to Proud Boys rally, at first City Councilor Tom Andersen was told that a typo on the city web site caused a page to say that May 1 was the date permits would be required for events in city parks, since a missing "3" would have made the date May 31. But I pointed out…
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Posted inCity Council Police reform

Derek Chauvin conviction just small step toward police reform

I'm glad that I was in my car, listening to CNN, when the judge read the jury verdict in the Derek Chauvin case. As I heard the judge say "guilty of second degree murder," "guilty of third degree murder," "guilty of manslaughter," my right arm made the same happy motion upward as the arms of the women below. But right next to this Washington Post headline story was a disturbing story of a police killing of a 16 year old girl in Columbus, Ohio, "Ohio police fatally shoot teen girl just before Chauvin verdict: 'This stuff just never ends.'" This…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Police reform

Police budget should be cut to pay for crisis response team

City Councilor Vanessa Nordyke is pushing for Salem to have a crisis response team similar to the CAHOOTS program that has been successfully used in Eugene since 1989.  Here's a description of CAHOOTS, courtesy of the White Bird Clinic. 31 years ago the City of Eugene, Oregon developed an innovative community-based public safety system to provide mental health first response for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. White Bird Clinic launched CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) as a community policing initiative in 1989. The CAHOOTS model has been in the spotlight recently as our nation struggles…
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Posted inChuck Bennett City Council Jackie Leung

Controversy erupts over Leung missing out on City Council committees

Mayor Bennett's initial decision to assign Councilor Jackie Leung to only one Salem City Council committee (as an alternate, moreover) struck many people as a big deal about something, whereas I've come to see it as much ado about almost nothing. Jackie Leung I learned about what I'm tempted to call CommitteeGate (just gave in to that temptation) after reading several Facebook posts about this on a private progressive Facebook group. Some city councilors got as many as five, six, or seven committee assignments. My first reaction was that it did seem strange that Leung got such little committee love…
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Posted inCity Council Land use

Costco approval was bad decision by Salem City Council

Today the Statesman Journal published an excellent opinion piece by Lora Meisner and Bill Dalton about the City Council's approval of Costco's relocation to a Kuebler Boulevard location adjacent to a residential neighborhood. As you can read below, Meisner and Dalton argue that City of Salem staff and city councilors, with the exception of Jackie Leung, failed to stand up for the broad public interest -- siding instead with PacTrust (owner of the property) and Costco (the main tenant on the property). Meisner and Dalton are very familiar with this issue, including the decision by LUBA (Land Use Board of…
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Posted inChuck Bennett City Council Coronavirus

There’s shameful silence in Salem about COVID-19

Ever since the pandemic reached Salem last spring, there's been little communication from Mayor Bennett, City Manager Powers, the three Marion County commissioners, and other elected officials (such as the eight city councilors) about the need to follow Governor Brown's public health orders. Yes, some City of Salem press releases have been issued. Yes, city councilors have used Facebook to urge physical distancing, mask wearing, and such. However, this mainly happened early this year. So by and large -- and especially now, when daily COVID cases and deaths have reached new highs in Oregon -- the silence from our local…
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