Mayor adds Bicycle Master Plan back into budget

Yes! This is awesome!

The mayor’s office is oblivious to the bicycle community and so much more. After speaking to someone within his “circle” over the weekend, I was told that the mayor’s office is staffed with young, inexperienced, and mostly arrogant people. This explains why the BMP was not funded. His staff had no idea what the BMP was, didn’t bother to find out what it was, and when told how important it was, they refused to acknowledge their mistakes.

The mayor is on damage-control after taking the heat from the charter reform mess, heavily mismanaged VisionPDX project, and BMP fiasco. He deserves no slack for finally including funding for the second year of the BMP process in an effort to cover up the mismanagement of his office.

While the mayor has idealistically pursued to involve the younger generation, he has lost touch with community-wide values, ironically at a time when he is pursuing a citywide visioning effort. If the mayor can barely handle what’s on his plate now (while nearly doubling his administrative staff over prior mayors according to an Oregonian article a few weeks back), why should we think he or any one else in his position will do a good job with all of the bureaus under his/her belt?

Wow. Never thought this would be overturned (and so quickly). Looks like the people close to Potter got him to realize what a mistake he’d made.

The mayor is not forgiven. And A_O, where were you Friday? I was there.

I knew this would happen because of the video “The secret”. It told me to write down “bike master plan” on a piece of paper, eat it and then drink 5 gallons of vinegar. Sure enough it worked!

Thank you to all who communicated with the Mayor’s office, and thank you to the Mayor, who listened.

…and thank you to the Mayor, who listened.

Er, eventually. After a lot of letters, phone calls, and an initial “I hear you, but it’s not happening anyway” from the Mayor. Who pushed the importance of cycling issues in his campaign.

Again, folks: don’t forget! 🙂

Oh. My. God.

How about: “Thanks Mayor Potter, for taking our input into account and restoring funding to the Platinum Bicycle Master Plan which we find extremely important to ourselves and our city. I’m glad our public officials are willing to listen to Portland’s citizens and change policies.”

I can’t believe so many people can’t even manage to say thank you. The man is dealing with a million different agendas. He took the time and energy to include ours in the budget after some prodding. I think he deserves some thanks and respect.

@Whiney:

I have no problem thanking the Mayor for exactly what happened, and that’s coming to his senses after a lot of poking and prodding on an issue that he, being the recumbent-riding bike-friendly guy he sold himself as during his election campaign and the first few months of his term, should already have been looking at.

So: thanks, Tom Potter. I appreciate you finding a way to fund the BMP in the end. What’s important got accomplished, and I can rest a bit easier now knowing that Portland’s bike infrastructure stands a better chance of improving as opposed to languishing a bit until the next time the plan would have gotten approved. That’s great. Politics-wise, though, you’ve already lost my vote for any re-election bid, and you’ve proven why it’s important that executive authority not rest solely in the hands of the mayor’s office.

@N.I.K.

That’s a response I can get behind. My badly worded point was that I thought he deserved a thank you. Maybe not a big thank you, but at least a nod in his general direction which I didn’t feel he was getting. (Why I care is another question.)

http://www.last.fm/music/William+Shatner/_/I+Can't+Get+Behind+That

Dear Mayor Potter,

Thank you for revealing, through concrete funding decisions, that you either (a) don’t really care about making PDX a world class bike city, or (b) are so out of touch with the City’s business that you aren’t paying attention to the connection between your priorities and your budget. You’re a great mayor. And you’ve removed any doubt I may have had about how to vote this election. Keep up the good work!

@A_O

You always manage to drain the caring right out of me. Good times.

Good call, Bjorn. Let’s win it…again! 🙂

It’s difficult to feel much sympathy for the mayor’s office when it takes nearly a week to get a response from an email (and a form response at that). I took the opportunity to respond and to tell the mayor’s office the following:

“Please pass along to the mayor that I appreciate that he chose to fund the master plan with this additional income. I sincerely hope that the mayor will consider future bike projects with the results of the Peak Oil Task Force report in mind – bicycles are an inexpensive alternative to cars, and as Peak Oil unfolds, a shift from cars to alternative transportation will bring bicycles to the forefront. In order for the city to manage and accommodate these alternate modes, the city must budget projects other than necessary safety and maintenance improvements.”

I fear that the message will be lost, but sometimes you have to sow thousands of seeds to get a single tree. If we stop sowing seeds, nothing will ever take root.

Congrats Portland peoples! I vacation in Portland and the surounding area a couple times a year and you folks really have a special deal going on there. I won’t pretend to believe that EVERYTHING is puffy clouds and tulips but on the whole your very lucky. It sounds as though your Mayor really got creamed with letters and calls. It doesn’t mean he’s a jerk just tht he probably didn’t realize just how important this issue was to Portland folks. In the future he may think twice before lowering the boom on bicycle funding. Again, congrats Portland peoples.

Mike Nebraska

peejay, I tried emailing you privately through bikeportland, but it didn’t work. I’m not sure whether you’re registered; or perhaps I’m just incompetent. Please email me at cmheaps [at] gmail.

I am gleefull! *bounces around happily*

I do thank the Mayor for listening to us… finally. I don’t plan to forget this, and I’m still voting against that little measure of his to shift more power to the mayor’s office. It is good that he listened, but it took too long and too much.

Jonathan & the BTA are heroes for providing responsible news coverage and well-organized activism, respectively.

Did the Mayor turn around 180 degrees? Yes. Can I still be grateful to the Mayor for doing this? Yes.

I would much rather have a Mayor who can change his mind than one who can’t. (If you can’t see the difference, just compare what goes on in City Hall with what goes on in the White House.)

This is good news, but I think it would have been better accepted if it was something like “I put it back in the budget because the community asked for it and that made me realize how important it is. Instead, without any comment, it sounds more like “I put it back in the budget because lucky for us, we found a pile of extra money, and so it’s politically it’s a easy way for me to get those pesky bikers off my back.”

Take a bow, Jonathan. We all did this together, but without the forum you provide for distributing this information, many of us would not have even known about this.

Michelle from the BTA chiming in from New Caledonia here. Very delighted the BMP update is now funded; echoing frustrations at Mayor Potter’s reluctance to respond (initially) to community interest in a BMP; happy that he found a way to ultimately change his mind; but also chiming in in defense of certain members of his “young, inexperienced, mostly arrogant” staff (I quote from above) who were more instrumental than you may know at bringing this to our attention in the first place and at getting it funded. There are very good people there.
Back to vacation.