From a practical standpoint, good arguments can be made for a new city hall and offices, municipal courthouse, and police station – and even a new downtown multi-story parking structure. However, practical needs to be the operative word here, and already we’re seeing signs of city leadership running too far afield of our fair burgh’s electorate.
Before we go further, we should explain: On December 2, the City Council will start to finalize how they want to update and configure all those aforementioned facilities, and given what we’re hearing so far, they’ll probably approve a plan to combine it all into a new downtown Civic Campus.
There’s been architectural studies and planning studies and meetings for about four years now – there’s also been a Civic Campus Public Engagement Task Force. Then, at last week’s City Council work session, councilors started to pick and choose from all that work product, and narrow things down.
For instance, there’s been considerable public support for renovating and retaining the current city hall building, but renovating often costs more than replacing, so councilors seem to be leaning towards a new building that houses the bulk of various city department offices, council and meeting spaces, and so forth. Likewise, they also seem inclined to delete the parking garage – the consensus being that it’s been a longtime desire for downtown, but too last minute of an addition to the project.
All of these seem like sensible choices that constituents could get behind, and that’s probably going to be necessary, because with a price tag of about $200 million, city leaders will likely have to ask voters to tax themselves to get the deal done. And we would argue that is just as practical a consideration as how many square feet per office.
A rocky start
The current zeitgeist includes a sense that the City is moving too quickly, to which leadership has defensively pushed back that they’ve been planning for four years now. On some level, we can empathize with leadership, but we also have to point out that if folks were loving what they were seeing, they probably wouldn’t be seeking a slowdown.
As Councilor Charlyn Ellis put it at last week’s work session, Corvallisites are feeling “pinched.” As stands, if pressed, more than a few city councilors will admit that voters don’t want to pay for this right now.
We think that’s true, but we also think the electorate’s reservations are deeper than that.
On the right, there is a worry that a new courtyard or lobby will mean a new campground for the houseless, and as that voter sees it, that may not be a good investment. On the other hand, progressives in the runup to this year’s city council election expressed an unwillingness to spend on new buildings as houselessness increases. Also, across the local political spectrum, there is a concern for increased taxes on the area’s low and fixed-income folks, and increasing worry, that even the working middle is overly burdened with local fees and levies.
There is also reservation that because the City’s envisioned campus would be downtown, it supports only businesses within the downtown core. We don’t think that’s a fair assessment – we think its natural that the City’s facilities would be downtown. But we also think Corvallis could be doing more to support commercial hubs throughout the community, and to attract a larger variety of businesses too. But then, we also think the discussion of this City building project needs to be well separated from a discussion of business interests – this should be about city services, period.
We also believe housing folks, at least into Safe Camp style microshelters, before asking for new buildings solves some of the objections across the political spectrum. It also seems like the right thing to do. Similarly, there may be any number of other voter objections to overcome, and by overcoming, we mean compromise.
A road forward
City leaders should look to the decisive defeat of the County’s justice campus measure as both a cautionary tale, and more usefully, as a study of what to do differently.
So far, the current dynamic around a Civic Campus is feeling overly familiar, with most of the public engagement to date centered on what constituents want in their fair burgh’s facilities. But that’s not enough – now it’s time to speak directly to folks who probably, today, would vote no.
That’s a lot of social media scraping and focus groups, and that’s the easy part, because after that it’s not just about how to come up with the right sales pitch. The County tried the sales pitch route.
We suspect nothing short of materially addressing voter objections is going to cut it. For instance, if you want a new police station, you may have to offer both the right and the left some updated policing policies. Want a new home for administrative staff – you may have to get the houseless folks out of the parks and into actual housing. All that may be hard to accept, or even unfair, but it’s likely true.
Another few considerations
So far, the City Council has not wanted to decouple one aspect of their envisioned Civic Campus from another. But maybe, even if the campus is going to be built as a campus, each of the facilities would do better with voters if they appeared separately on the ballot. The police station and courthouse, new city hall, and even the less likely parking garage will all have their own constituencies.
In some ways, we think both the city hall and police station will knock yesses off the table from one another – and that both stand a better chance if their natural constituencies can vote for each individually.
Also, city leaders may want to tamp down the rhetoric a little and keep the discussion down to earth. For instance, sharing visions of a Civic Campus that morphs Madison Ave. into some kind of artery between Oregon State University and the downtown core borders on the esoteric – voters may prefer a more pragmatic approach.
Finally, stepping into our wayback machine and looking early on at the County’s bid to win voter approval for a justice campus, it sure looked like this newspaper was leaning towards endorsing the idea. But then we ultimately endorsed against it, and decidedly so at that.
Our point being, we want to support new City facilities – but we think leadership needs to take a more considered approach, which includes taking more direction from currently objecting voters.
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