Comprehensive Plan

Thanks, Jim Scheppke, for sharing on Scribd an Our Salem: Today presentation by the City of Salem that was discussed on April 3 at a meeting of committees charged with advising staff on revisions to the Comprehensive Plan.

OK, that sentence probably doesn't make your heart race with excitement. But if you click on the continuation to this post, you'll be able to pursue a bunch of facts about Salem that really are quite interesting.

For example, in the not-so-fun-fact category, Salem sucks when it comes to bicycling.

The miniscule blue bar in Salem's column shows that, compared to Eugene and other cities, very few people are riding bikes here. Which almost certainly is because the City of Salem has put very little effort into making cycling easy and safe to do. 

On the positive side, the presentation included the first results of a Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

As shown above, Salem has considerably higher emissions per capita than Eugene, likely because our transportation system is so car-centric. Eugene has a much better bus system and bike paths.That theory is supported by this chart, which shows Salem's reliance on automobiles leads to much greater per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector than Eugene enjoys.

So the next step the Salem City Council needs to take is creation of a Climate Action Plan that lays out concrete steps to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Click below to peruse the entire presentation. 

Echoing a Who song: Salem, let's not get fooled again. In the early 2000s a pioneering, far-reaching, creative Salem Futures project was killed by clueless conservatives. Our town has been paying the price ever since, as I'll discuss below. Here's how someone active in land use issues at the time recently described to me the ax'ing of Salem Futures. (Note: LCDC stands for Land Conservation and Development Commission. It oversees the Department of Land Conservation and Development, DLCD.) Mayor [Janet] Taylor killed the Salem Futures project after almost two years of work and a million dollars. LCDC was giving Salem…

I'm sort of ashamed to admit it, but once upon a time I was a professional planner. I was an executive service manager with the State Health Planning and Development Agency (SHPDA) back in the 70s and 80s.  Looking back, what I'm not proud of is how I and other SHPDA staff elevated technical criteria over human values without giving much thought to why we did this. I bring this up because I'm worried that the City of Salem effort to update the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan will make the same mistake: expect citizens to conform to the values of…

Well, that didn't take long. At 11:30 am yesterday, City of Salem officials sent out an email about the start of an effort to update the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan.  A mere 19 minutes later, at 11:49 am, Michael Slater wrote a post on a Facebook page where Salem City Council issues are discussed that critiqued the Our Salem Stakeholder Advisory Committee, which a City of Salem web page describing the planning effort says "will be providing guidance to staff."  Slater said: The City has released the members of the advisory group that will assist staff on "technical" issues related…