Carrots will work better than sticks

Maybe we need more carrots.

The commission charged with guiding downtown Portland's historic commercial district has struggled a bit to find its footing over the past few months, and we don't envy the commission members their jobs.

For decades, the approach to downtown historic preservation in Portland has been to emphasize carrots over sticks, providing building owners with information on how to preserve their properties without telling owners what they can and cannot do.

The new commission, however, is marching off into some new territory. These days the emphasis seems to be more about sticks than carrots.

While the commission has yet to take a tough stand that puts it in a confrontational position with a downtown property owner, the language and the tone have been the sort that rankle those concerned with individual property rights.

So far, it's mostly been bureaucratic bluster. But unless the city comes up with a supply of carrots to induce downtown property owners to make historically appropriate improvements to their buildings, it's only a matter of time before there's a serious head-to-head confrontation.

Mayor Bruce Hosier wisely made sure that the city's tax increment financing (TIF) district stretched from growing areas all the way downtown. That way tax revenues from developments like Wal-Mart's Supercenter and the Holiday Inn Express can help provide infrastructure funds for downtown Portland.

But that's a slow process, and it's simply not enough.

Instead, the city ought to designate a chunk of its healthy stockpile of economic development income tax funds to create a pool for downtown building improvements that meet historic standards.

(Full disclosure: The newspaper's home office is within the historic district and could be eligible for funds under such a program)

Such a fund (or bunch of carrots) could work this way: A property owner in the historic district who wants to make improvements to his building - say, for new windows - could go to the commission with his estimates for doing the job. If the commission had an alternative for doing the job in a way that was more appropriate historically, the commission would come up with the money - the carrots - to difference between the basic cost and the higher cost.

That money could be in the form of a loan, or it could be an outright grant.

Logic leads us to think it should be an outright grant.

After all, if the property owner is giving up control, there ought to be compensation for doing so. Taking this approach, providing more carrots and using EDIT dollars that have already been collected, the city could see a pretty rapid transformation and upgrade of its core historic district.

Relying on sticks or empty threats of sticks won't get the job done. - J.R.

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