June 01, 2005
(Updated) Five Days Left For Comment On PDC's New Public Involvement Policies
And Sundry Other Items
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Apparently, we managed to miss that the proposed new policies and manual for public participation at the Portland Development Commission has been available for public comment since May 20. Which means that we're now first mentioning it a mere five days before the public comment period for the proposals comes to an end.
We haven't yet had the chance to read either the proposed policy (pdf) or the proposed manual (pdf), but given the short remaining window for public comment, we figured we should mention and link them even before we ourselves get into it.
PDC, of course, is seeking some good public opinion for itself at this point, especially with the latest round of bad news about its contracting and consultant practices. Last week's Web-only Willamette Week piece showed up in the print edition today, and today's Oregonian joined in on the same topic -- that being the scrutiny of one Anthony Harris.
(Which pretty much explains the tip we got three months ago to look into Harris, but which we didn't really have the wherewithal to pursue.)
To be fair, PDC in its press release today on their proposed public involvement policies, goes out of its way to point out that they decided to look at improving those policies "[m]ore than one year ago, before Mayor Potter was elected to office and before the City Club report was released last January". So this is more a case of possibly-convenient and happenstantial timing than anything else.
Commissioners will be considering the proposals at their June 8 meeting, with a decision on them to be taken on June 22. Public comment is supposed to be incorporated into the documents by June 10.
Meanwhile, on the subject of input, there's a special PDC meeting on June 6 at 6:00 PM "to give the community an opportunity to provide comments to the PDC Board of Commissioners regarding the standards, criteria and policy directives that the PDC Search Committee should consider in hiring a new PDC executive director."
June 1st, 2005 Update
We're told there's a new link to the proposed manual (pdf), superceding the one linked in our original post here. We had lifted the original from PDC's Public Participation and Education page, apparently before they had updated it to link to the current version.