River Renaissance Initiative—City of Portland, Oregon

1. Purpose

The City of Portland, Oregon, created the River Renaissance Initiative in 2001 to intensify the City’s focus on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers and channel energy to meet five goals:

•  Ensure a clean and healthy river system for fish, wildlife, and people.

•  Maintain and enhance the city’s prosperous working harbor.

•  Embrace the river and its banks as Portland’s front yard.

•  Create vibrant waterfront districts and neighborhoods.

•  Promote partnerships, leadership, and education.

River Renaissance is charged with maintaining the City’s River Vision and implementing the River Renaissance Strategy, which notes:

River Renaissance …embodies a new approach to understanding problems and developing responsive, effective, and enduring solutions. … revitalizing our rivers and their related systems can only be successful if we strive to achieve multiple goals simultaneously. … Rather than pitting goals against each other (environment versus economy, for example), River Renaissance advances a model in which we can improve the health of our natural system and, at the same time, thrive economically—relying on collaborative problem-solving and creative design as potent tools to achieve mutual gains.

River Renaissance seeks to reclaim the Willamette River as Portland’s centerpiece and sustain the city’s vital connections to the Columbia River. The Initiative promotes and celebrates the Willamette River as the city’s chief environmental, economic and urban asset. River Renaissance coordinates the city’s river-related work, engages the public, and connects community partners to create innovative urban solutions.

2. Action Profile

River Renaissance has been instrumental in reshaping the City’s river thinking by fostering a new, multi-disciplinary and cross-Bureau approach to complex river issues. River Renaissance works closely with the Bureaus of Environmental Services, Parks and Recreation, and Planning, as well as the Development Commission and four other bureaus to fashion a yearly river action plan. This plan is a major element of River Renaissance’s annual State of the River Report which describes major accomplishments, tracks river-related progress measures, and sets the river agenda for the coming year.

River Renaissance also places a high priority on sharing river information with the public. The program publishes a popular monthly river calendar that showcases river tours, lectures, festivals, and events. In addition, River Renaissance sponsors a monthly River-In-Focus speaker series featuring talks on river history, economy, and environment. Most recently, River Renaissance was a major sponsor of Riverfest, Portland’s biggest celebration of the Willamette River.

3. Case Study

One of Portland’s most ambitious waterfront projects ever is South Waterfront, the newest manifestation of the city’s nationally acclaimed approach to redevelopment and riverfront revitalization. The Oregonian newspaper has called it an effort to “create something all but unprecedented this close to an urban core: an entire high-rise, live-work neighborhood. … [a commitment to] something spectacular” and “one of the most complex public-private real estate deals ever in Portland.”

The first few years of the 20-year South Waterfront project have brought numerous successes. The adoption of the 2003 South Waterfront Plan sparked immediate development in Portland’s newest waterfront district. Within four years, the Portland Aerial Tram was built to connect a hilltop neighborhood with the waterfront, and ridership greatly exceeding expectations—the Tram carried its one-millionth passenger in October 2007, less than a year after opening. The Portland Streetcar also reached deep into the district in 2007 with the opening of the Lowell-Bond extension.

Oregon Health Sciences University opened its Center for Health and Healing in October 2006 (accounting for roughly the first 1,000 of 10,000 jobs projected for the district) and in 2008 unveiled a new plan for its waterfront campus which centers on a Biosciences Collaborative in partnership with Oregon’s major universities.

Residential development has also grown rapidly, with the construction of multiple towers housing condominiums, apartments, and retail sales.

As a large undertaking with many moving parts, South Waterfront has encountered implementation issues, including long-term financing, provision of affordable housing, changing market conditions, integration into evolving mass transit alternatives, and environmental impacts.

One of the more immediate issues that illustrates the complexity of the waterfront environment is the South Waterfront Greenway. The plan for South Waterfront calls for a 1.2 mile-long, 100 foot-wide riverfront greenway that provides not only for increased pedestrian and bicycling access, but for significantly improved fish and wildlife habitat on the riverbank and in the near-shore environment. The project involves regrading the bank to create a shallower slope to the river, creating bioswales establishing native vegetation, and building paths and viewpoints. The greenway carries an initial price tag of $6 million from the City of Portland, alone.

To construct the greenway, the City and its partners need to negotiate a challenging permitting environment. The greenway exists at the intersection of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), and the Rivers and Harbors Act—as well as a suite of state and local codes.

Portland is one of the few cities in the nation that must deal with threatened species living in and migrating through its jurisdiction. Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead trout were listed as threatened under the ESA in the late 1990s. Projects that require riverbank or in-water work often must first be permitted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In turn, the Corps must consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to assure that any permit will not adversely affect listed species—if, indeed, a permit can be issued at all.

The greenway route also involves a contaminated industrial site which is being cleaned-up under the authority of CERCLA and the Clean Water Act, as implemented by the State of Oregon. The particulars of the clean-up are being negotiated between the property owner and the State—but they will have profound ramifications for the City’s greenway. The likely site remedies will include soil excavation, sediment dredging and/or capping, bank stabilization, and site capping. The extent to which any final site configuration either harmonizes or conflicts with the level of riverbank restoration called for under the City’s South Waterfront Plan is uncertain.

Progress in building the greenway has been difficult. Despite the City’s plans to transform the riverbank from a contaminated and hostile habitat into a far more natural and species- friendly environment, NMFS found that the project would adversely affect salmon habitat. This finding essentially halted greenway construction for at least one and perhaps several years. The City is now working with NMFS to identify design changes that would allow permit issuance.

Similarly, the City is working closely with the State to better understand the scope of remedies for the contaminated site and explore alternatives that meet federal and state requirements while setting the stage for greenway implementation.

The issues being surfaced in the regulatory processes to build the greenway have far-reaching implications for future redevelopment and revitalization of Portland’s waterfront. How the City can: promote partnerships to plan and fund the clean-up of contaminated sites; increase citizens’ access to their river through parks, trails, and boating facilities; conserve and restore invaluable fish and wildlife habitats; and increase river-related commerce—all require deepening relationships with federal agencies.

As Portland moves forward to redevelop Centennial Mills (a derelict riverfront site), restore near-river brownfields to productive environmental or economic uses, work with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry on its waterfront campus expansion, implement remedies resulting from the Portland Harbor Superfund process, and restore habitats along the river—it will be essential for the City to expand its understanding of and fluency in federal processes at the water’s edge.

Some possible stepping stones on the way to deeper partnerships with federal agencies could include:

-  assuring federal agencies have sufficient resources at the local level to interact fully and in a timely manner with the City and other local partners to share information early, consult often, conduct necessary analyses, eliminate any permitting backlogs, and efficiently process future permit requests;

-  establishing a federal position or program specializing in the urban waterfront environment. The urban waterfront environment is made unique by its population density; market values; layering of historic uses and their consequent ecological legacies; preciousness of remaining habitat; and the demands placed on designs to serve both ecologic and economic uses. Finding innovative approaches to achieve success along the urban waterfront is a specialty that should be recognized in the development and funding of federal positions;

-  increasing federal resources (e.g., direct appropriations, grants, in-kind services, or incentives) that are available for cities like Portland to pioneer innovative approaches to revitalizing waterfronts to help both the economies and ecologies served by our rivers.