In 2013, Mayor Charlie Hales removed Commissioner Dan Saltzman and later appointed Commissioner Amanda Fritz as commissioner in charge of the Bureau of Development Services, which administers Portland’s zoning code. The city charter grants this power to the mayor to ensure that bureau leadership is consistent with the mayor’s policies.

Without objection from the mayor, Fritz last month advised BDS staff to reverse direction, saying, “We’ve drifted a bit too far toward approval of proposals that didn’t quite reach the bar of what we should accept.” She also specified new, tougher criteria for review of discretionary land use applications. The change was uncharacteristically issued in a memo without any public process, such as notice and a council hearing. Hales’ public silence on this controversial shift has allowed speculation that he supports the new hard-line policies.

The memo describes Fritz’s goal as “raising the bar” in discretionary land use decisions to a level that “should be higher than where it has been in the past…” It argues for consideration of antidevelopment criteria, including some that do not exist in the zoning code. The text of some of the new denial criteria as drafted by Fritz are:

• “Are they trying to squeeze too much onto the site?”

• “Environmental resource conservation (tree preservation, streams, stormwater, etc.)”

• “The carrying capacity of the lot/site itself, what it can reasonably handle, as well as the infrastructure and the context”

• “Is there available on-street parking or not?”

• “Good design and quality development”

All discretionary decisions in Portland, including conditional uses, zone changes, subdivisions, design review and others are already subject to council-adopted criteria embedded in the zoning code. In some cases Fritz’s criteria partially paraphrase existing criteria, but in many instances the code criteria differ from these newly announced standards and are even at odds with them.

This change will inevitably place the BDS professional planners in a tough spot. Staff professionals are now directed to apply new criteria that may not appear in the zoning code and recommend denial of more applications than in the past. As Fritz said, “It is my hope that these principles act as guides through which you consider your recommended approval or denial of an action.”

Guides that determine decisions are nothing short of criteria and, in Portland, we now have new ones. These decision-making standards have not been adopted by the City Council, but Fritz says they reflect the expectations of the current City Council members based on their 2014 land use voting records. Thus far, no council member has publicly said otherwise.

As of now, the combined effect of the mayoral appointment and the Fritz memo is in some respects the de facto amendment of the zoning code. Unless the City Council as a whole takes formal action to disavow the de facto amendments, they will likely control future decision making by BDS staff and make land use permits more difficult to obtain.

Applicants for land use approvals are well advised to help BDS staff address these criteria, whether or not they appear in the code. Failure to do so risks putting a project in jeopardy of being denied under these new “guides.” The cautious interpretation of the council’s lack of comment on the memo is that silence is assent.

Tim Ramis is an attorney and shareholder in Jordan Ramis PC. For more than 30 years, he has focused his practice on the business of land development in the region. Contact him at 503-598-5573 or tim.ramis@jordanramis.com.

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No other area of the country can match our region’s depth of experience with building livable cities. In virtually all areas of city building, the planning jurisdictions of this metropolitan area have been innovators. They have pioneered new ways of addressing urban sprawl, walkable neighborhoods, transit issues, historic preservation, citizen participation and infrastructure finance.

From a national viewpoint, the region is considered a laboratory for testing new ideas in regulating development.

In the core area of Portland, this work has been guided by the principles set out in the 1988 Central City Plan. The plan took inspiration from the best ideas of that era, but it was flexible, allowing for evolution and innovation.

The document was an agenda of generalized goals, providing direction while leaving the door open for new techniques to accomplish the city’s late 1980s vision of a vastly more interesting downtown. This was a successful approach to land-use planning, and it played an important role in Portland’s transformation into one of the most livable cities in the country.

Portland has now embarked on a new planning initiative that will replace the Central City Plan and eventually rewrite the development code. The product of this work is expected to shape the future of the city for the next 20 years. The process will challenge the council-appointed steering committee to apply the lessons learned from three decades of experience to the many development issues that have surfaced in recent years.

It is a big job to evaluate which strategies have worked and which have not and to derive practical lessons from our experience. But given our long history of land-use planning, we have raw data to do it. Some of the land-use related issues that we face are major issues of public policy; others are important urban design choices.

Among the many historical issues are:

Turning livability into job growth

The region has invested heavily in supporting a livability agenda, believing that it would draw talented workers and the companies that would employ them. We have attracted a talented workforce, but we have not been as successful as other cities – like Austin, Texas and Pittsburgh – at converting livability investments into job creation. The new Central City Plan will need to identify the strategic changes necessary to realize our employment goals.

Spreading the benefits of gentrification

Much of Portland’s success has involved upgrading and renovating areas close to the city’s core. The results have been widely praised, but we have rarely been able to make the pregentrification residents the direct beneficiaries of changes in their neighborhoods. Can we find ways to change this outcome?

Other planning issues center on the procedures and design requirements needed to create great neighborhoods and great places. These include:

Open space planning

The current process has produced spectacular results like Jamison Square, which is a magnet for human activity. But it has also given us parks that are admired as concepts but used little by the general public. If we think of these places as experiments in park design, we should be able to distill principles that will guide us to success in the future.

Mandatory storefronts

Our zoning code attempts to create active and energized streets by mandating vast amounts of street-level active uses. In some situations this has worked, but in others we have produced deathly quiet streets with thousands of feet of empty retail space.

Seattle has had a similar experience and is now rewriting its development regulations to change course, confining mandatory storefront zoning to places where it can be concentrated to produce successful pedestrian areas. Whether that is the right midcourse correction should be considered here.

Historic design review

The Portland Historic Landmarks Commission deserves high marks for its many successes with restoration and adaptive reuse of historic structures. It has been criticized, however, for its work on new construction. Some blame it for driving Apple away from Northwest 23rd Avenue, and others are unhappy with the use of historic design guidelines to reduce height and density designations that were intended to reduce urban growth boundary expansion pressures.

West Linn solves this problem by making new development in historic areas subject to a hearing before its historic review commission. But the result is advisory to the planning commission and city council, which retain authority to balance other factors en route to a final decision.

In Portland we have the opportunity to build our new plan and regulations on the foundation of our real-world experience with smart growth. The city will benefit from planning staff and a talented steering committee co-chaired by Portland State University historian Chet Orloff. This team has the skill to evaluate our historic experience, distill from it the development outline we need to improve the civic vitality of the central city, build on its role as an employment center, and keep it connected with healthy neighborhoods.

Take the opportunity to follow the work of the committee through the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability website. Look for Central City 2035.

Timothy V. Ramis is an attorney and member of Jordan Ramis PC’s Business Law practice group.  Tim has over 30 years of experience in land use and transportation planning, local government applications, Goal 5 applications, wetland permitting, Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) petitions, Court of Appeals and Supreme Court cases and legislative drafting.  Tim currently serves as city attorney for the cities of Tigard, Milwaukie and West Linn.  Additionally, Tim maintains a video blog, , which covers urban planning, governance, architecture and infrastructure. You can contact Tim at 503.598.5573 or by email at tim.ramis@jordanramis.com.

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