Officials begin collecting information on how residents aim to share the cost of pedestrian improvements
SOUTHWEST PORTLAND – City Transportation Commissioner Sam Adams’ proposal to pay for pedestrian pathways on three major roads through Southwest Portland is beginning to gain steam as Southwest Neighborhoods Inc. begins to plan surveys, open houses and mass mailings to residents within a half-mile of the roads.
SWNI’s efforts are part of a campaign to get residents involved in the push for pedestrian safety, which is likely to include a local improvement district that charges properties within a certain radius of 35th Avenue, Hamilton and Vermont streets.
Called a “halo” LID, the proposal is designed to soften the impact on the relatively few property owners who abut the roads by distributing the cost among surrounding properties who might also benefit.
Don Gardner, project manager for the Portland Department of Transportation, said many of the details on the project are still fuzzy. Everything from how much the project will cost to where a resident will put his or her garbage when the street is pushed back are all questions that still need to be worked out during the coming months, Gardner said.
To encourage citizen input in the process, SWNI officials are developing a letter and a survey that they will mail in February to about 3,000 property owners within a half-mile of the proposed developments.
The transportation committee then plans three open houses in March, one for each of the three projects. Details on the open houses were not available at press time.
Andrew Aebi, the transportation department’s LID coordinator, said he favors a graded approach to assessing the fees so that a property owner isn’t charged a much higher rate than her neighbor. For example, there could be a certain percentage assessed to those who live 3/10 of a mile away and a slightly lower percentage for those 4/10 of a mile away. But Kriger cautioned against extending the halo much farther than a half-mile as it has the potential to add too many voices to the decision-making process.
“There’s a fine line between getting the costs low and just having an unmanageable number of people to deal with,” he said.
For now, city officials shied away from estimating any figures for how much money the project would cost and how much property owners might be assessed.
Senior Project Manager Jerry Maresino of OTAK, the engineering firm for the project, said he wants the community (and each neighborhood’s halo LID project teams) to agree on the design before he can determine a price.
This has caused some delay in scheduling open houses as not enough details on the project have been available.
“Without a price I don’t want to start talking to people saying, ‘I’m going to assess you’ because my first question would be ‘How much?’ Well, I don’t know yet,” Gardner said.
Gardner did say he thought the soonest the project can go to contract would be the summer of 2009.
Marianne Fitzgerald, chair of the SWNI transportation committee, said residents should look in their mailboxes, the SWNI newsletter, and The Connection, for more information on the open houses as they are scheduled.
Reach Out!
Visit http://swni.org/bridlemile/hspi for more information, or contact Leonard Gard, SWNI’s Program Manager, at 503-823-4592 or leonard@swni.org.