PSU Magazine Winter 1993

When there have been problems, they've been in the form of turf battles. Washington County worked for 15 years to find a solid waste disposal solu– tion that would satisfy Metro, with little success. Outgoing Hillsboro Mayor Shirley Huffman says the county formed one arrangement in which private haulers would build a garbage transfer station at their cost and run it as a private enterprise. "Metro wouldn't allow it. They wanted complete control-to build it and operate it themselves. To this day we still don't have a transfer station," she says. Gresham Mayor Gussie McRobert says "a lot of times, Metro does things to local jurisdictions instead of with them." Clackamas County Commissioner Judie Hammerstad says she supports regional government, particularly Metro's role in land use planning. "But they tend to operate in a top-down fashion without meaningful consult– ation with local government," she says. One case in point was a proposal announced in October 1992, by Metro Councilor Tanya Collier and Executive Officer Rena Cusma to consolidate the three Portland-area counties with Tri-Met and Metro. Collier says the idea was to cut down on duplication of services in order to save money, and that local officials weren't consulted ahead of time because "we wanted to go directly to the people." Local officials, including Hammer– stad, whose county contains more than 90,000 residents outside of the current Metro boundary, fought the proposal, and it died. "What we would have liked them to do was identify the problem-and we would have helped them identify it-so that we could look at ways to address it. Consolidation doesn't solve anything," says Hammerstad. If Metro needs to do a better job of working with local governments, Seltzer says it also needs to do a better job of relating to its real constituents: the citizens of the metropolitan region. "They need to get out of the build– ing, cut their meeting time by about 90 percent and spend a whole lot more time developing constituent relation- Professor Ron Cease ships: go to neighborhood association meetings, go to chambers of commerce, create committees within their districts to relay issues back to Metro," Seltzer says. "It's not a real mystery." In some ways, the new Metro charter passed in November will help put it on that road. It creates a commit– tee made up of local officials to advise the Metro council, and it limits the veto power of the executive director. At the same time, however, it allows the Metro council to impose "niche taxes" such as hotel or real estate trans– fer taxes without voter approval. It creates further controversy in that it reduces the number of elected coun– cilors from 13 to seven, but gives them salaries instead of the current per diem arrangement. The council won't be reduced until 1995, yet the salaries go into effect immediately for the existing 13 members. "I have to carve out $350,000 to solve this problem," says Cusma. The title for the Metro charter bal– lot measure said it would "limit the powers of Metro," yet, with the expanded taxing authority, it does just the opposite. Cease is convinced that if the charter went on the ballot in any other election-one without the distractions of Measure 9, the presiden– tial race and other hot local issues-it never would have passed. Cusma agrees. "It was the biggest piece of consumer fraud I've ever seen," she says. Associate Professor Ethan Seltzer Despite its faults, those closest to Metro and its history agree that the regional system works better here than anyplace else in the country. Cease and Seltzer credit part of this accomplish– ment to the planning efforts that came years or decades before Metro. Cusma says the relative racial harmony in the Portland metro area enables regional decisions to be made much easier than other places-such as Detroit; Albany, NY; and Southern California-that are struggling with regional government. Cease says that in a practical sense, Metro could provide a lot more services than it does right now. "There are so many little jurisdic– tions-read your property tax bill. How many of those would be better handled through a regional approach?" he says. But he quickly acknowledges that efficiency is only one issue. People must still feel that they have local con– trol, and no matter how much Metro rubs houlders with the people, there's likely to be a limit to how much people will relinquish to a regional govern– ment. They might not care if their sewer system is managed from two counties away, but they're likely to care a lot about keeping local control of the police. ln running a region, you have to know when to quit. D (John R. Kirkland , a Portland freelance writer, is a regular contributor to PSU Magazine.) PSU 17