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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 25, 2011)
13 Street roots Nov. 25, 2011 PBQT budget shortfall puts infrastructure, safety at risk BY M ARG AUX MENNESSON C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T rumbling bridges. Unfilled potholes. Restricted emergency vehicle access. Bike lanes filled with debris. Sidewalks in disrepair. These are some of the conditions we can expect to see more of when the Portland Bureau HEALTHY of Transportation (PBOT) cuts services and lays Bicycle off employees to Transportation account for a $16 Alliance million shortfall, in revenue forecasts. Thé budget shortfall is a direct result of our transportation funding structure’s overieliance on gas tax revenue. Revenue from the gas tax — the state’s single largest source of transportation funding — has fallen far short of expectations for the past five years, forcing budget analysts to revise expectations for years to come. The city saw the steepest drop in 2009, at the height of the recession. High unemployment means fewer people áre driving. More households are doing whatever they can to reduce expenditures and save money. People are registering fewer vehicles, driving fewer miles, purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles and, increasingly, turning to alternative transportation like public transit, biking and walking. While these figures point to some positive and lasting changes in our individual 8 I Healthy Streetbeat is a monthly colum n fo r Street Roots written by the Bicycle Transportation A llian ce (BTA). O u r contributors are Rob Sadowsky, executive director, an d M argaux M ennesson, com m unications director. STREETBEA' transportation habits, they also create, an alarming crisis for a transportation bureau that relied too much on an unstable funding stream. In 2009, the Oregon state legislature approved a measure to raise the gas tax by six cents per gallon. The City of Portland has attempted to increase revenue through parking fees, extending pay-to-park hours to 7 p.m. and on Sundays. But these efforts haven’t come close to making up for the losses. * City and state governments say they have few options in the face of dried-up funding sources. PBOT says that filling these gaps “will require that cuts be permanent and ongoing, as opposed to one-time spending cuts that expire once revenues rebound - that will fundamentally restructure the organization.” The union representing a portion of PBOT employees, Laborer’s Local 483, warns that “the city’s backlog in road maintenance will increase, eroding the condition of our roads, sidewalks and bridges? Will our leaders sacrifice safely and basic infrastructure on bur city streets and neighborhood sidewalks, while they continue to pursue the $4 billion/ regressive, auto-centric Columbia River Crossing project that has already cost the public over $100 million? Or will they work harder to come up with a mix of strategies that puts our region in a stronger position for the next generation of Oregonians? That’s the challenge facing the city’s Budget Advisory Committee, the stakeholder group tasked with discussing permanent cuts and layoffs to help PBOT fill the holes without cutting essential services that keep us safe on the roads today and prepare us for the future of transportation. The community needs leaders to prioritize projects that make our roads safe for everyone, increase access to affordable transportation choices, and connect people to jobs, services and neighborhoods. Last year, 15 people were killed while walking on our roads — a 36 percent jump from previous years. Three bicyclists were killed in a two-week period in the Metro area this summer, after zero bicycle fatalities last year. The number of serious or fatal crashes involving people walking and biking is on the rise, even while the total number of traffic fatalities is declining. Leaving safety needs unaddressed shifts the burden onto the public, with an estimated $6 million cost in health care and lost wages for every traffic fatality in the Portland-Metro area. Recently, the Oregonian reported that 58 miles of major city streets lack sidewalks on either side. Future cuts to public transit service will likely impact those neighborhoods with the most dangerous streets for walking. Yet already, in anticipation of further cuts, the bureau has postponed $3.2 million in new sidewalk construction that was supposed to go toward improving those high-crash neighborhoods. We need to find more stable sources of revenue. And we need to prioritize smart, cost-effective, sustainable transportation projects that keep our roads safe and our community healthy. There is hope yet — if you’re a possibilist BY TO M WATSON C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R About Jonah, From a Dream By Debra Knauf I hold this picture close When I am at cliff’s edge, When the door I thought Was closed, opens. I carry this dream of you Jumping from a high place Landing easily on your feet Right side up, as if you were Your own parachute The last time I had dinner With you and your sister Every cell in your thick, earthly body From your eyebrows to your toes Was in the appleseed prayer We sang thanks for the food We were about to ea t The earth is good to me And as I thank the earth For giving me the things I need The sun and the rain and the appleseed And the earth is good to me. ▼ polarization and fear seem to have a I— stranglehold on American society J. today, making social, political and environmental change nearly impossible. How can we ever agree on anything? If you think we can think our way out of this mess, Frances Moore Lappe offers a? potential escape route in her new book, “EcoMind.” She tells us that environmental transformation can only occur if we throw out our old ideas and strategies and create a new roadmap in our minds. Her style may, at EcoMind: times, be a little New Changing the Age for some tastes, Way We Think, to but there’s no denying Create the World that Lappe is an innovative, deep We Want by thinker and a strong Frances Moore writer. In 1971, her Lappe influential “Diet for a Small Planet” became an international bestseller. She has written 16 other books, and currently heads the nonprofit Small Planet Institute with her daughter Anna Lappe. The premise of “EcoMind” is that our current efforts to make real environmental changes are mostly rendered impotent because of seven “thought traps.” In consecutive chapters Lappe describes these views that are widely held by environmentalists, and then dismantles them: 1. No-growth is the answer. 2. Consumer society is the problem. 3. We’ve hit the limits of a finite Earth. 4. We must overcome human nature to save the planet 5. We have to override humanity’s natural resistance to rules. 6. Humans have lost the connection to nature. 7. It’s too late. Although in less skilled hands it could seem forced and preachy, this framework actually serves to make the book a compelling read. Lappé provides illuminating real-world examples, as she meticulously makes her case. To show that we haven’t “lost thè connection to nature,” for instance, she describes the urban food-growing movement and the efforts of a British town north of London called Todmorden (which Lappé unfortunately misspells as “Todmorten”). Marketing itself as thè “Incredible Edible Todmorden,” this community has planted vegetables, herbs arid fruit trees everywhere, from the lawns of homes and businesses to the cemetery to the train platform, and many of these gardens are available for free public picking. In another chapter, calling B.S. on the idea that we must overcome human nature and that “humans don’t like change,” Lappé offers this eloquent rebuttal: “We do typically experience change in part as loss, but a striking feature of our species is our attraction to the new. Virtually from birth, humans are learners, testers, explorers.” But what really sets this book apart is the way Lappé connects environmental change with social and political change. The environmental crisis is “a crisis of democracy itself,” she writes, and the solution lies in “removing the power of concentrated wealth from public decision making.” One way to achieve this, she says, is through public campaign financing, which Arizona, Maine and Connecticut have as an option for state elections. Lappé describes how Maine waitress Deb Simpson — a single mom and domestic abuse survivor - ran for office in 2000 after she collected just $5 each from 50 people and was then able to get on the ballot and access public funds. She won and has served since then in the Maine House of Representatives and state Senate. Frorii that story Lappe immediately turns to an inspiring account of how the Maine Legislature passed the first state product stewardship law in the nation for old consumer electronics products such as computers and TVs. Even though “industry lobbyists mounted the biggest effort to defeat a law that Mainers had ever seen,” this law took effect in 2006 and inspired more than 20 similar state laws, including the popular electronics recycling law in Washington. Under this program, known as E-Cycle Washington, individuals and small businesses now pay nothing to recycle a computer or TV because the electronics industry is required to provide funding for those recycling costs. When she gets revved up about the political inertia that also stalls environmental and social progress, Lappe is at her best Three conditions have been shown over America’s history to elicit the worst in us, she says: extreme power inequalities, secrecy (she gives the example of the financial industry operating without public oversight), and scapegoating. That’s why the solution can be found in the dispersion of power, transparency and mutual accountability, she asserts. This book was published months before Occupy Wall Street, and the vocal protests of the 99 percent, but it almost seems as if Lappe predicted that movement The recent surges toward democracy in the Middle East also mesh well with her assessment of, social, political and environmental problems and solutions. We don’t even have to be optimists, Lappe writes. She describes herself instead as a “possibilist,” and that’s what we should all strive to be. Change is possible, and we can make it happen. Originally printed by Street Roots sister paper, Real Change News, Seattle, Wash.
