Portland's Renegade Bureaucrat

Colin Woodard writes an excellent post-mortem of Portland's Maine State Pier and Ocean Gateway fiascos in last week's edition of the Working Waterfront newspaper. Woodard details how one city bureaucrat, former ports and transportation director Jeff Monroe, fabricated economic-impact numbers to convince the city's councilors to spend tens of millions of dollars on cruise ship infrastructure.

Woodard summarizes new research from Todd Gabe and James McConnon, economics professors at the University of Maine who surveyed actual passengers at the cruise ship gangway last summer:

"Their conclusions: the average Portland passenger spends $80.52 ashore, 22 percent less than previously assumed. Almost $7 of that is spent in Freeport (where many are bussed) and an unknown amount in the Kennebunks and the White Mountains of New Hampshire (two other popular bus tours.)

...This raises questions about Jeff Monroe's $200 per passenger per day estimates, which were contained in a 2002 city study used to justify the construction of Ocean Gateway. The figures clearly do not stand up to scrutiny.

...Taken together, [his] errors appear to amount to approximately $86 per passenger, nearly half of Monroe's $200 estimate, raising the possibility that the city built Ocean Gateway on the assumption that revenues to the region would be nearly twice what they actually are."

Monroe's optimistic estimate was used to justify the city's $21 million expenditure on the new Ocean Gateway cruise ship terminal. His fake numbers were called up again three years ago, when the city rushed to sign over the publicly-owned Maine State Pier to the politically well-connected developers at Ocean Properties, who promised to "fix" the pier's allegedly-unstable pilings in exchange for the right to build a $100 million hotel-and-office complex, replete with solar panels planted in the shade, on top.

Once the "necessary" repairs were made, the renovated Maine State Pier would also be made available for more cruise ships. But the city "needed" a private developer to foot the substantial repair bill.

"The public was repeatedly led to believe that the pier was in dire need of repairs," writes Woodard, "the costs of which were estimated at as high as $26 million."

Conspiracy theorists have had plenty to work with: when a competing firm unexpectedly responded to the official call for proposals, the city council let Ocean Properties redesign their plans not once but twice; Ocean Properties employees gave generously to the campaigns of the current mayor and to two successful city council challengers, including one who'd been their paid community organizer.

Here's the kicker: the pier never needed serious repairs at all.

The City finally paid for an independent assessment of the Pier's pilings this July, instead of relying on the faithful word of Jeff Monroe and private developers. A July 11th Press Herald article reported the results from engineer Wayne Duffett, who said that "once you get underneath, [the Pier] is in remarkably good condition, and for the most part quite capable for the loads it is designed for.''

Fortunately, the financial crisis swept the developers away before the City had a chance to make the same multi-million dollar mistakes on the Maine State Pier that it made on the Ocean Gateway terminal. Three years after the developers made their pitches to rescue the allegedly-unstable Pier, it's still standing - in fact, there's a cruise ship there today.

With the benefit of hindsight, the hundred-million-dollar hotel and office complex perched atop pilings in the ocean is a textbook case of real-estate-bubble development hubris. But three years ago, the plans dazzled the city into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on staff time, attorneys, and meetings for the competition to develop the Pier. Woodard notes that "Ocean Properties employees gave generously to the campaigns of the current mayor and to two successful city council challengers, including one who'd been their paid community organizer."

Several of those councilors elbowed their way onto the City's Community Development Committee, which would have overseen large development projects like this one. Except now, with the credit crisis, there's not much for the Community Development Committee to do. Instead, Ocean Properties' favored candidates are spending a lot of low-pay hours with the mundane details of zoning language changes, proclamations, and liquor license approvals. One has to wonder whether a guy like Councilor Dan Skolnik, who is still really burned that no one is going to build a luxury hotel on the Pier, is wishing that he could be spending more billable hours at his day job as an attorney.

But why would Jeff Monroe, nominally a civil servant, manipulate so many numbers and lead the city to spend tens of millions of dollars on infrastructure it didn't really need?

As the Ports and Transportation Director, Monroe would have been in charge of overseeing the maintenance and operations of these multi-million-dollar facilities. It may have been a question of prestige. Or it may have been aimed at preserving his own job, by making the Pier and the cruise ship business look more important than they actually were.

Either way, it didn't work. Monroe got laid off last year as the city struggled to balance its budget through the recession.

A cautionary tale for citizens and their representatives: beware of bureaucrats bearing multi-million-dollar engineering schemes.

And for bureaucrats: beware of believing your own bullshit.

To read more about the Maine State Pier in the archives, follow this link.

The Maine State Pier

Now that the economy has tanked and the developers with fake tans have slinked out of town, it's a great time for the city to take a deep breath and decide what the future of the waterfront will be.

Today's Press Herald includes a fantastic audio slideshow by Scott Hanson, Portland's historic preservation officer, that provides an in-depth explanation of the history of the Maine State Pier and Portland's Eastern Waterfront. The accompanying news article by Tom Bell is also excellent - as one commenter noted, "could this be a part of a brighter future for our threatened print newspaper?" I hope so (I also think that this feature generated the most complimentary and civil comments I've ever seen on the Press Herald's web site, which is another credit to the quality of the report).

I attended tonight's public forum and panel discussion about the pier and "related economic issues," but it was a bit of a disappointment. Panelists included Charlie Colgan, economist from USM, John Henshaw of the Maine Ports Authority, and a commercial broker from CBRE.

Unfortunately, with the exception of some rather discouraging shipping data from Mr. Henshaw, there weren't many economic insights to be had this evening. Mr. Colgan briefly mentioned research that indicates many waterfront areas have transitioned from an industrial economy to a service economy in the past 20 years, and then spent most of his time talking about other cities' waterfront tourist attractions and how nice it would be for Portland to have a pleasure ground where tenured university professors could dine and stroll on the pier.

The broker from CBRE largely echoed Mr. Colgan, saying that the Pier would be most valuable as a tourist attraction. His argument was more nuanced, though: he pointed out that there are over a dozen large empty lots in downtown Portland, so there's little point in perching office buildings and hotels on top of expensively shored-up pier pilings. Instead, the Pier should be an amenity that helps drive redevelopment inland, he said.

Mr. Henshaw guided the audience through a printed PowerPoint presentation of bar charts, unfortunately. But the gist was that Portland's cargo shipments are in decline, and cruise traffic has been variable.

Mr. Henshaw made two valuable points, though: first, that freight traffic is cyclical (and remember that we happen to be in the middle of a major economic disruption - one that's ravaging Mr. Colgan's favored service sector). Second, the Maine State Pier has an extremely valuable industrial and transportation asset: a deep-water berth where large ships can dock. And third, wind turbine shipments have begun to come through Portland... and what about the possibility of using Portland's working waterfront to assemble and maintain floating wind turbines in the Gulf of Maine? This last point seemed to compel the people in the room more than any other made this evening.

Another forum will be tomorrow evening at 7 pm in the Ocean Gateway building: this one will discuss ways to leverage developer investment to enhance public goods, like public access, quality jobs, and transportation infrastructure. A final forum will be an extended "community design workshop" on April 11. The City is encouraging potential attendees to pre-register here.

Ocean Properties sneaks out of town

Walsh told the city that he was too occupied with projects in places like Bar Harbor to pursue the Maine State Pier project in Portland.

Tom Walsh (pictured) of Ocean Properties quietly stole out of town last week, leaving his lawyer to explain that, contrary to is insistence to the contrary last year, he actually doesn't have enough money to build a hotel and office building on the Maine State Pier.

What? Ocean Properties isn't following through on their promises? I know - it's crazy, right?

And so, the Maine State Pier project dies once again. Although, even though its lifeless corpse has been beaten so thoroughly that you could drink it with a straw, we shouldn't be too surprised if some politician tries to revive it one more time.

[2011 update: sure enough, mayoral "candidate" Ethan Strimling wants to resurrect the real estate bubble, and has made Maine State Pier whining a centerpiece of his campaign! AND he's also hired Bob Baldacci, the sleazy Ocean Properties developer with the fake tan, to fundraise for his campaign.]

Walsh's departure should be a serious embarrassment to half of the City Council, and especially those who tried to make political hay out of the Olympia Companies' failed bid to develop the pier a few months ago.

Councilors Dan Skolnik and Dory Waxman, in particular, have made connecting their political buddies at Ocean Properties into the city's Pier negotiations process their primary focus on the Council and in their campaigns - and now they have nothing to show for it.

Left: Councilor Dan Skolnik. Or is it ex-Councilor Jim Cloutier? Or Councilor Waxman? Maybe Councilor Mavodones, or Councilor Duson? They all look so much alike these days...

Two years of wasted time and debate on the Maine State Pier fiasco has done incredible damage to Portland's civic environment by introducing a level of corruption and political skulduggery unseen in decades: from out-of-town union goons flooding "public hearings" at City Hall, to Tony Armstrong's (a vindictive sleazebag from Cape Elizabeth) illegitimate hatchet job against Ed Suslovic.

But the damage to Portland's economic development and urban environment has also been substantial. The economics for putting a big hotel and office building on an unstable pier in the ocean were always questionable; any politician who honestly believed the developers' promises, especially in this economic climate, is probably too ignorant of financial issues to lead our city.

Meanwhile, the whole two-year fiasco distracted our city, its developers, and our planning resources from neighborhoods where this kind of development is more economical and realistic: places like the Eastern Waterfront (which is still mostly empty) and Bayside.

When Jim Cloutier, Dory Waxman, Jill Duson, and others offered preferential treatment to Ocean Properties to develop a huge hotel and office complex on city property, that sent a clear message to other private-sector developers that it would be difficult for them to compete, and that they should hold off on building their own projects on private land.

But now that the MSP chimera is (hopefully) gone, maybe Portland can finally focus on real development projects - projects that can provide unvarnished benefits to our workers and our economy, instead of producing nothing but political bile.

More on the Maine State Pier business here.

And read more about Ocean Properties' credibility issues in this article from the Palm Beach Post.

Finally, one more link to improve Tony Armstrong's Google results: as this Bollard article makes clear, real estate broker Tony Armstrong is a lying, vindictive sleazebag from Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Ding, Dong, the Pier Deal's Dead

The Maine State Pier redevelopment deal is dead after the state refused to relinquish its ownership rights to the submerged lands under the pier. This morning's Press Herald has the whole story.

Players from the same Tammany Hall crew that made a shit-show of the original pier negotiations have just been elected to the new City Council and are in the process of buying the ailing daily paper, so let's hope that the state's ownership claim puts the kibosh on any redevelopment discussions for a good while longer.

There are much better, much more productive redevelopment opportunities all over downtown Portland: Franklin Arterial, Bayside, Gorham's Corner, the Eastern Waterfront. Why the City and these developers continue to sow divisiveness and waste money by trying to install a tacky tourist valhalla on our working waterfront is beyond me.

There's more sordid news from the Maine State Pier fiasco in the archives. Let's hope that we can put it to rest for a good long while.

We have a representative government!

"At a certain point, you have representative government and you live with that."

-Jim Clouter (quoted in the Bollard)

Back when former Councilor Jim Cloutier spoke these words in July, he uttered them with the characteristic arrogance of an authority figure who thinks he knows better than everyone else. At the time, Cloutier was in the middle of engineering the Maine State Pier logjam, one of the most spectacular failures of leadership this City has seen in some time. Now, the day after Election Day, Cloutier has been relieved of his public service duties, and these words take on a much more eloquent, patriotic tone, don't you think?

With Cloutier out of the way, the Maine State Pier process has a chance to move forward, and in a direction that won't induce vomiting.

The new Council seems likely to break the previous deadlock by endorsing Olympia Properties as a partner in redevelopment. Instead of letting Olympia go ahead and build their proposal, though, the Council's newer members will probably endorse a series of public charrettes to determine what Portland citizens really want to have on their Pier.

By selecting a development partner, the City will be agreeing that private development should pay for the Pier's infrastructure, including the construction of the megaberth cruise ship terminal further east. Portlanders may say "no" to a five star hotel, but ultimately, Olympia is going to need to make a profit to make this project worthwhile for them.

This means that the Pier will NOT turn into a wide-open, grassy dog toilet like the Eastern Prom, no matter how much people scream for "open space." It will have to host some productive built space to pay taxes, pay Olympia, and pay for the infrastructural investments that our working waterfront needs.

Incidentally, the Maine State Pier, or any of the upper level offices on Portland's working waterfront, would be a wet-dream workplace for any number of innovative, mobile tech companies or individuals. Didn't IDEXX start out in this neighborhood before its remarkable growth forced it to seek more space in Westbrook? An adaptive reuse of the existing Pier warehouse could preserve some space for marine industrial uses while also accommodating flexible office or light industrial space to incubate new, growing businesses in our city.

Or it could be another place for people my age to work for low wages and no benefits in the service of rich people. It's up to us, now.

Pier politics

A news article in today's Press Herald describes the political advantage that has just tipped in the Olympia Companies' favor, since only Ocean Properties partisans are up for reelection next month.

While we can all take comfort in the expensive failure of big-money sleazebag politicos in their efforts to snatch up and Palm Beach-ify our Pier, we're now faced with the prospect of slightly more legitimate local developers who want to snatch up and Palm Beach-ify the same place.

As I see it, the fundamental cause of this whole mess was Councilor Cloutier's failure to define a clear and open public process from day one. Well-defined redevelopment bids are supposed to attract many firms with excellent track records and experience. The Maine State Pier redevelopment bid, burdened with Cloutier's rotten leadership and the heavy baggage of political risk, attracted only two firms whose political influence clearly outweighed their ability and willingness to create a great place on our waterfront.

Council candidate Bill Linnell wrote an excellent comment to the PPH article online. Because the Press Herald's online comments section is such a miserable swamp of trolls and shills, I'm going to cite fair use and reprint his comments in a much more dignified setting:

Captain Linnell of Portland, ME
Oct 17, 2007 5:58 AM

Can we talk?

If we don't re-start the bidding process, we may find ourselves simply substituting our headaches with Ocean Properties(OP), with problems with the Olympia Companies. OP and friends have been pushing for a quick decision because until yesterday, they had the upper hand. Similarly, now Olympia doesn't want to restart the bidding process, because at this point, they have the upper hand. It should be noted that all work thus far is saved on everyone's computers, and is not wasted. Either company would have the upper hand over any newcomers to the process.

But I'd like to make sure that it's Portland taxpayers who have the upper hand, and the only way to do that is to keep the competitive bid process alive. Healthy competition is what makes this country strong, from the free market to the NFL to the democratic process. That's why our economy leads the world. Just as the Patriots compete, so do candidates, parties, ideas and businesses. If you want the best price on plowing your driveway, only several different bidders will do.

A lack of healthy competition is a root cause of the Council's dysfunction: Nothing wrong with Democrats, but Portland has been a one-party town for too long. A less homogeneous gene pool within the Council would have avoided the too-cozy relationship with Ocean Properties. Third or fourth bidders were likely discouraged when they saw that the deck was heavily stacked with face cards George Mitchell, Bob Baldacci, Dennis Bailey, and Peter O'Donnell, all of the same suit as the Council leadership: Democrat. More competition, meaning stronger alternative party representation-- whether Green, Independent, or Republican--would encourage healthy debate and better decision-making. Likewise, more competition among the bidders would undoubtedly yield a better result. That would be good news for taxpayers and the waterfront.

Captain Bill Linnell
Third District Candidate for City Council

Deadlock!

[this post contains 90% recycled content]

Last night was decision night for the Maine State Pier and the results were ... Inconclusive. That's right, a 4-4 deadlock on both proposals. ( Councilor Jim Cohen recused himself due to a potential conflict of interest.) Juicy details here and here. New, less juicy details here, actually.

The Maine State Pier: Onramp to the New Franklin Superhighway

The Peninsula Traffic Plan of 2005 recycled the 1960s-era concept of turning Franklin Arterial into a six-lane trench of freeway traffic. Unsurprisingly, the Plan failed to garner any popular support, and it remains in limbo.

The Peninsula Traffic Plan of 2005 was universally panned and consigned to the dusty files of City Hall's netherworld for its complete lack of consideration for anyone who might want to navigate downtown Portland without an automobile.

Written by suburban traffic engineers Gorrill-Palmer¹, the Peninsula Traffic Plan envisions a few nightmare scenarios for downtown Portland: eight lanes of speeding traffic at the edge of Deering Oaks Park, a six-lane Franklin Arterial that runs through a trench through downtown, streets so dangerous that pedestrians need bridges in order to cross them, and numerous other wet dreams for anyone who yearns for the halcyon days when we wantonly bulldozed our cities to make way for more cars.

At the intersection of Marginal Way and Franklin, GP proposed nine lanes of traffic. The proposal would be so dangerous to pedestrians that a separated bridge (yellow dotted line) would be necessary in order to cross.

In spite of its shortcomings, certain foul elements of the Peninsula Traffic Plan refuse to die. Most recently, the idea of widening Franklin Arterial at Marginal Way has been revived, and traffic engineers are trying to link the idea to the mess on the Maine State Pier. A May 21 memo (see page 9) from MDOT engineer Stephen Landry to developer Ocean Properties states that

"...some off-site mitigation is expected to be required, including additional turn lanes or traffic signals and possibly some ramp widening at Franklin Street I-295 interchange...

It matters little that this memo was written for Ocean Properties; the other development team (Olympia) is also planning on building more off-site parking, which will still clog area roadways and justify widening projects in MDOT's worldview. Plus, Olympia's traffic engineers aren't exactly progressive urbanists: they happen to be the same Gorrill-Palmer firm that wrote the bankrupt Peninsula Traffic Plan of 2005.

So how can Portland citizens keep the development on the Maine State Pier from becoming an on-ramp to the dreaded Franklin Superhighway to Hell? Simple: write to your City Council (you can find the e-mail addresses above in the next post - avoid the "black hole" on the City's web page) and demand that a project of this size should be postponed until Portland completes its upcoming study of pedestrian, bicycle, and transit traffic downtown.

Unless that happens, we can count on more cars, more air pollution, more pavement, and more misery in general from these developers.

¹Perhaps not coincidentally, Gorrill-Palmer Consulting Engineers, Inc. operates in the village of Gray, Maine, a locale for which years of intense traffic from the nearby Maine Turnpike has driven the town to designate "blighted" status. In other words, years of traffic engineering prescriptions of the sort contained in the Peninsula Traffic Plan have made a literal slum of Gorrill-Palmer's own hometown.

"The Process Stinks"

The above quote was repeated several times in last night's community meeting regarding the Maine State Pier's tortured quest for redevelopment.

A number of people in attendance - including this blogger - called for the entire process to be put out of its misery.

The City Council and prospective developers have given us plenty of reasons to start over: lousy public involvement, allegations of favortism, botched due diligence, name-calling, etcetera, etcetera. Citizens have lost a good deal of faith in our city government, and who knows how many legitimate developers will be frightened away from our city after this unholy spectacle.

The only way our Council can save face now is if it rejects both development proposals and begins again from the beginning with an open-source, public plan for this crucial resource in the city's working waterfront.

Starting with a public vision for the site would not only serve Portland better, it would also give developers more certainty as they proceed. As it stands now, the entire debate has been ruled by the increasingly unstable oligopoly of two development firms. Clearly, it's doomed to fail: let's start over and do it right, on our own terms.

The Maine State Pier: Sinking Under Its Own Weight

It's been a while since I've written about the Maine State Pier, that sinking piece of waterfront real estate that's attracted hundred-million-dollar proposals from local developers.

The "request for proposals" competition for the Pier has devolved into a full-blown circus, complete with profanity in City Hall, a "public" "process" that's being invented on the fly, and name-calling among City Councilors. It's pretty much turns my stomach to think about it, which is why I haven't been giving it much attention here.

But just to recap: last year, this fellow, Bob Baldacci, brother of our Democratic governor, began meeting privately with his buddies in City leadership positions to talk about putting hotels on our Maine State Pier, a vital piece of infrastructure on our working waterfront. After some public outcry, the gang hatched a plan for a "request for proposals," which would have the appearance of a public, competitive process, although the short timeframe and previous negotiations made only one submission likely - Baldacci's.

In February, then, Baldacci and his "Ocean Properties" team turned in a half-assed "proposal" that had more typos and grammatical errors than a chimpanzee's transcription of Hamlet. Presumably they expected it would be good enough for a rubber stamp - quality hardly matters in a monopoly - except for one hitch: the Olympia Companies, a local developer, had submitted a competing proposal. And it was clearly superior in almost every respect.

Since then, Ocean Properties has revised its proposal past deadline several times, swear words have echoed through council chambers, and truckloads of Baldacci-friendly union bosses have been bussed in from out of town to lend City Hall a distinctly Tammany flavor. Through it all, a process that was supposed to have been gin-clear and open has been muddled, contested, and out-and-out botched by the Community Development Committee's chairman, Jim Cloutier.

First, Cloutier allowed Ocean Properties to change its proposal well past the deadline. On the surface, this seemed well and good: Ocean Properties came out with better plans and the city got a better selection to choose from. But the last revision from Ocean Properties came just a little more than a month ago, leaving planning staff and the general public only one meeting in which they could air their concerns (of which there are many).

The rest of the lurid details are best outlined in this lengthy feature article currently in the Bollard. Chris Busby stops short of putting the obvious conclusion in print, so why don't I put it down in writing right here: The Ocean Properties developers used massive out-of-town political influence to corrupt Councilors Jim Cloutier and Jill Duson into subverting public involvement and voting for a proposal that was not in the best interests of the City of Portland and its citizens.

Even if you disagree with the "corrupt" label, there can't be any doubt about how little they have done to avoid the appearance of corruption. At the very least, they're guilty of lousy public service.

Through all of this, Jim Cloutier has been petulantly dismissive of criticism: anyone who questions his authority to make up rules as he goes along is labeled "inexperienced" or naive. In the Bollard's article, Khan Cloutier defends his disregard for public process and opinion by telling Busby, "At a certain point, you have representative government and you live with that."

Well, he's partly right: we're supposed to have a representative government. When the question of Cloutier's reelection comes up in November, I suspect we'll come a bit closer to that ideal.