Neighborhood Pulse
Neighborhood Pulse provides information about the Portland region’s neighborhoods: how they are changing, who lives there, and the issues of interest to the region’s leaders and residents.
Neighborhood Pulse includes three components:
- Neighborhood Profiles, which provide information about people and housing in each of Portland and Beaverton’s neighborhoods;
- Greater Portland 21, which provides a stories about how our region and its neighborhoods are is changing; and
- Neighborhood Pulse Map Viewer, which provides taxlot-level maps related to specific issues of interest to neighborhoods and advocacy groups.
Neighborhood Pulse complements Greater Portland Pulse by providing a neighborhood view of some of the data provided at the county and regional level on Greater Portland Pulse. We hope to add additional features and data to the site over time.
Bi-State Cooperation Project
Click here to download the draft final report for this project.
Background
On March 16, 2006, Governors Chris Gregoire and Ted Kulongoski met at the 2006 Bi-State Metropolitan Forum to address a group of public and private stakeholders from Oregon and Washington and to identify and discuss issues of mutual concern. Each Governor acknowledged both the interdependence of the two states and the interconnectedness of the region's economy. They encouraged public and private-sector leaders to ignore the state boundary and find areas in which cooperation could improve prosperity, quality of life, and government efficiency on both sides of the Columbia River.
During the forum’s breakout sessions, participants set forward ideas for cooperation which ranged from a bi-state compact for post-secondary education to the harmonization of standards for certified industrial sites. A common theme woven through many of the comments was the need to break through legal and bureaucratic hurdles that place unnecessary restrictions on cooperation between the states. Dozens of participants volunteered to work in groups to follow-up on the ideas generated during the conference.
At a meeting in the office of Congressman Brian Baird on August 11, 2006, a group of leaders from the Portland Vancouver Metropolitan Region continued the discussion and identified a number of potential benefits for more effective bi-state cooperation. However, they also recognized the need to make a strong case emphasizing the benefits of such cooperation to citizens on both sides of the border.
Need
The following were suggested as key products needed to advance the progress of this work:
- An inventory of opportunities for bi-state cooperation that are difficult to capture in the current environment.
- A review of how other states have benefited from developing a framework for bi-state or multi-state cooperation.
- A summary of the key benefits available to the region using a bi-state cooperation framework.
- A description of the key legal and organizational tools that can be used to provide a bi-state cooperation framework.
Project
A team of faculty and students from WSU Vancouver and PSU's Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies addressed the following questions:
- What are the key policy areas that could benefit from bi-state cooperation?
- What problems and barriers can be addressed by developing new tools for bi-state cooperation?
- What are the structure and scope of successful interstate agreements, both here in the Pacific Northwest and in other regions?
- What are the key benefits of existing and potential interstate cooperative arrangements?
- What resources are available to assist in the development of interstate cooperative arrangements?
The primary source of information for this project was interviews with key stakeholders, particularly in the Oregon and Washington business community. This information was supplemented with interviews with key public sector officials familiar with existing bi-state agreements, both here and in other states. The team also conducted a thorough review of public management literature to evaluate the scope and effectiveness of multi-state agreements.
Read the draft final report from the Interstate Cooperation Project here.
Interested in working with us? Email us at ims@pdx.edu.