A very strange dance

Yesterday was the big day for the Willamette River Strategic Recreational Use Plan of 2012. It was presented to the Portland City Council in somewhat of a formal ballet-dance.

The very bored-looking Mayor and three of the four Councillors were there on the dais, and the room was about half-filled with (mostly) supporters of the Grand Plan, WillBoat people (there were four of us including my wife) being the sole exceptions to the dance aficionados.

This type of ballet features a lot of mutual back-slapping. The audio-visual presentation was quite good, though, and the A/V person mixed the screen images well so that there was no perceptible delay when the speakers changed or a Councillor asked a question of a speaker. Any slides were seamlessly presented.

That was the good part, but now Portland is stuck with a new policy which means nothing because it is unfunded, and given the current economic conditions, unlikely to ever BE funded.

The policy calls for bending the current emphasis on funding which has the Marine Board building/maintaining/improving facilities for motor-botors (primarily) into an emphasis reflecting the "trend towards human-powered boating". The problem is, as my wife pointed out several times, is that the current user-financed system ONLY assesses motor-boat owners, both with registration fees and marine fuel taxes, and the "human-powered" boating community is HIGHLY resistant to changing that, say, with a tax or fee on their kayaks, canoes, rowing shells, etc. The wife wrote "Show me the money" on her notepad, and each time one of the paid City planners gushed over a new, exciting aspect involving an expensive new paddler-project envisioned for the future, the wife would put another underline under "Show me the money" and elbow me in the ribs. By the time the official presentation was over and it was my turn to speak, there were many such underlines on her notepad.

So, I laid aside the attack speech I was prepared to give, and instead, introduced my company and people, then simply cautioned the assembled burgesses to actually attach the reality of zero funding to their aspirations. I was amazingly well-received, in a room which I had imagined beforehand to be a Lion's Den.

In fact, I was so well received that I dared to go up to my arch-nemesis afterwards, the author of the repress-motor-boating Grand Plan, and ask him if I could serve on a sub-group of his Advisory Committee specifically to suggest and identify funding sources for the Plan.

The bottom line for WillBoat is, that the Plan is part of City policy now, and that was foretold before it was written, my and other previous complaints being only a formality to be accomplished and not a real roadblock to implementation of the Plan. The real work is ahead, and that is finding new financing that the City can use to make Portland and the Willamette River a paddler's paradise with "no net loss" to the motor-boating community which actually PAYS for all the riverside improvements. THAT will be the REAL trick. Hizzoner leans towards wanting to burden the City's taxpayers for a generation with a Bond Issue, but the political reality is that the best sales rep in the nation probably couldn't sell a $25-50 million bond issue to the voters right now, and that is not likely to change. No, it will have to be some sort of user-pays theme, and getting the "sweat is FREE" bulging-arm crowd to put down their paddles and dig into their wallets is NOT going to be easy.

So, if I get placed on the Committee, I have two objectives, either to raise the money and sell the new fees to the new paddlers (and maybe some new ones to the motor-boaters as well), or convince Hizzoner that it simply can't be done, this version of getting blood from a turnip, and without the money, the Grand Plan is toast.

Boo-hiss of the day: Goes to NOAA, who sent a "Man of Science" to the assembly to tell all of we asssembled swells that the Plan should include restoring the River to it's pre-settlement shallow, meanering state, as if that would restore the 5 species of salmonids that are threatened with extinction. That idiot, and I freely award him the title, completely failed to look at the engineering history of early Portland, which had it's entire downtown flooded every few years in the Spring Runoff, sometimes up to and including the second floors of downtown buildings, back when the River was in that "shallow, meandering state". Diking the River, building and back-filling seawalls, and dredging the River's channel were the solutions, along with building the "fish-killing" flood-control dams upstream of Portland. The River is now tamed, and has only even approached flooding twice in the past two generations, despite there having been several "100-year" flood events on the River. If this is "science" that NOAA brought, the product of my colon is ambrosia, and I can save a dish of it for him to eat.

Comments

[Rivrsis]

Re your boo-hiss: This is another "rewilding" gambit. There are many efforts of this sort. This one is unusually destructive. Usually they target a small population and make the pitch to a larger, eco-friendly majority who don't really care if the project ruins lives other than their own. This notion (shallow/meandering Willamette), however, is destructive or potentially so to millions of people. Here at the headwaters, it's already started, because we upwater river-dwellers are few in comparison to the well-meaning general population, many of whom may even envy us living or otherwise owning property along the high tributaries. We all need to start calling this movement (which can only be accomplished by the death of billions of humans) what it is: "rewilding".

[Rivrdog]

Whatever their motivations, the City Council planners at least showed some knowledge of which side their bread is buttered on. Can't say the same for NOAA.

Interestingly enough, the Oregonian editorial page echoed your concern and your political fact that in an environmental State, it's an easy sell to hawk an enviro project in someone else's back yard. The editors mentioned this in regards to a bill creating more square miles of prohibited-fishing off the coast, as if banning harvesting of groundfish within the three-mile limit can actually bring back the depleted stocks of groundfish. Why didn't the Bill just ban nets? Why ban the occasional coastal fisherman who goes out on a stormless day to drop a line or two from his boat and feed his family or have a pleasant time on the ocean? But NOOOOO, one size must fit all, and THAT, dear Rivrsis, is what CONTROL is about, not what fish management is about. When you strip away the pretty veneers, most of these sorts of environmental projects are simply about imposing control where none existed before. Can you make a CASE for control? Doesn't matter, if you are SAVING THE PLANET AND ALL THE LITTLE FISHIES.

bAH!