With Black Friday upon us – let’s start with local environmentalist Mark Yeager telling us that the Benton County Democrats passed a resolution against expanding the local Coffin Butte landfill.
And yes, we we’re going there, we’re taking the cheap shot – conflating landfills and the Black Friday deals that fill them. We can’t blame local Dems or Yeager for our digression, they have nothing to do with it.
Nope, we blame Netflix. Just in time for the holiday they dropped the documentary-ish Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy – so you’re just gonna have to wait a minute before we give you the rest of your local government news.
Buy Now has had mixed reviews, and we’ve had mixed feelings about it. The two central problems with Buy Now are that some will love its storytelling and production bents and others the opposite, and while the journalism is okay-ish, it doesn’t point to anything a considerable number of prospective viewers won’t already know.
Sellers and producers of goods do things to keep us all buying – and those actions, and how they impact us, and the planet, are plain damn evil. Point taken, well-worn as it is.
On the other hand, it’s worth a watch, because you may love it – and plenty of reviewers have. However, our reviewer literally fell asleep about three-quarters in.
In some ways, our takeaway was that Buy Now felt like a really good Facebook post from the days when that platform mattered. It’s easy to forget its algorithms once played a role in helping Arab Spring organizers, to, well… organize. But that was then.
Nowadays, Facebook groups are little more than referral outlets for goods and services, and there’s no way their algorithms would lead to a spring of any kind – not really, not anymore. The whole platform has become a shopper.
Hell, just this week the Zuck flew to kiss the Orange ring at Mara-a-Lago. We don’t know what the president-elect served for dinner, but we suspect Elon Musk was probably somewhere laughing his hindquarters off – Jeff Bezos is elsewhere, quietly shushing his Washington Post, the paper that once ended a presidency mid-term.
Oh, CRAP.
Never mind ALL this, we think, dear reader, we can all agree this screed never happened. Soooo – yeah… let’s just check in on our city council, shall we…
Next Year’s City Fee Increases: Jeff Blaine, the City’s public works director spoke at the City Council’s Nov. 21 work session last week – letting them know they’ll be asked to increase the City’s public works fees by 7% for next year. He says the increase comes to $9.04 monthly for residents.
Terrifyingly, he also noted that neighboring Albany is looking at new street fees and a city gas tax to raise more revenue. Most experts believe that mobility taxes like these disproportionately impact lower income folks. There’s no current indication that Corvallis is considering the same, but we’ll keep you posted.
Anyhow, next up was Corvallis City Manager Mark Shepard with service fee increases for the new year: fire 16.8% which is about $2.50 monthly per resident, police at 20.3% or $2.75 monthly per resident, and urban forestry at $0.15 monthly per resident. Total increase for next year, $5.40 monthly.
Shepard told the councilors that increased insurance costs and Oregon’s new family leave plan are two of the major inflationary drivers for the increases.
Trash Fees: On Monday, the City Council will mull a “request” from Republic Services to increase their rates for next year. The increases: residential 5.11%, commercial 5.76%, and for industrial 3.31%. According to a memo to council from Kris Kelly, Corvallis’s Internal Services Division Manager, City staff is amenable to the increase, noting it amounts to $1.33 per month for a 32-gallon cart customer.
Notably, however, Republic is also asking to add a whole new fee, and they’re saying its particularly aimed at university students that change their services frequently. The new charge would be a $10 cart delivery fee when folks start an account at a new address. The company says existing customers will not pay the fee unless they seek to exchange carts more than once yearly.
The Tally: All the aforementioned rate increases total $15.77 monthly. Annually, that’s $189.24, or 17 Chile Relleno Giant Burritos at the 24-hour downtown taco place by our office.
Flag freakout: City of Corvallis public information officer Patrick Rollens probably didn’t mean to open up a can of creative differences between City Councilors at their Nov. 21 work session last week. All he did was innocently point out that it would be a good time to refresh our fair burgh’s flag, given we’re at the tail-end of a citywide visual rebrand – he showed the councilors some options.
As you probably have already guessed, what ensued was about six hours of reasonably friendly creative differences between the councilors – and eventually a unanimously approved motion to table the matter. Okay, it was only about twenty or thirty minutes, but you get the idea.
We at The Advocate would weigh-in on this whole logo and flag thing, but looking at our own logo, we think it best that we just quietly slink off to the next topic…
Big Deal City Civic Campus Decision: Also on the City’s Council’s agenda for Monday evening – Civic Campus and Police Facility site layout selection. It’s an envisioned $200 million teardown and rebuild of the city hall and department offices, municipal court and police station – and less probably, a long desired multi-story downtown public parking garage. There are a few options to choose from, and the councilors are supposed to pick one at the meeting.
One small detail though, the City doesn’t appear to have the money or even borrowing capacity to build the thing – so voters would need to approve increasing taxes on themselves to get it built. Plenty of insiders are privately skeptical – some, not so privately.
There’s a cart-before-the-horse vibe to the whole thing – like last year’s failed County attempt at shaking dollars loose from voters for a new Justice Campus.
We published an editorial about the whole thing earlier this week, and we’ve pasted it below, in case you missed it. Also, Steve Clark, who co-chaired the City’s Civic Campus Engagement Task Force, has submitted written concerns to the City Council, and we really hope you’ll read them, so we published those today, as well.
Advocate Editorial: $200 Million Corvallis Civic Campus Proposal Needs Sensible Shoes
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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