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As an avid outdoorswoman, Robin McArthur, the director of Metro’s planning and development department, spends substantial time outside of her office in Northeast Portland. In places such as Forest Park, on high hills overlooking the city, she has opportunities to truly appreciate the urban centers, streetcars and parks.

“You get high in the city and you look across and there’s just so much green,” she said. “I don’t want to imply that these are all my doings, or even Metro’s, but these are the kinds of things that give me a lot of pride about living in this region.”

McArthur announced last week that she will retire at the end of June, after spending the past eight years helping craft the region’s communities.

Connecting dots: It may sound like a no-brainer to identify a destination before building a road to get there, but planning wasn’t always a connected process. Decisions about transit lines, new highways and urban growth boundary expansions were made independently of each other as though they were items on a to-do list. McArthur wanted to change that.

“You build your transportation systems to foster what the community wants,” she said. “Where do you want your downtown? Where do you want your parks? How do you want your folks to get around? … People get excited about their community. They don’t necessarily get excited about a transportation solution.”

The East Metro Connections Plan was a case in point. For years, Gresham, Fairview, Troutdale and Wood Village had been divided over where to put a potential connection between Interstate 84 and U.S. Route 26. The new plan (adopted this past summer) instead asked those communities to think first about what they wanted their cities to look like, and then how they should be connected. In the end, nobody wanted a highway.

“For 20 years, there was no way you could go out there and get any two city councils to agree on anything,” McArthur said. “Last August there was a unanimous vote to support the East Metro Connections Plan.”

Metro is now following a similar route for the Southwest Corridor Plan.

A different world: McArthur grew up in the suburbs outside of Detroit, where cars were a necessity of life and sidewalks mostly were cosmetic. Moving to Portland was a big eye-opener.

“When I came to Portland, I could take a bus, and had access to the park nearby, and I could go off and ski on the weekends,” she said. “It was like, ‘Wow! This is a great thing.’ ”

With a degree in natural resources from the University of Michigan, McArthur briefly toyed with the idea of being a park ranger, but immediately landed a job working for the parks commissioner at the time, Charles Jordan. She pursued a master’s in urban planning from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and then started a career in planning Portland. She also served as an adviser to three governors – Neil Goldschmidt, Barbara Roberts and John Kitzhaber.

The lasting impact of schlock: When McArthur thinks about Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, she can’t help but think back to a trip to the Maryland coast in college.

“The whole way there was just schlock along the highway, and then you got to the coast (and) it was just a carnival,” she said. “I was just appalled. I never went back.”

McArthur is thankful that Oregon’s land use laws stymie such development. Slightly more than two years ago, Metro and the three counties it represents adopted an urban and rural reserves plan. It plots a course for growth and preservation of some 270,000 acres over the next 50 years. The plan is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals, but it nevertheless was a huge accomplishment for McArthur, who helped shepherd it along.

“We believe that the way we were directed by state regulations to expand that (urban growth) boundary wasn’t helping us with urbanization, and it wasn’t helping us long term to protect agricultural land,” she said.

Hunting for money: With the plans in place and the right people on board to see them through, McArthur feels confident in the course the region has chosen to follow. The big challenge will be money. Previously, the federal government would provide 90 cents on the dollar for things like transportation improvements. Those days are gone.

“We need to focus more strategically on getting the investment dollars to actually build those plans,” she said. “That is the biggest challenge over the next decade or two. It’s sewer, water and transportation dollars … We have to get more creative at local and regional levels about creating public and private dollars, and getting those investments into the system to create our cities.”