For those of you who haven’t met her yet, here is an update on the Portland Plan from Susan Anderson, the new director of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.
Dear fellow Portlander,
Thank you for your interest and participation in the early phases of the development of the Portland Plan.
As director of the new Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS), I am truly excited about the opportunity to develop a plan that promotes a healthy, prosperous and environmentally sustainable community. A quality plan absolutely must have the involvement of a broad base of Portland residents and businesses. To that end, I am writing you to bring you up to date on the Portland Plan.The Portland Plan process started two years ago and built on the important work done through visionPDX. Through that effort, an impressive amount of information was gathered. Much of that can be reviewed in the Community Input Summary, which captures 17,000 comments from a wide variety of Portlanders and is available online at http://tinyurl.com/inputsummary. We also developed the Portland Plan Outreach Chronicles to summarize what we heard during the public meetings and summits in May and June 2008 (http://tinyurl.com/outreachchrons).
More recently, Mayor Adams appointed a Community Involvement Committee for the Plan. This committee was formed to help design and monitor the public involvement efforts for the Plan. The committee will met for the first time today, July 8, 2009. In addition, at least two other advisory groups will be established to provide advice on the content of the Portland Plan and Central City Plan. Members for these committees will be drawn from the Mayor’s cabinets and other organizations to evaluate the technical work of staff.
Over the next three months, BPS staff, under the leadership of Chief Planner Joe Zehnder, will provide background information on key trends, conditions and issues facing Portland. This information will be available by mid-August and then be merged with provisional citywide goals and indicators in a Baseline Report due out in September.
Later this fall, Portlanders will be able to roll up their sleeves and work with each other to develop components of the Portland Plan. BPS will hold a series of community workshops where you will be able to discuss key issues and test “what if” scenarios that help describe the characteristics of the Portland you want to see in the future. I hope you will join us at these workshops and bring your neighbors, friends and coworkers to these events. The more people you bring along to participate, the more the Portland Plan will be a true reflection of our community.
As we move forward with the development of the Plan, I will send out quarterly updates and you can visit the BPS website any time for news or information at http://www.portlandonline/portlandplan.com.
So stay tuned, and stay involved. Your participation is essential.
All the best,
Susan Anderson
Director
Bureau of Planning and Sustainability