December 23, 2002
Whatever Happened to the Poster Ban?
Back in May of last year, the Portland Mercury reported on a planned pilot project to rid Portland of the alleged blight of posters affixed to the city's telephone polls:
Eight months ago, Mayor Vera Katz spearheaded a plan to rid the city of the posters, advertisements, and art that are tacked onto poles everyday. Without a formal name, the plan is still at the preliminary stages. Katz asked Hugh McDowell, Graffiti Prevention Coordinator for the City of Portland, to facilitate the postering removal. In the next few weeks, McDowell will develop a plan based on community suggestions, a plan which he will submit to City Council for review after six months of community suggestions.
At the time, I attempted to obtain information on this pilot program from the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, since the Graffiti Abatement Program is part of their Crime Prevention Center.
I don't recall ever receiving any details, nor do I recall ever hearing anything more about the program. For my purposes here, I've sent an email to the current coordinator of Graffiti Prevention.
In the meantime, if you know whatever happened to this program -- a prime example of the type of Portland politics which prompts the question, "Livability for whom, exactly?" -- please post a comment here. I'd like to know if it ever got off the ground, is still in the pipeline, or vanished in a sudden puff of logic.
There was never much sense in this program. It had always seemed to me that in a sane city that truly believed in livability in its broadest and most inclusive sense, the right-of-way granted to utility companies to install poles on city property would include specific protections for citizen use of those poles for public speech and publication.