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A major push for community organizing began in the late 1970s. Senate Bill 100 mandated that all municipalities in the state create comprehensive land use plans - with ongoing citizen involvement as part of the process. County planners helped mid- county citizens organize into seven community groups: Cully, Parkrose, Wilkes, Hazelwood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, Centennial and Rockwood. Out of a desire to exchange information, coordinate their activities and assist each other the seven formed the Mid-County Coordinating Committee.
Veterans of this time remember it as the good old days. Dorothy Smith of Parkrose calls the Coordinating Committee “one of the best organizations I’ve ever belonged to. We worked together for the sake of the community.”
Her husband Peter says, “We were totally financially and factually independent. We got some money from the county for printing flyers. Except for that, whoever was involved just dug in their pockets and paid what was needed. If we wanted coffee for meetings, someone brought it.” As treasurer, he remembers a bank balance of $39.17.
“Because there was no money, we didn’t attract people interested in money. This was work, demanding work with little satisfaction other than helping your community.”
The focus was on land use planning, but it became a way to address other issues, he says. When issues came up, “The approach wasn’t just ‘We don’t like this,’ but ‘What can we do about this?’”
“I can’t say enough about the community groups,” Anne Picco of Parkrose says. “There were conflicts, People who said, ‘Why should 15 women who don’t have anything better to do say what my zoning should be?’ There was a certain amount of angst, but most people were satisfied, those that participated, and there was quite a few of them. We were working with people who had knowledge of geology, drainage, what makes a town grow - it was like a college course.”
“Our role was to inform the government, not to be against anything, but to point out what the laws were, what worked and what didn’t,” Russell’s Bonny McKnight says. “We tended to be ongoing-involved rather than issue-involved. People like Anne Picco became experts on citizen involvement. Whenever someone in the county tried to backslide, we were on them.”
The great transition
Much of this changed with annexation of the area to the city of Portland, a piecemeal process that began early in the 1980s, born out of a decision to bring unincorporated urban areas into some municipal jurisdiction. Many Mid-County Coordinating Committee members fought the trend, establishing Mid-County Future Alternatives Committee in an attempt to establish the independent city of Columbia Ridge. The attempt ultimately failed, and the annexation proceeded.
For area residents, the change meant new laws and regulations, new agencies to deal with, new zoning classifications that didn’t match up perfectly with the county zoning they had worked so hard to create. (Fortunately, in this last category, they had the services of planner Colleen Acres, who had worked for the county and was familiar with both its workings and many of the local issues.) It also meant a new citizen involvement system. Beginning in the late 1980s the city hired a succession of community involvement workers to help the area - Merlin Reynolds, Carolyn Marx Bax, Charlsie Sprague, Bixby, and Tom Walz. At first they worked out of the Central Northeast Neighbors Office at 5540 N.E. Sandy Blvd., later shifting to an office in Parkrose, then to a house on Southeast 122nd Avenue.
The price of the assistance was fitting into the Portland neighborhood system. ONA officials at first balked at giving recognition to the community groups, pointing to their large size and single-purpose orientation. “We got a little legal with them,” Peter Smith recalls. “We realized that their guidelines were law. We told them that we met the requirement and we told them, ‘You may not want to follow them, but you are legally obliged to.’ ONA didn’t like that at all.” Not only were the community groups admitted, but they managed to keep their names.
Meanwhile, communities within the community group areas, primarily people who had supported annexation, broke away and were recognized as neighborhood associations. In Parkrose, the first such groups were Argay Terrace, Parkrose Heights, and the Parkrose Neighborhood Association.
In 1991 they formed the East Portland District Coalition. According to Peter Smith, those most active in putting the group together were Argay Terrace and the Hazelwood and Parkrose community groups. “People who had almost been throwing insults at each other sat down together and worked surprisingly well,” he says. “We had a common goal, and there was enough work to do that there was no time for argument. Once this was set up all the others came,” at least at first.
“It functioned well. You could debate what it should have been doing, but it functioned.”
(Part Two of Lee Perlman’s evolutionary history of Mid-county Neighborhood Association’s will continue in the November issue.)
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