Ask Tim Ramis to point out the person who played a key role in helping him become one of the region’s top lawyers in land use and municipal law, and there’s a good chance he’ll mention Harold Schnitzer.

“He really gave me an opportunity in my career to try my first land-use case in City Hall,” Ramis said.

The Jordan Ramis shareholder has come a long way from that first case. Last year, he successfully represented the city of Scappoose in an appeals case with a decision that is expected to give Oregon cities more solid footing when it comes to bringing land inside urban growth boundaries when those moves are opposed by residents and environmental groups.

His fascination with how cities grow – or, in Oregon’s case, sometimes don’t grow – can be traced back to when he was in high school, a time when social and political unrest sparked protests across the country.

“Cities were burning down; Watts was on fire,” Ramis said. “It made me curious about cities and how they worked.”

Ramis knew he wanted a career that would somehow help him satisfy that curiosity. He found a more specific direction in law school. There he met Dave Frohnmayer, who taught a class in legislative and administrative policies. Frohnmayer helped Ramis see how the law helped shaped government decision on how cities took shape.

“I knew I wanted to work in the building and governing of cities,” Ramis said. “Land use law became a way into that world.”

While Ramis says he doesn’t plan on stepping away from the legal world anytime soon, he did step into new territory a couple of years ago when he created a website called Tim’s City. The site is designed to share his love of cities and urban issues with others through videos and photography.

He also continues to work with Specialized Housing Inc., a local nonprofit group that Ramis and a friend formed approximately 30 years ago with the goal of building housing for people with disabilities. It’s a demographic that he’s concerned is being overlooked amid the debates over creating more affordable housing in Portland and elsewhere in Oregon.

“I’m hopeful that whatever decisions get made to address housing we don’t forget this population of people,” Ramis said.

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The objection period is over for an application by the city of Scappoose to expand its urban growth boundary by approximately 379 acres, but the proposal did not emerge unscathed before heading to the state for approval.

Anne Debbaut, a regional representative, said the city’s proposal drew three main objections: one from , another from 35 property owners supporting 1000 Friends’ complaints, and one from an individual.

The UGB expansion would include 339 acres of vacant land east of the Scappoose Industrial Airpark. Jon Hanken, Scappoose city manager, said the land’s proximity to the airport makes it a valuable resource for future growth.

“We have identified this as an opportunity for Scappoose,” Hanken said. “If you look at how Portland’s growing, how Hillsboro airport is growing – as Portland grows and some of those smaller businesses get relocated to Hillsboro, some of those Hillsboro businesses are going to get relocated and Scappoose is a good place for them to go.”

Scappoose anticipates adding 8,068 jobs by the year 2030, according to the Columbia County Planning Commission staff report, which recommends expanding the UGB. Professional and business services, manufacturing and retail trade are expected to account for 67 percent of that growth.

Hanken said hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on lawsuits over the past 30 years protecting that land for industrial purposes – the land’s rich aggregate content attracted a mining company in years past. He added that the land could suit a new Portland Community College campus, which it is seeking, and that now is the time to realize the land’s industrial value.

But 1000 Friends of Oregon questions the employment numbers the city is projecting.

“This site might be justifiable, but this document they’re using is so out of whack with what you’d need to justify that site and with commonly accepted methods of projecting employment need, that we can’t let it go unanswered because it will set a precedent in other areas,” Mary Kyle McCurdy, a 1000 Friends staff attorney, said of the economic opportunities analysis prepared by John Reid LLC.

In its written objection to the DLCD, 1000 Friends stated that because Scappoose expects to gain only 3,421 residents over the next 20 years, its employment projections would result in 2.4 jobs for every new resident, child, aged and disabled person in the community.

The document goes on to point out that Scappoose’s proposed growth rate is 543 percent of the actual 1990 to 2010 Portland metropolitan statistical area’s total jobs growth rate, 640 percent of Scappoose’s MSA total jobs capture rate, and 3,650 percent of Scappoose’s MSA manufacturing capture rate.

“1000 Friends of Oregon objects to everyone’s UGB expansion applications and they always use that as the factor – they don’t believe the projections,” Hanken said. “The consultants that we hired did the analysis. We looked at it, we went through public hearings, it was presented to the City Council, it was presented to the Columbia County commissioners – all of them listened to the information in the testimony and believed it was reasonable.”

Debbaut said the DLCD plans to make a director’s decision on the application rather than refer it to the Land Conservation and Development Commission, and that the decision must be made by June 8. Groups that disagree with the DLCD’s determination would then be able to appeal to the LCDC.

Hanken said it’s anyone’s guess how long that process would take.

“Realistically, any time you have a UGB application and it has appeals, and the objection to appeals, and by the time it goes to court, it can be anywhere from two to 10 years,” he said. “Woodburn has been at theirs for 10 years.”

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After a brief detour on the traditional route to expanding an urban growth boundary, Scappoose officials are back on track.

Slightly more than 53 percent of the Scappoose voters who turned out for a special election on Tuesday voted in favor of a citizen-driven referendum that asked whether they supported a city plan to expand its urban growth boundary by 365 acres. The plan is scheduled to now go before the Columbia County Board of Commissioners. Final approval would come from the state Land Conservation and Development Commission.

The UGB expansion would include 339 acres east of the Scappoose Industrial Airpark and 26 acres on the city’s southern boundary where Old Portland Road meets U.S. Route 30. Portland developer Joe Weston is the major property owner and has plans to use the land for employment purposes and potentially for a Portland Community College satellite campus.

Details aren’t worked out completely yet, but supporters of the expansion plan – including local business groups, Mayor Scott Burge and state Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose – believe it could lead to the creation of hundreds of family-wage jobs.

This belief led a group of citizen activists, with the support of statewide land-use watchdog group , to fight the UGB expansion proposal. The group, , contended that citizens don’t support the plan, which was approved by both Scappoose’s planning commission and City Council.

The group’s main gripe with the proposal, according to one of the main opponents, Pat Zimmerman, is with claims that it would create jobs. She noted that the southern end of Scappoose has nearly 200 acres of vacant industrial land considered shovel ready and not creating jobs.

Mia Nelson, a member of 1000 Friends of Oregon, pointed to flaws in the city’s justification for expansion. Under state law, cities must prove they need land for their 20-year supply before they expand UGBs.

Nelson believes the city is relying too heavily on the figures in an economic opportunities analysis, and that statistics from the Oregon Employment Department might be more accurate.

“We recognize and commend the city of Scappoose’s efforts to plan for its future,” Nelson wrote in a letter to the Columbia County Board of Commissioners. “We support economic development, including provision of land necessary for that development, when it is based on accurate facts, and realistic future assumptions and projections, and takes into account a jurisdiction’s unique attributes.

“But … the proposed employment growth rates are neither realistic nor based on sound factual information.”

Burge agreed that jobs aren’t created from a UGB expansion directly, but added that an expansion is needed for Scappoose to be competitive in the regional economy.

“If you want to be hyper-technical … adding land to the UGB doesn’t directly create any additional jobs,” he said. “But it does indirectly help create the jobs for our future by giving companies looking for a place to (locate) more options to locate and thus helps create more jobs.

“Not adding the land guarantees no new jobs over the next 20 years and guarantees turning this land into a gravel pit and only residential development. More homes and no more jobs.”

Burge added that if the land wasn’t added to the UGB, then both taxes and rates would likely rise, and less money would likely be spent on public services, which would lead to more crime.

The election resulted in 609 votes in support of the expansion, and 536 in opposition.

If the expansion plan was to receive approval from the Columbia County Board of Commissioners, it would then go before the LCDC. Also, the UGB expansion could be appealed, but none has been announced.

Even if the UGB expansion was approved, the property would need to be annexed into the city, which would require approval of voters, before development could occur.

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Students in the past may not have given much thought to how much energy their schools consume. But perhaps pupils will ask more questions when they see what makes their schools greener.

More architects nowadays are choosing to open students’ eyes to green design by designing new school buildings with solar arrays, storm-water drainage systems and other sustainable building features exposed intentionally.

According to Scott Rose, a principal with DLR Group working on the new Petersen Elementary School in Scappoose, youths have minds like sponges, and will benefit from being able to see green building systems in action.

“If nothing else, we want to use this building as a teaching tool,” Rose said. “If they can look at an exposed cistern with color-coded pipe showing how the rainwater is being recycled into the bathrooms, they will make the connections.”

Several studies performed in the last decade have lauded sustainable schools for improving the performance of teachers and students alike because of better lighting and air quality. However, data is still being collected on how learning in a high-performance school affects students’ concepts of sustainability.

John Weekes, a Dull Olson Weekes Architects principal, designed exposed systems for the new Valley View Middle School in Snohomish, Wash. He said the visible systems will encourage students to think more critically about their surroundings. All of Valley View’s mechanical equipment, boilers and water-reuse systems will be exposed or placed behind glass walls for observation.

“Unless you can see it and touch it, you don’t understand how it works,” Weekes said. “Seventy percent of students are visual. Having these systems exposed shows there is more to a building than the rooms they happen to occupy. Then you can apply those lessons to math, science and physics in their curriculum.”

That is what science teacher Jason Hieggeoke has been doing at Da Vinci Arts Middle School. He has used a water garden, which drains storm water, as a living laboratory.

“There aren’t many special places for kids in schools, and this is one of them,” Hieggeoke said. “We do water quality testing and look for invertebrates. We care for the garden so they learn about conservation. Sometimes they will see the pipes and ask where they are coming from, which gives me the opportunity to explain the storm-water system to them.”

According to Nancy Boyd, resource conservation director for Portland Public Schools, students at Da Vinci Arts Middle School also have been engaged by a net-zero music room constructed there last year. In the room, which features a solar system donated by the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, kids can visit an interactive kiosk to track how the photovoltaic panels power the building.

“The students are definitely paying attention to the data,” Boyd said. “We’d love to know if there are other things we could do (with facilities) to help integrate that into the curriculum.”

For Paul Peterson, superintendent of the Scappoose School District 1J, Petersen Elementary School’s exposed building systems present an opportunity to teach not only about sustainability, but also about the economics of operating a building.

“We never set out to make a ‘green’ building but to make decisions that would provide a reasonable payback,” Peterson said. “By seeing interactive screens with energy readouts saying how many trees haven’t been cut and how many tons of coal haven’t been burned, the kids can see what that means to the economics of the school.”

Introducing a school’s sustainable building functions into classes such as math and science is something that Rose is working on with teachers at Petersen Elementary.

“Teachers were intrigued by the idea, but they hadn’t done anything like that previously,” Rose said. “If it’s not easy to implement, they won’t do it.”

And sometimes, the best sustainability teachers turn out to be the kids themselves. There are 15 to 20 Da Vinci students who are trained as ‘ambassadors’ for the net-zero building. The kids know the systems inside and out and are tasked with showing off the building to visitors, including a recent delegation of Fulbright scholars from Japan.

“The kids are extraordinarily aware of what the building means to the future of school construction,” said Eric Bergmann, Da Vinci principal. “In terms of that information trickling down into the student body, it’s slow taking roots. A lot of questions are being asked. I think having the kids running the show has had the greatest impact.”

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In the past, whenever Scappoose public works officials had to upgrade a portion of their sewage treatment plant, they had a few main considerations: which parts worked the best for the job and how much the project would cost, for example.

The federal stimulus package added another consideration: where those parts were made.

A “Buy American” provision requires that projects receiving stimulus money use parts made in the United States. Scappoose got $706,000 in stimulus money to improve its treatment plant, which includes an ultraviolet disinfection system.

“One issue we talked about early on was using the Trojan UV system and upgrading it,” said plant supervisor Steve Wabschall. “That system’s made out of Canada.”

Scappoose officials decided to replace some of the system’s parts with American-made components instead of swapping out the whole system. Under a deal that took effect Tuesday, they wouldn’t have needed to worry about buying from Canada.

The U.S. and Canada signed a trade deal last week opening stimulus projects to Canadian suppliers while opening Canadian projects to U.S. suppliers. The deal promises to ease what had become a headache on stimulus projects, particularly water and sewer ones, said Perry Fowler, the director of governmental affairs for the Associated General Contractors of America.

Often, especially in water and sewer project, a needed part has no American makers, Fowler said. “The large pieces of equipment used in treatment facilities, like blowers and ultraviolet treatment systems and membrane filtration systems, a lot of those are manufactured abroad, many in Canada,” he said.

“A lot of those are preferred by the engineers and water authorities for their performance.”

Smaller items may have a single American manufacturer, Fowler said, creating an artificial spike in demand. “A lot of these items with a lot of parts in them are not manufactured in sufficient quantity,” he said. “One manufacturer was granted a virtual monopoly on a pipe fitting of a certain diameter.”

Where finding domestically made parts has been impossible or nearly so, the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency responsible for administering water and sewer projects, has granted waivers. The waiver process has gotten smoother, Fowler said, but can still delay projects.

Responsibility for compliance with the Buy American provisions ultimately rests with the contractor on a project, Fowler said. If an EPA inspector finds foreign parts, even if the supplier swore they were domestic, the contractor could face fines or other penalties, he said.
“We tell our members they have to make extra sure they’re well educated,” Fowler said. “If you go out of business because you used a bolt that’s not made in the U.S., that’s contrary to the goals of the Recovery Act, certainly.”

Despite early concerns, the Scappoose project is moving ahead. Tacoma-based general contractor Pease & Sons should start on the project next month, Wabschall said, as soon as parts arrive.

Although the deal with Canada gives U.S. agencies more flexibility in water and sewer projects, Canada isn’t the only foreign supplier for public works projects. Scappoose officials had to pore over parts in their screening, filtration and pumping systems to make sure all were American-made.

“The consulting engineers had to get all the paperwork up front,” Wabschall said. “We have a screen that was originally made in Germany, but I think (the company) has a plant in Georgia now.”

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Students at the new Otto Peterson Elementary School in Scappoose will have opportunities to learn firsthand how a building consumes energy. The 61,577-square-foot school, designed by DLR Group, will feature a digital “green screen”’ between its cafeteria and gymnasium that will display live data on the building’s energy use and production.

The school for youths in grades 4-6 was designed as a replacement for an outdated, sprawling elementary school campus on the opposite side of Highway 30. DLR Group worked closely with community members, who wanted a building that would lower operating costs while retaining the positive attributes of the original school.

“They wanted to address all of the problems that the existing school has, but keep the things that were good, such as the size of the gym and classrooms,” project manager Michelle Evans said. “They wanted to create a school that was high-performing because they’ve had so many maintenance issues in the past.”

Leaking roofs, and campus security were issues at the existing school, which had flat rooftops and a sprawling layout due to various additions constructed over the years. The new $14 million building will have external drainage on all of its metal roofs, which are sloped except in places where mechanical systems needed to be installed. A cantilevered fifth-grade wing forms a rain canopy over the school’s designated drop-off area, which can be easily viewed from administrative areas so that visitors can be monitored as the children are taken to and from the school.

The target is for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification. The design includes rain gardens, a rooftop garden, above-ground rainwater harvesting, photovoltaic panels on the library roof, and various skylights and translucent ceiling systems to light common areas.

“We allowed our engineering team to drive how the classrooms function as far as daylighting,” said Evans. “The sizes of the windows were determined to allow the most efficient use of outdoor light.”
P&C Construction broke ground on the project in early June, and will finish by June 15, 2010.

The project team for the new school includes civil engineer MGH Associates Inc., landscape architect Cardno WRG, and project manager Cornerstone Project Management.

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