Portland Plan puts emphasis on sustainable business

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Officials tasked with plotting the next 25 years of growth in Portland say they’re putting heavy emphasis on economic prosperity, an aim that bodes well for sustainable industries, already targeted for growth by city leaders.

Eric Engstrom is a principal planner with the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and charged with overseeing the Portland Plan, a 25-year vision for directing growth in the city.

After spending several months gathering input from focus groups — including a workshop hosted for the business community by Keen Inc. on May 17 — Engstrom now plans to spend time meeting in small groups and with Portland businesses, particularly in the sustainable industries sector.

“What they need to know at this point is there is an opportunity in the Portland Plan to get the city more focused on this,” Engstrom said. The plan’s aims for business are pinned on three basic tenets: building a stronger local economy, broadening prosperity, and developing better economic tools.

The effort is now dovetailing with a city decision to target sustainable industries for growth in an economic development strategy adopted last fall. That strategy looks ahead toward five years of investment in sustainable industries, while the wonkier Portland Plan looks at practical ways to make that and other future goals a reality.

Growth in the sustainable sector is currently hampered by obstacles to land development — some brought about by previous planning efforts by the city and Metro, the regional government tasked with managing land use.

Meghan Doern, spokeswoman for the Portland Business Alliance, said she is encouraged to see Portland planners taking those issues seriously in the 25-year plan.

“We want to make sure that it has a broad sense of sustainability. That it encourages the economy, the environment and social equality, sort of the three pillars of a prosperous region,” said Doern.

“How we see this is that we’ve done a great job with (land-use planning) and with our public transportation infrastructure and multi-modal use, so I think we're at the point where we need to really look at the economic posterity and how this plan can help provide that,” Doern said.

Part of the struggle Doern sees for businesses, including those in the sustainable industries sector, is that while Metro plans for land use in the Portland region, there is sometimes a disconnect between how they envision business development and the realities of carrying that development out in Portland.

Portland also tends to support new businesses, Doern said, and isn’t always steady in its support for existing businesses, such as a strong manufacturing base that includes some sustainable industries, and agriculture, which relies heavily on the Port of Portland and is closely tied to the state’s overall economic health.

Doern said she is encouraged by the direction of the Portland Plan this far, which is already projecting a 650-acre shortage of industrial land and a 350-acre shortage of campus land in the next 25 years in Portland. The projections set a stage for removing hurdles that slow new business development and expansions on campuses that educate and train the workforce.

Engstrom said the city has been rightly criticized by business for losing focus in its support.

“We help people start them up so we don't always have the land supply or the spaces to help them” become stable and successful, Engstrom said.

In broad community surveys, however, even the general population put a need for more aggressive business development at the top of their priority list, side by side with continued focus on environmental sustainability and support for education.

That helps planners steer more resources toward economic growth through the Portland Plan and reverse a trend in which job growth has been slower in the last 10 years than in the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, according to Steve Kountz, senior economic planner for the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

Engstrom said new resources will have benefits for sustainable industries because Portland aims to be a national leader in that area and will also continue to support innovative start-ups.

He said continued business input into the Portland Plan will help make those goals a reality. The Portland Plan goes to the City Council for adoption in early 2011. Two years of related policy tweaks will follow.

Lee van der Voo, lvdvoo*at*gmail.com, is a freelance writer for Sustainable Business Oregon.