hard deadlines

The Portsmouth Economic Development Committee (PEDC) last night reviewed a "commercial development scorecard" for the now-threatened Target proposal, heard findings from an analysis of development issues in the town, and voted unanimously to express concern over the moratorium on large-scale commercial development.

According to members of the PEDC, the Town has notified Target that their application is "not in compliance" and that "it's now in Target's ball park to sue or not." One of the committee, who had spoken with Target attorney Bob Silva, reported that he was "very pessimistic" and that, "Target was not going to come in if the the Town didn't want their $250K in taxes, 150 jobs, and 5% of net return to the School Board."

The majority of the economic analysis last night, however, was actually about the bigger picture for development and the impact of the proposed six-month extension of the retail development moratorium, due to be taken up by the Town Council on August 1. After much discussion, the PEDC adopted a strongly worded resolution saying that, "[The PEDC is] concerned that the proposed moratorium restricts the financial future of Portsmouth and that further study needs to be done before a final decision is made."

Staff work was presented on potentially developable parcels where "large" retail might be sited, with economic impact numbers for locations in Middletown to provide a working fact base. The PEDC's role, stressed chair Rich Talipsky, is to "present data in an unbiased fashion." There's a lot of misconceptions out there, he noted, and the impact of a "big box on Union" might be different than large retail "somewhere else."

For comparison, the committee considered Raytheon, a complex of buildings totaling over 700K square feet, which adds about 7,200 trips per day to local traffic. Said Talipsky, "If that was open space, and Raytheon came in today to build a plant, people would say, 'over my dead body.' But they've been a friend to Portsmouth."

The root question is one of a balanced tax base, residential and commercial. Previous work done by the PEDC has shown that the town cannot sustain itself economically by taxing residential property, since every house requires more expenditures in town services than it generates in taxes. You can click the chart for a larger view, but the numbers are clear: an all-residential Portsmouth is unsustainable. And the current balance, 89% residential, is one of the factors driving the perennial funding crisis in the town, according to discussion at the meeting.

One of the case studies presented was the Middletown Plaza, anchored by Barnes & Noble. The six stores in the plaza comprise 99,369 square feet, sited on 15.8 acres, employ approximately 65 full-time and 49 part-time, and contribute $281,355/year in real-estate taxes to the town. (The numbers are not directly comparable, since Middletown's commercial tax rate, $14.10/thousand is higher than Portsmouth's $10.95, so you'd need to discount the tax revenue by about 20%) Twelve months of Fire Department data showed 19 runs to the location, 9 of which were for trouble with fire alarms. In terms of police activity, 18 months of data showed 65 calls, 36 of which were "vacant house" or calls to check locks. There were 24 "other," about 1.3/month, which I suspect probably meant shoplifting or other actions that might actually tie up an officer both immediately, and longer-term for prosecutions.

The committee reviewed the lots in Portsmouth which might be potentials for larger commercial retail, and the number is quite small: given assumptions about lot coverage and setbacks, there are only 6 parcels in Portsmouth which might be candidates. The boogyman of strip malls like Middletown, according to analysis, would be "cost-prohibitive" due to high housing prices, and the need for developers to purchase a significant enough number of parcels to perform an "assemblage."

For the record, the six parcels discussed were Plat 38 Lot 1, Plat 44 Lot 15, Plat 56 Lot 6, Plat 52 Lot 5, Plat 57 Lot 7A, and Plat 57 Lot 7B. That's it for Portsmouth. Six pieces. Each of these is vacant, 13 acres or larger, and zoned Light Industrial or Commercial. The core question is one of developable percentage: a permanent limitation on stores over 55K square feet would effectively reduce the value which could be realized from these few remaining chunks of developable land. Even potentially desirable retail, like a food store on one of the West Main Road parcels, would be over the size cap, and it the sense of members of the EDC was that it would be difficult to attract developers to jump through all the rigorous Design Review and Zoning Board hoops for smaller stores with limited return.

Regular readers know that I've been a supporter of Preserve Portsmouth and an opponent of the Target proposal for Union Street. They came in with an ugly, insulting box that spit in the face of our design standards and quite rightly got their asses kicked for it.

But I have a respect for data: no one who has sat through the budget process this year can be under any illusions about the Town's need for more net revenue. And the crazy "ban all commercial development" proposal by Tailgunner Gleason at the last moratorium meeting frankly scared the hell out of me. Portsmouth clearly needs intelligent growth, especially given the realities of the Paiva-Weed tax cap, and the discussion by the PEDC last night has led me to question the wisdom of a blanket moratorium.

When the Council was enacting their emergency measure, attorney Vern Gorton, representing the O'Neill properties, urged the Council to "act strategically — perhaps even surgically — to ensure that what you view as inappropriate development is all that you ban."

I would urge similar restraint at the August 1st meeting. None of us wants Portsmouth to lose the special character we love, but neither do we want to tax people out of their homes. We have excellent safeguards in place — zoning, planning, and design reviews — which are tailored to deal with the specifics of proposals, rather than resorting to the brute-force totality of a moratorium.

What do you think? You can take my new poll, or reply here in comments.

Coming up on 7 am, and our wonderful, articulate new Senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, has risen to speak. "Words alone are not enough," said Whitehouse, urging his colleagues to vote for the Levin-Reed amendment.

"This administration says we need to support the troops — I agree.... We can also support them with wise strategies arising from honest debate," said Whitehouse. "The war in Iraq has made us less, not more secure."

Citing the just-releaseed National Intelligence Estimate, Whitehouse noted, "Al Qaeda remains a significant threat, and four years of war in Iraq has not changed that."

If Levin-Reed became law tomorrow, he added, it would give the administration 9 months to plan an orderly redeployment. "Is that truly a precipitous withdrawral? Those who say it is are not being straight with the American people."

Stressing the importance of engaging Iraq's neighbors, "As long as we occupy Iraq, the broader international engagement we need will remain elusive." Our "buffering presence" allows Saudi Arabia and other regional powers to remain disengaged, and provides a "defining argument" for Al Queda and other terror networks in their depiction of the US as an imperial power.

The Iraqi government needs to understand the need to step up. "They must look into the abyss. We must announce that we will redeploy our troops."

"If we are on a collision course with the facts, if our strategy is ill-advised, can we at least consider that at least the credible threat of redeployment," he said, might provide that pressure, could galvanize the international community and the region.

"The Levin-Reed amendment is the change of course we so desperately need."

Great job, Senator. I'm proud to have folks like Reed and Whitehouse representing us.

UPDATE:
RI senior Senator, Jack Reed speaking, at about 10:40 am. "No strategy can be sustained, regardless of the slogans, without troops and public support," says Reed, and we must act now before, "Options to avoid a more chaotic redeployment disappear."

"Will six more weeks change the political dynamic in Baghdad," the result of hundreds of years of conflict among Sunni and Shia, asks Reed. "The Levin-Reed amendment tries to reflect the reality on the ground there and here."

Scott Rosenberg is one of the founders of Salon and author of a great new book on programming called Dreaming in Code (which I'm reading and aim to review as soon as I find the time). In a provocative blog posting yesterday, he faced-off two of the big names in the Web world, Marc Andreeson (the guy who sort of invented the browser) and Jakob Nielsen (the reigning usability king) on the role of blogging. Or blogging about blogging. Or blogging about blogging about, well, until you get a stack overflow from too much recursion.

Anyway, here's the nut of his post, Nielsen vs. Andreessen on blogging:
Over here, first, in this corner, we’ve got usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is telling us that smart people will forget about blogging and write articles. Blogs, says Nielsen, are a dime a dozen. If you want to “demonstrate world-class expertise,” write long, in-depth articles that you can get people to pay for.
“Blog postings,” says Nielsen, “will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments.” Note how the definition has shifted without notice: all blog posts have somehow become “short comments on somebody else’s comments.”
[...]
Now then: here, in the other corner, we have Marc Andreessen. He’s the guy who whipped up the first popular Web browser for personal computers. In 2003 he rashly dissed the need for blogging, saying, “I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.”
But he’s come around, and in the past few weeks he’s poured a huge amount of thought and energy into an impressive new blog. Yesterday, in a post titled “Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far,” Andreessen wrote, “It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact”:

Far be it from me to wade into a slugfest of this magnitude (especially since this posting comprises merely short comments (on somebody else's comments)) but it seems to me that Web discourse is continuing to evolve, and that browser-based text (the long, in-depth articles that Nielsen highlights) represent one old, venerable species. The kind of quick-hit quote-and-comment blog posting (like this very item (yes, this!)) could be seen as a new species, tailored more to the ecological niche of RSS newsreaders and blurbed display on portals like iGoogle and myYahoo. And yet a further compression is the discourse of Twitter, which is essentially a virtual proxy for looking at someone to see what they're doing.

At a high level, this seems to be a movement from a didactic discourse (long posts are about people displaying expertise) to an apprenticeship (quote-driven postings are really a mechanism for social filtering (as are tools like Digg and del.ici.ous )) to, finally, something resembling virtual presence.

But I may just be seeing things that way because it's what Marshall McLuhan predicted way back in the 1960s, when he argued that the ultimate role of the computer would be to extend all human senses in a unified balance.

Or maybe I've just had too much recursion caffeine this morning...

Have to confess, I only just subscribed. I'd been reading editor Tom Sgouros's excellent blog (click here for RSS, or visit his site) for a while now, and decided it was time to stop being a freeloader and cough up a measly $35 for a year's worth of timely, fact-based analysis of local policy issues. And boy, the first issue, which hit my mailbox this week, did not disappoint.

There's a powerful cover piece on the recent budget madness at the State House with hard numbers and historical context that you don't get from story-based reportage in other media. There's also an extended essay on the Social Security "crisis" and its roots in changing income distribution in the US. Oh, and a synopsis of an RI public transportation report Sgouros did for the Sierra Club.

If you're one of those hard-data oriented folks like me, and want to get some insight into how the numbers add up here in RI, you owe it to yourself to subscribe. And it's easy — RIPR has a PayPal button, so you can sign up with a click.