Portland Public Policy

An overview of the Oregon Health Plan was the subject of an April 2004 presentation to Multnomah County Commissioners from the County's Health Division. The report, Status of [the] Oregon Health Plan: Multnomah County , looks at the issue from both a stateswide and local perspective, and examines topics such as Medicare, program enrollment, eligibility, and the effect of Plan changes on Multnomah County's Health Division and service delivery. The document is available as a PowerPoint presentation or in HTML. Scroll to the bottom of the County's web page to access it.

There is a wealth of information available about Portland housing, including the gargantuan report from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, the American Housing Survey for the Portland, OR-WA Metropolitan Area: 2002 . Produced in July, 2003, the report looks at the size of housing units and lots, financial characteristics, makes some comparisons to other American Housing Survey cities, and has a host of other information. The document is huge, 8.1 MB, so expect a slow download if you have a dial-up Internet connection.
Another housing-related document, The Greater Downtown Portland Housing Report, was produced for the Portland Business Alliance and the Portland Development Commission, and focuses on dowtown, but also (for some of the report, anyway) the Lloyd Center area, and Goose Hollow.

Affordable Housing Now!, a movement of affordable housing activists supported by the Community Development Network, has posted some very useful statistics (almost all of them are pdf files) on shifts in and concentrations of poverty in the Portland metro region. Go here to the CDN website, and scroll to the bottom of the page for the documents.

The City of Portland and Multnomah County created a joint procurement strategy that allows each to take social, environmental and economic impacts of purchases made with taxpayer dollars.
This 2002 report didn't make much of a splash, but is representative of a growing trend among municipal governments. Once again, Portland is in the forefront of change.

The lower Willamette River between Swan and Sauvie islands is known as Portland Harbor. A sizeable portion of the Harbor riverbed (at a minimum, from Swan Island to the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia rivers) is contaminated with a number of contaminants, including heavy metals like mercury, lead,and selenium, along with dioxin and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
These hazardous substances pose problems for the waterway's fish, to those who eat the fish, and possibly to the communities downstream who use the Willamette as a drinking water resource. There are also a number of sites along the waterway that are contaminated with the same or similar hazardous materials. The Harbor became a federal 'Superfund' site in 2000.
Since that time, the EPA has named 69 companies as being responsible for the riverbed contamination.

Department of Environmental Quality Resources
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) maintains a very useful website on its efforts to bring a myriad of parties together to agree to clean up the various contaminated sites along the waterfront. Here is the website, which contains maps, lists of the sites, updates (although it doesn't seem as if the site is kept current), contact information, and details about the Community Advisory Group.

For a while, DEQ tried to keep the site a state, and not a federal problem. Here you'll find the state's Portland Harbor Sediment Management Plan, written in 1999.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Resources
The U.S. EPA has the granddaddy site of them all on this issue.Here's where you'll find a compendium of documents and loads of information on this problemmatic site. A Portland Harbor factsheet is also available.

Another federal agency, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) worked with the Oregon Department of Human Services to produce a public health assessment for the Portland Harbor Superfund site. The agencies found that consumption of fish from the lower Willamette, of which the Portland Harbor is a part. Although the assessment is not available online, here is information on acquiring a copy of the report.

Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group
The CAG has its own website, which isn't as well organized as those of DEQ and the EPA. Like the DEQ site, however, it presents information about the waterway cleanup in less technical language. You can also find a list of the 69 responsible parties to the waterway pollution. The CAG includes the Sierra Club, Willamette Riverkeeper, Oregon Center for Environmental Health, Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, citizens at large, representatives from neighborhood associations, business groups, and the like. Here is an article by Joe Keating about the CAG and the Harbor evaluation and cleanup process.

City of Portland
The City of Portland, due to its stormwater and combined sewer overflows that dump into the Willamette River, contributes to the sorry state of the Harbor every time it rains. The City's Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) serves as the City's representative to the U.S. EPA on the Harbor cleanup.
A BES staffer produced a report on the status of the Harbor project for the Oregon Chapter of the Public Works Association.
The City's Bureau of Planning produced a Portland Harbor Industrial Lands Study, which can be found here, along with a wide variety of documents about the City's Willamette River Renaissance initiative.

1000 Friends of Oregon, a land use and conservation organization, has a small but valuable treasure trove of housing-related documents available to the public policy researcher. One of the most valuable is a housing resource list (with live links) that details federal, state, local, non-profit, funding, and advocacy organizations involved in housing. A good-sized description accompanies every link in this 6-page document.
The three remaining documents focus on federal affordable housing, housing funding tools, and local tools. They can be found here.

A 2003 Urban Institute study, Profile of the Foreign-Born in the Portland, Oregon Tri County Area, is one of the more recent reports on the subject. The report, part of the UI's Building the New American Community project, explores the regions of birth for the foreign born population, income and poverty,and language and linguistic isolation. Data sources are primarily the U.S. Census and the Immigration and Nationalization Services' Statistical Yearbook, which reports on legal immigrant admissions to the U.S.

Portland is located in Multnomah County, a sprawling mass of land that extends from the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers to 302nd Avenue, on the border of Clackamas County. Here's a map of the County from the Oregon Elections division, so it contains state House and Senate districts.

Multnomah County has produced some very useful public policy documents, especially in the area of public health, the County's Latino population, domestic violence, and a few other topics.

Population
The County's population is getting older and browner, according to a study of population changes in the County between 1990 and 2000. The work was done by the University of Portland's Population Research Center. Census 2000 population profiles in Multnomah County can be found here.

The County's Latino Population
The Latino Gang Violence Prevention Task Force of Multnomah County convened by Commissioner Serena Cruz just released a report on Latino youth gang violence in the county. The report was released in April 2004, and provides a comprehensive look at the topic (I had a hand in producing the report, so I may be biased.)
A couple of years ago Commissioner Cruz commissioned the Latino Network to do a study of Multnomah County's Latino population. The report, Salir Adelante, provides an overview of many needs and issues facing the County's growing Latino population, especially the 25 percent in poverty.

Environmental Health
Chair Diane Linn commissioned a report in 2003 on the County's environmental 'health.' It can be found here.

The Auditor's Office (surprise!) maintains an excellent resource, Portland Policy Documents, for those interested in Portland public policy. Last year the Mayor's Office and the Auditor agreed to capture all City policies and administrative rules in one central location.
The document collection also contains reports on community development, the City's Endangered Species Act responses, and much, much more. The documents are, however, limited to those produced by City agencies. Currently the PPD contains 405 items.

The Portland City Club produced a valuable report last year on community policing in our city. Get it here.