 Welcome to Lyft 360's Portland Unwrapped, and this is our first. We're so excited. We're going to hear from many leaders in our community about Portland, and about our history and about our local Portland and about global Portland. We have so much richness to share. And I know I've been here 30 years and I continue to learn every single day living in this city. And so I'm looking forward to learning more as the day goes on. This is going to be informal. We want it to be interactive. We want you to share your knowledge and ask questions of our presenters. So please make this participatory because it'll be more fun for all of us. At Lyft 360, we focus on leadership every day for individuals and organizations and throughout our communities. It's our mission to inspire leadership, build stronger leaders, and to equip those leaders to tackle critical issues that we face in Maine. That focus takes us into communities and boardrooms, teaching all sectors and all areas of the state. We deliver programs and services working side by side with organizational and community leaders. The impact of our work and the stories that we hear from those we collaborate with is an incredible reward. It is our way to make Maine an even better place to live and work. Today, we thank our sponsors for supporting this new program. A special shout out to our friends at Community Television Network. They are recording the program today. Thanks to diversified communications, to Machiah Savings Bank, New Height Group, Pierce Atwood, Ethos and Vaunt for the design work, and to Port Printing for the posters. Our champion sponsors are Unum and LL Bean. I also want to thank Pam Plumb and Jill Dusan for being our moderators today. To Jane LaFleur, Sean Hansen, Eric Moeberg, and for their setup help today. And our planning team, Carol Walker Aten from La360, Bethany Campbell from United Way Greater Portland, Julie Chase of the Southern Maine Community College, Choi Moon from City of Portland, Dinah Minot from Creative Portland, Pam Plumb, Jill Porter, US Export Assistance Center, Amy Senstra from Portland Press Herald, and Gretchen Williams from Lyft 360. So I will now turn it over to our moderators. Welcome. We're delighted that you're here. And we're going to learn a lot today. You are going to share a lot of your thoughts and your information today. I think it's going to be great. Let me just ask a quick question. How many of you have come from somewhere else? Meaning you didn't grow up here. Okay. Well, all the more reason to spend a little moment delving into the history and the background of this community and seeing a little bit about where the community as a whole came from. We're going to be talking about the threads that make up this community, some historical threads, some modern threads, the history of the old buildings. Why Portland was founded. What are its roots anyway? Why did those first 40 people come here anyway? What goes on and where might it be headed in the future? Today we hope to illuminate some of those questions, spark your interest in where Portland has been and where it might be going, and draw you into be a part of shaping that future. I just want to say hello. I actually want to check the acoustics in this building. Oh, what a beautiful wall. I can promise you, you would not want me to try that. Okay. Our first segment today is really about the history and the background. And we want to delve a little into where this all came from. What is the waterfront? We're here on the waterfront. We're here in the Customs House building. The Customs House building, I'm going to need to turn for help from you. Would you come and tell us how much money was flowing through this building right after it was built? My name is Jeff Porter. I'm with the U.S. Commercial Service. I'm one of the federal employees that actually have offices in this building. This building is still a working federal office. There were 30, I just shy of 30 of us who work here. Every place you see a door, there is somebody working here or on the road. So it is still operational. Just briefly, this building was the U.S. Customs House. It's one of 11 left in the United States. The rest of the U.S. Customs Houses have either been turned over to the private sector, like in Boston, which has been turned into a Marriott, or they've been turned into the smaller ones have been turned over to historical societies. So this is one that actually still operates. And one of the reasons that myself and another individual that work here have opened this place up is we want to make sure that if a bureaucrat in Washington ever decides someday that this building needs to disappear, that there will be enough of you in this community that will rise up and make sure that that doesn't happen. So this building, the primary purpose of this building was to collect money. It cost about a half million dollars, $485,000 to build this building. It was built between 1867 and 1871. It was operational in 1872. I have some articles up in my office that I'm happy to show you on the tour that talk about they had 400 people here for the party. This is before, actually Portland was. Portland would have been dry at that time, so I'm not sure why they were consuming alcohol, but they were consuming alcohol in this building. So this building, when it opened up, Portland was either the fourth or fifth busiest port in the nation. So you're bringing in just shy of a million dollars a year, which roughly translates to about $200 million today. Again, this is the only way that the federal government, for the most part, was able to collect any revenue. There was no federal income tax until 1913 when the 16th Amendment was finally ratified that allowed the federal government to tax income. So every good coming into the United States would come through a customs house. So the first federal agency was customs. The second federal agency, can you guess what the second federal agency would be? Excuse me? Smart man. And why did we need a Coast Guard? We needed a Coast Guard because people cheated on their taxes back then. So every single ship would come into harbors and they would try to sneak into harbors and not pay the duties and tariffs on their goods. So what they were supposed to do, and then there were people here to make sure that they did, as they came into this harbor or in Lubeck or the other places we had customs offices, the customs officials would go down, board the ship, they would fill out a manifest, they'd come in here and then they'd pay their duty or tariff. I will show you on the tour, we have a two-story vault, so where all of that money was kept. I'm not sure why they have a second story to that vault, but they do. We don't have the ladder anymore, so that is on my to-do list of things that I want to do, is to go into that second story. The other reason I believe, as you travel around the country or around the world, you should always go to a customs house. And in most places in the world, I just go back from St. Petersburg, it is the most gorgeous building you will ever find. Again, that's where all the money was. Those are just absolutely amazing. The architecture, the amount of money that was put into this building, there are little things that you just can't believe. Again, on the tour, we'll show you some of those places as well. We will not bring you to the dungeon. We do have a dungeon as part of this building as well, which is actually underneath the sidewalk into the road on the four street side. So if you want to come back in the summer, we can show you the dungeon. Trust me, it's not a place you want to visit. But the other reason these buildings are so nice is that they were designed to... It was a great lie. It was a great bluff. The United States was showing its power and wealth, of which we had neither. In most of them, if you go... You'll still see some of the photos of the existing customs houses that exist throughout the country, and you go into the inside of them in Philadelphia and New York. We just lost that one. That's Portland, Oregon, or New Bedford, but just absolutely gorgeous. But it was designed to convince those people who were coming from around the world and they went back to their countries to say how powerful and how strong our country was. And again, that was a bald-faced lie. It took us another 50, 60 years for us to get there. But I'm happy to answer questions later in the day. I know you have a full agenda, so if I can answer questions, find me. I will be hiding upstairs in my office. My duty is to introduce the speakers for the panel, and we have... And Jeff just provided us with the kick-off presentation for the speakers, giving us a quick history of the customs house. Joining on the panel presentation will be Bill Needleman, who is our Waterfront Coordinator for the City of Portland. Bill's here. Thank you. Yes, right here. And then Tuck O'Brien. Thank you, Tuck. Tuck O'Brien is our City Planning Director. And so you'll find, in Bill, his job is straddling these two worlds, straddling the land and the ocean and being a major planning and organizing force for the city and putting that interaction together. And Tuck is the City Planning Director, and you will have seen him most recently, leading a whole slew of community conversations about the new comprehensive plan that the city has been working on and is putting out for discussion. I really appreciate the opportunity to come here and talk about Portland's Waterfront. I've been, when Dinah Monod-Hubbly kind of pigeonholed me back a few months ago and said, you're going to talk at lift 360. And I said, I don't know what that is. He says, well, it's just going to be a great conversation about the city of Portland and what's important to us. And we want to talk about the waterfront. And I said, super. I imagine bringing out my typical PowerPoint, which shows a lot of development and a lot of change. And she goes, oh, we really want to talk about what's behind that. Where have we been? We're proud of our community as a waterfront community. And so I am going to start off where many of us Portlanders started off in this conversation, which is third grade. Anybody who grew up in the city of Portland went to Portland Public Schools or has had a kid in the Portland Public Schools in the third grade is when you learn Portland history. And back when I was at Roosevelt School on Stevens Avenue, they trotted us out to the Tate House as one of the first steps because the Tate House is that wonderful house museum in Stroudwater was the home of George Tate, the mast agent. And we all learned about how important forest products were. We didn't call them forest products, but we all learned about how important the masts were to the British Navy and how important Maine was as the source of those masts. But as I got older, I never really figured out why the Tate House was still there and still important because by 1755 when the Tate House was constructed, they'd been cutting trees in that area of town and this area of the state for well over 100 years. The trees probably weren't right there in Stroudwater anymore. The mast trees were up in the forests in the hinterland. The mast agent was still on the Four River because it was the Four River. It was the harbor. It was the naval of this place. It's where we were born. And it was the ability to take a commodity and to move it to the world that gave Portland its identity. One of the other important elements of the third grade curriculum in the Portland history is the Cumberland and Oxford Canal. Back in the 1830s, there was a canal building craze across the country and Maine was swept up into it like many other parts of the country because canals had proven themselves to be a valuable way to connect the hinterland to ports. And the very terminus of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal was right about where the Casco Bay Bridge is now. Bringing forest products and agricultural products from the western part of the state down through the Sabago River watershed to the Four River and then out into the world market. It was quickly taken over by rail. The Cumberland and Oxford Canal didn't operate for very many decades and it worked in conjunction with early rail development. But rail from the south coming up into the western waterfront, rail to the north and west coming to the eastern waterfront, and what connected them? Why did they come here? They came to the Four River. And they came to the Four River because we're at a great launching spot to get off into England. We're closer than Boston. It's deep, relatively deep. It's sheltered by the Casco Bay Islands and it had all the ingredients of a great harbor. And when we had rail to the south, the plans for rail to the north and Montreal, it was Commercial Street that brought them together. And that Commercial Street is what we now define as that place when you know you're on the waterfront when you're on Commercial Street. And at that point, and I love this, we're doing this in this building because Commercial Street replaced Four Street as the waterfront drive for Portland Harbor. We're now literally right between the 1830s and the days of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal and the 1850s when Commercial Street was filled in to provide access not only to the harbor but to the national rail system. And we have become that place that connects the United States and the North American national transportation system to the world. Maine in our economy and the national economy come together at this place and it's been happening since the 18... well, back in the days of George Tate and the mast agents in the Four River. And I believe that the result of bringing these things together on Portland's waterfront are its commerce, its prosperity, and its identity, our identity as a port community. And much of the development and much of the controversy that has ensued probably over the last 30 years, back in the 1980s when condominium development was taking hold in this waterfront, there was the rally and cry that we need to preserve our working waterfront because we're losing our identity. We were also losing commerce. And while we love waterfront condominiums, anybody who's been in one, they're lovely. But what we lost in the 1980s while we saw slipping away was the actual commerce that took place on the piers that those condominiums replaced. Today we are seeing a lot more waterfront development and it's happening on both ends of the spectrum where we can see potential development on the western waterfront reconnecting us with that heritage of being a global port. And other developments that spark that thought of preserving the working waterfront. More hotel and the ideas of gentrification on our waterfront that worry folks about the preservation of both our heritage and our identity, but also the commerce that takes place, the commerce that needs trucks and needs forklifts and needs bait. The things that potentially conflict with restaurants, hotels, and a tourism related economy. I think they can come together on our eastern waterfront where we see that the cruise ship industry has really sparked a resurgence in the idea of passenger transportation on our waterfront. While cruise ships may be tourism, we also employ longshoremen, chandeliers, stevedores. The types of industries that handle ships really appreciate the fact that we're getting a lot more ship visits here in the eastern waterfront. And the city is also working on the eastern waterfront to encourage that active participation between our citizens and the water through the development of open space and our work with the Amethyst lot and transforming a portion of our eastern waterfront into a public place where we use the water, where sail training and public landing and just the general passive enjoyment of being on the water can all come together in a place that looks right out into the harbor, right out at Fort Gorges. So thanks for a little rambling tour. I kind of lost the thread there towards the end. But I want everybody to kind of walk away with this pride that we as a community for many years, through many transitions, through the transition from road to canal to rail to highway, and now maybe back again and revisiting some of those modes. We've stayed connected to our waterfront and our waterfront remains the identity of this city as a port community. Thank you. Hello. Did the canal run through Canal Plaza? Or if you could just speak to that a little bit. Thanks so much. A name question. Pardon the pun, but I may be a little out of my depth in regards to this, but the Canal Plaza was the 1970s home of the Canal Bank and the Canal Bank was formed for the financing of the canal itself. Bill and Tuck, thanks for being here. And Tuck, I'm not sure what you're going to cover. So I'm going to toss out three themes and if one or other of you are going to cover them, that's great. One is rising water levels and what the plan for Portland is on that. Two is business with the Maritimes of Canada and how we envision that perhaps being built in both in transportation, business, whatever. And three, bear with me. Oh, I got it. Risk to our waters in this area. There's been a lot of conversation about are the lobster moving out and I know that's a whole coastal issue and I'm only using lobster as an example, but when I think working waterfront, do we need to be concerned about our fishing industry and what is the impact on ensuring we keep our core resources in this area? Thanks. Great. Three huge questions. Those are three full week conferences in each one. So very briefly on sea level rise, we know that sea level rise is happening in Portland Harbor because we have a tide gauge on main state peer that has been tracking a steady increase in sea levels for over 90 years. The question is what's that rate of acceleration? And so what will we do on our Portland waterfront? It's an excellent question. We don't have a specific answer, but the general answer is that we will adapt. And we are undertaking a planning exercise in the Bayside neighborhood called Bayside Adapts to understand how to transform urban infrastructure and business opportunities and development opportunities in a condition of more water. And what we learn in Bayside, and we're taking Bayside on first because when you're standing at the sidewalk by Whole Foods where the notorious flooding happens, you're actually about five feet lower in elevation than when you're standing on the deck of main state peer. Bayside is our more vulnerable neighborhood. And what we learn in Bayside, we will use elsewhere in the city, including Commercial Street, but I use the anecdote that Charlie Poole tells on Union Wharf when they did some sewer work a while back and were excavating a parking lot and they dug down three feet and they found a parking lot. We'll have to bring some sediment to the party. With regards to maritime commerce with the Maritimes of Canada, fortunately the Ameskip Service, the Icelandic Steamships Company that is now going to the western waterfront at the International Marine Terminal, does have stops in the Maritimes and there is opportunities for direct service between Portland and Halifax as well, though that's more on a speculative, but we actually have those connections right now through Ameskip at the IMT into the Canadian Maritimes and then on to both Greenland, Iceland and northern Europe. And the last one was... The threats to our ocean, ocean warming, ocean acidification, the buildup of nutrients in our bay, all are legitimate and serious threats and fortunately we have great partners with folks like the Friends of Casco Bay, Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute who are all staring this in the face and doing extremely important work. Do we have an answer for any of those things right now? No. Will we continue to question, work and strive to make sure that we have both an ecologically solid foundation within our bay but also a commercial resource that we continue to utilize like our fisheries? We need these places because we're going to run out of calories and the ocean is how we're going to feed ourselves and so working with the aquaculture industries, the fisheries management and the scientists around these many and myriad threats is going to be our ongoing task as participants in a poor community. Bill, could you perhaps elaborate a bit about the issues of the fisheries and change in the past and potential change in the future which perhaps today is more driven by environmental changes than commercial changes but the history of the fishing industry and the future of it or the marine resource industry to be sort of stated more broadly. So I think this is a great example of how when you start to talk about waterfronts you quickly can get into very large issues so the marine commerce, fisheries commerce historically and into the future again it could be a week long seminar. I think one of the interesting antidotes is that the first significant pier built to support fisheries in the city of Portland was built in the 1980s. We were fishing town but we were a port community. Fisheries expanded greatly in the 1980s and 1990s due to federal subsidies a fairly lax look at fisheries regulation and changes in technologies that allowed us to catch fish really efficiently and the stocks just tumbled and what we learned from that is that it is not an infinite resource that the resource changes over time due to human influences, due to natural influences and our science and our management structures I think are always in a process of playing catch up and that we have to be nimble. We have to know that no one fishery is going to stay stable because the environment is not stable and our influences on the environment are not stable because as a community we need to be nimble and we need to be able to react to changes that are beyond our control so that means having diversified fisheries it means having a diversified maritime economy generally so that when one particular issue like lobster is booming right now we are at historic high landings for lobster statewide relatively stable down here if lobster fishery takes a big hit with the migration of the species we need to be prepared to backfill that likely that backfilling will take place in the form of aquaculture but there may be new species that come in and fill that void. Fundamental clean water and if we have clean water we have the opportunity to at least let this environment respond and bring in the kind of life forms that we may want to eat and sell. I just wanted to expand on what Bill was saying my primary job here at the commercial service is to help companies export their products and services I think some of you may have glossed over the article that was in the Press Herald this weekend talking about the lobster industry the Canadians have signed a free trade agreement with Europe that is going to jeopardize upwards of $140 million worth of business for Maine not only is the Canadian dollar 25% cheaper with this trade agreement which should go into effect probably by May maybe as late as June the tariff rates 8% on lobster disappear for the Canadians that 8% tariff rate is still going to be for our clients so I think one of your speakers later is Kurt Brown from Ready Seafood he can address that but I can assure you that is the most immediate concern that the seafood companies feel right now and it's not just on the lobster industry it's other sectors but the lobster industry will definitely see the largest hit thank you Tuck and Bill for coming and for your efforts in both increasing the traffic to the waterfront and preserving the identity my questions are about traffic management so you've talked about on the eastern waterfront the increase you know we've got thousands of units of condominiums hotels there's now a proposal from the economic development department to sell the open space land that is currently around where the VA is and I'm not exactly sure what the streets are butting it but basically all of that open parking lot that's down below four street in the Portland company there's now a proposal from your department to sell that to turn into apartments hotel mixed use and we've got the thousands more units that are coming online there and then on the western waterfront the new comprehensive plan calls for that to become more of a trucking hub and there's the proposal for the 75 foot cold storage facility so these are both great opportunities for the city for a lot of traffic and development on the waterfront my question is how are you managing the land based traffic and the increase in the 18 wheelers for instance on commercial street and then the thousands and thousands of car trips that we're going to be generating on the east end thank you so it's a great question and I think one of the things that Portland has right now is a lot of opportunity we have something that a lot of American cities don't have which is transportation capacity we're engaged in a study of our parking needs downtown and we are beginning to do a lot better job more sophisticated job of looking at making sure that we examine our transportation grid holistically and leverage all of these opportunities to make sure that as our transportation network becomes more robust and becomes more full of users that we are getting the maximum community benefit possible so how we're doing that is with modeling how we're doing that is with bringing in additional resources to look at development not only of the metro public transit service in the city but also starting to once again look at what technology and innovation can do transit management associations, private shuttles allocation of parking, demand management those kind of techniques that rely on more technology that wasn't available as cities grow they become more congested that's the way that growth works in terms of we are in an area in a world where people are still using their cars that's not necessarily a bad thing but it is a cost of our growth I will say from our standpoint in both we work very closely with economic development the disposition of the Thames Street parcel which is the dirt parking lot that you are referring to on the corner of Thames and Hancock is both going to introduce more traffic but also is one of the signature parcels that the city owns that are available for redevelopment and probably one of the signature parcels for commercial development in the state of Maine you mentioned the 58th 4th Street development bringing online upwards of 600 additional units of residential we have the growth in the cruise ship industry which hit 100,000 passengers this year as well as potential opportunities to increase development on the western waterfront all of which is going to bring more traffic all of which is going to bring more demands on our parking we are learning though as we do better quantification and this comes as a surprise to a lot of people that there is capacity we have significant capacity both in our transportation infrastructure and our parking infrastructure what we have to do a better job of is managing that and leveraging it to get the most community benefit that we can so as we go forward I think the answers to your question are going to be partially technology and they are going to be partially taking a more holistic view of understanding that a development at the corner of Thames and Hancock is going to have an impact at Washington in 295 and making sure we understand those connections so that was a great segue because the next segment is Tuck's presentation and our goal, the meeting plan is very flexible so Pam and I are going to go with the flow but our hope here is that Tuck has a few minutes to present and then we will have more Q&A and then we will maybe turn to the notes that are on your name tags about the two or three things that you noted in response to the question on the registration form so Tuck take it away Thank you Councilor Duton so I'm going to try to be quick so we can get back to questions because I think that was really interesting conversations just to start out a little bit my history, my background is very different than Bill's I've lived here for seven years I have a second grader at Longfellow who still hasn't got to that class that Bill could teach and I love being on panels or in meetings with Bill because every time it's just such a fascinating story of how our community got to where we are today I'm going to talk a lot more about what happens next and where we're going and how we're trying to achieve fundamentally a balance you know Portland started like the resondetra of this community was moving things on the water and moving things out of our port now that's a part I want to make sure that stays a part of what our community does but there is so much else going on here a lot of it's interrelated and a lot of it isn't our tourist economy wouldn't be as robust if it wasn't for the waterfront we hope that as our breweries grow as our local agricultural scene grows that we are able to harness our port to export we hope that we are able to develop because of our geographic location and our waterfront location a better connection to northern Europe that puts us at a comparative advantage to other places and all of this is the traffic piece is such a key component of this because all of this requires balance and effective management and so I'm going to take four themes talk briefly about our comprehensive plan and our general approach to adapting our city's regulatory structure to the future but for the things that Bill said that I think are really applicable what we're trying to do as a city our flexibility the flexibility is really important to preserve waterfront working waterfront land as the ebb and flows excuse the pun of the working waterfront comp we wanted to preserve land we had set aside land for ground fishing the ground fishing industry had a moment and then kind of receded into the background but preserving that land and time use is going to be really important that leads to the second theme which is adaptation how do we position ourselves to take advantage of our opportunities and not forestall what might be coming in the future a big theme of our comprehensive plan and our ability to stay ahead of things and be ready for innovation has to do with quantification one of the things we are really pushing with this comprehensive plan is better data it goes to transportation it goes to land use planning it goes to economic impacts we are really pushing for some outcomes of our comprehensive plan to be the robustness of our data sources and lastly is what we're doing today what we're going to do tomorrow night for the comprehensive plan public hearing what we've been trying to do all along which is conversation it's a discussion of all of the interests a lot of these choices about compromise and looking at different options we are not ever given silver bullets we're never given the one no brainer 100% fail safe choice there's always competing needs and I think Councilor Dutzen could talk to this more than anyone about on a weekly basis she's sitting in a situation where she is wrestling with different arguments that are very well founded and passionate about our community and trying to weigh those and that needs to keep going on and it needs to keep we'll finish the comprehensive plan which has been a really successful community conversation but that document only works if it doesn't sit on a shelf if we're constantly using it to continue the conversation so briefly on the comprehensive plan an 18 month process it's involved over 2400 Portland residents and business owners 8 community forums we worked with 3 public schools Portland High, Casco Bay and King Middle one of the things we realized is that this plan really belongs to the freshman in high school in our schools when this plan comes time to do the other plan those kids are going to be in their early to mid 20s and they're going to be the people that we want to still be able to live here and raise their families and to have established roots and have opportunity in our city we've had 6 planning board workshops and we'll start the hearing tomorrow night this comprehensive plan represented a shift for the city the previous plan served mostly as a compilation of a lot of the other efforts that had gone on and it was very successful in that but some of them were competing and over time it lost the central narrative about at a 30,000 foot level what the goals of the city were so we tried to step back and fundamentally established what we call a community value statement what Portland is and that was based on starting place of a survey that we did that was very successful and had over 2,000 respondents we tried to distill what we heard from people and unpack a lot of what we had related to people's core concerns or goals for our community and we basically ended up with a value statement or a community vision that has 6 key themes Portland is equitable it is sustainable, it is dynamic it is authentic, it is connected and it is secure big broad themes but it's important to have that kind of vision to judge all future policy decisions off of and to look at the choices and goals and say does that really balance across all of those themes from that we have 8 different subject areas waterfront, economy, housing environment, parks, open space future land use that try to take go from 30,000 feet to 15,000 feet and develop some implementation strategies that look to move forward the community vision we're hoping that this comprehensive plan starts as a guide for growth something that gets used on a yearly basis by the council in its goal setting that is constantly available to the planning board that new business is looking to come into our community look at but it's trying to stop at a 10,000 foot level establish a broad vision and lay the framework but no more than the framework for the ongoing work that we're going to need to do and one of the pieces of the ongoing work that's going to happen is an examination of our 892 page land use regulatory framework and looking at what we can do to better match that document with the goals of our community and I'm happy to get into specifics on any one area but that will be driven by best practices nationally this community conversation is a constant feedback loop one of the things we had done in the past was it's a lot of effort to get zoning changes through the city council and so we would make a zoning change and there would be certain things that would need to get fixed but that wouldn't happen because of the effort it took to start that process and starting with the India street form based code which we've revisited four times since its initial adoption we've looked to make zoning more iterative to allow that feedback loop and of course corrections to allow new data to influence what we're doing and we hope to make that a more consistent practice so I think with that I can stop and we can get back to a conversation I just have a question going back to traffic and transportation as we see more and more increasing traffic particularly cruise ship traffic and lots of tourists who are not particularly willing to walk great distances there used to be the 8A bus that ran just the peninsula loop it didn't go all the way out to Hannaford it was very practical for tourists is there any idea, any thought of bringing that back in the future either just on cruise ship days or potentially in the future all the time because we do have a lot of work at Victoria mansion and we get so many calls from people down on the waterfront who just aren't willing to walk that distance we that is that is so on point so and if Greg Jordan who's the head of the metro is here he would say we are constantly looking to refine the routes to get at all those different audiences it's hard to figure out with the current structure of how the bus system works those kind of targeted special routes for brief periods of time we have seen innovation such as moving all the school kids on to the buses have been really successful so there's going to be three factors that are going to need to take place one is going to be flexible vehicles and thinking at the metro which is already taking place second is use of technology so not necessarily Uber or Lyft but there are other companies private companies such as bridge that are doing this with the private sector that we are looking at bringing to Portland such as transit management associations one of the things that I am really passionate about right now is looking at a TMA shuttle loop going from the transportation center at Thompson's point along the waterfront past 58 4th street and hitting some of our major institutions such as main met in USM because at different times of the year all of those uses are having an intensity and the ability to share parking between them and to share transportation between them for example on cruise ship days parking comes really premium down here but school tends to not be in session so facilities out there but there is no way to get in between them conveniently so that's something that we are starting to look at I would like to follow up the private sector has really done a good job trying to fill that void and we are trying to work with them to provide minimal infrastructure that promotes the use of private tours to get our tourist visitors around especially on cruise ship days so we created a waterfront marketplace down in the commercial street, Thames street area and we expect to try to concentrate some of the tour bus and trolley activity down in there to clean up the streets a little bit make it more predictable for the visitors and to get them to more places around the city and I would encourage institutions and destinations to reach out to those folks as well to put together good packages for folks that create an attractive visit for them well mine just turned into two fold because of her question which is could you speak to biking bicycling here in the city because a lot of people may not be able to walk a certain distance but so many cities have adopted grab a bike and if our from that 30,000 or even 15,000 foot view I think we could have some connections much better safer ways to get around with your bike right now in some areas of our city you take your life in your hands and as a driver I'm always afraid when I see a biker in certain areas so if you could speak to that in my original thought I'd like you to speak to when you were giving us the six points could you speak to secure what does that mean I especially feel in these uncertain times when I hear that word I want to know what's keeping us secure thank you so with regards to bikes we have had a first year where they bike rental down in the eastern waterfront so for those folks who are visiting and would like to access the city by bike they have that opportunity and just received a very interesting presentation at the sustainability and transportation committee last night where Councillor Dusson sits from an extremely energetic competent and you know I'd say inspiring young woman looking to bring bike share to the city and there's what appears to be a credible movement in that direction and we hope to see progress in that regard the interesting takeaway that I had from her presentation last night was that often the infrastructure that creates the safe environment that allows participation the more bikes the better the infrastructure and so the more bikes we have the more likely we are to invest in and create the safe environment that expands that opportunity quickly on bikes because I think that hits the nail in the head I think a couple of things that need to happen when we do the survey people are overwhelmingly in favor of recreational bicycle amenities and also commuter bicycle amenities but when we are actually having the conversations about budgeting and the CIP those voices tend to not be as prevalent and so that's part of it I think the other thing is just the recognition that there needs to be innovation because in a northern city it's a challenge to keep our bicycle infrastructure intact and in place with all of the abuse that our roads take during our winters it's there are many many places around the world with equally or more severe climates that do that it's just a challenge and we just need to rise to that challenge and lastly it's working on the people who are working with talking to that conversation with the people who don't bike and who commute into our city to work or you know ride a car which is fine you know what I always tell people who kind of roll their eyes when we talk about bicycles you know you don't need to bike but if 10% of your neighbors in the community who would like to bike feel safer doing it that's 10% of the people who aren't driving and that's great for everybody so on that so on Secure we were told from the survey and then we went out to the community and the bottom circle it's a Venn diagram I should have brought the easel but the bottom circle was a question mark and it was Portland like what are we missing, what else is there and what we heard from a number of different communities we met with the South Sudanese Community Association Homeless Voices for Justice a bunch of neighborhood associations and it was an issue of security and it wasn't part of it was physical safety issues about crime but it was more about housing security job security and security of your place in the community and it's very intentional that at the top and the bottom of our Venn Diagram are equitable and secure and that secure is not only about community policing and the work that our police department does but also gets at a lot of the work with the housing committee to make sure people have places to live and that people who are here that are part of our community recognize that the rest of us have their backs and we own that that is what our community believes and that's what we heard from our community about our value statement that whatever else is going on in the world Portland has strong beliefs that are distinct from those and that we shouldn't be afraid about saying that I was curious what is for directional signage in the community I can see that you're working on Franklin arterial but the fonts and the icons are a bit small and hard to read from a few cars back but the rest of the city has some old signage not really great signage so for those visitors that are coming into town they're kind of going blind so that was one question and I don't know if you want to bring up something from Bill's presentation but I was curious if you could tell me or elaborate with the importance of the AmeriCold facility and why it's so vitally important to keep our working waterfront thriving so one of the things the way finding in the city we've worked on it a lot we've done a lot of studies and Casey could talk about this at length as well the parking study is once again reaffirming that part of the major problem with it's a New England thing I grew up in Boston and it prides itself on being hard to get around but part of the issue is we've never got the branding and navigation right people who are trying to find parking for the museum who aren't from here people who are trying to get around if you just step back yourselves even if you know where you're going and try to see the visual cues to find your way around too small, faded inconsistent, not helpful and so a bill actually has done a lot of work on this and more will be coming to kind of this is one of the city manager's priorities it's a lot cheaper to get some effective science made than the build of parking garage. So with regards to the Franklin Street project that's actually a pilot of a citywide way finding study implementing a portion of a citywide way finding study that was done a few years ago and with the you know which ended up with hundreds of signs spread out throughout the peninsula at all of the highway interfaces the surface road interfaces with the peninsula and it ended up with a pretty staggering price tag. So we started off taking the graphic conventions and some of the concepts of that study and applying them to Franklin Street because people couldn't find the ferry and they couldn't figure out well which ferry there's island ferry and there's international ferry and there's cruise ship and then what we've learned is that people don't really like them. So it was actually really good that we didn't spend that huge not right off the beginning because we probably need to work with the graphic conventions I think the Franklin Street pilot project has some successes. It certainly doesn't hit on all cylinders and with the prioritization from the manager's office and support from council and especially support from the community and likely bringing money to the table because this stuff is incredibly expensive that's what would get it done. I'm going to go in a little different direction so you had talked about the high school students wanting them to be here. Maine has an aging population I also see the fisheries and the tourism to be a little bit cyclical and vulnerable to disruptors so what are we doing from a planning perspective to bring in technology or other maybe more steady business segments. That's an awesome question so the first section is the answer is we worked a lot with the high school students but that wasn't the exclusion one of the other big components of the comprehensive plan was to provide a framework and a better integration of aging in place and to provide a community where people can have sustainable hospitals where they can be born where they can have great schools where they want to stay and people want to raise their kids retire and move to smaller places and have choice so whether the choice is you know we've seen actually a lot of senior living type of housing come online lately so we're kind of getting more robust in that segment I think the family housing areas where we really need to do a lot of work in terms of the economy you're 100% right diversification is going to be the key we tried to spend some time working with the both the start-up community and the mid-sized companies to make sure that we put into the comprehensive plan language that reflected what they were trying to do we also tried to not forget the focus on two specific segments one is local ag and value-added local resources so that's always going to be a big part whether it's going to be ocean related is cyclical you're right but there's probably going to be something else going on whether it's going to be or the next thing we haven't thought of to that point one of the things we've tried to do is when the tasting room boom happened we were caught flat footed our regulatory structure really didn't anticipate it and it became very challenging so we tried to step back Bill talked about looking more at pilot projects and being more flexible with temporary uses so that we can't predict what the market's going to do there's brilliant people out there trying to figure that out we just want to be ready when they have those ideas I think that's the best thing that the government we can do trying to set up an environment where we attract a couple more 500 person companies wouldn't hurt but I would like to make a point about the cyclical nature of the fisheries industry that can be largely modified by well at least mitigated by two factors one is broadening our scope for supply how do we bring in marine resources for processing here and that's one of the things that happens through Aimskip and the western waterfront that those areas of the north Atlantic with rich fisheries are now supplying our processors on the Portland waterfront with material for for laying, packaging freezing shipping into the national market that's happening now and has the opportunity to expand and there was a question of why is the western waterfront so important it's critical to our employment base on the waterfront that we have access to quality world-class quality seafood from elsewhere because it is cyclical here at home we are in aquaculture we do need to transition from being largely hunter-gatherers on the ocean to farmers we're about six or seven thousand years behind in a lot of these aspects we're going to need those calories there's going to be a hungry world ready to eat them and we want to have a place here in the Portland waterfront using the resources of Casco Bay and the coast of Maine to grow them the years' wars and industrial areas in the city of Portland to process them and a port to ship them it's a good story and it's real and it does help modify against the swings of what's happening out in the ocean so my name is Peter Neal I'm from the World Ocean Observatory I'm very much a newbie I spent 20 years in New York advocating for the working waterfront so I have a sense of deja vu here and I see a couple of things to observe one is that truth is in the details and planners and citizens become consumed by the details and that's a necessary thing and flexibility is a very important aspect of that there's also a lot of lip service to the working waterfront when time comes to it actually people don't mean it it's a romantic notion that doesn't translate into a more narrow set of values the details notwithstanding truth also is sort of a cosmic idea and port is a cosmic idea port is a place of exchange of goods and people and ideas so maritime ports import and export transport, trucks and trains airports cyber ports so the fact is that a small regional city with access to quality of life perfectly placed on the Atlantic Ocean outside of the eastern megalopolis is a tremendous idea in the making and when I despair is when I hear catch up and I hear a reaction to because that's planning by looking over your shoulder backwards whereas planning is supposed to be a prospective exercise and what the comprehensive plan is doing in those values is very progressive and interesting but it doesn't necessarily affirm the big idea so port city has tremendous implications for what this city can become not what it is what it was but what it can become and the ocean is an enormous opportunity it's not just I'm skipped it's not just a one way trade it's not just train cars it's intellectual property that's going to be going back and forth and those that industry and it is industry is looking always for a place outside of those other inhibiting places so I keep hoping that I hear somebody say look we're going to contextualize the future of this city as a place of exchange of goods people and ideas and all the details would follow but it becomes a kind of driving principle a driving idea a driving concept for who we want to be and I guarantee you that ocean industry ocean employment ocean productivity ocean sustainability has enormous applications in terms of job opportunities tax base tourism new people and families coming in different kinds of demographic shifts all of that will occur if you can essentially arrange the ideas around the the prospect of of a future identity so I love what I'm hearing because I think it's possible here New York actually under Bloomberg changed because he understood what a big idea is and he sort of allowed the city to adapt and even invent but Portland has like Maine the advantage of scale that's the greatest strength of this place I think is that you have talent and you have scale which means in terms of the ability to actually implement and take advantage of opportunity it could work but it can only work if it's focused and prospective beautifully said and one thing that I would like to layer into that is geography and the specific place in which we live and how the you know and I started off with the history because I think that we've retained this incredible man made or human made geographic of peers and warbs in a 19th century form based along a waterfront drive adjacent to our downtown that puts the framework where that kind of environment can evolve we do need to nurture it and take care of it and I really appreciate those comments Thank you for those great remarks Mr. Neal and that's one of the things I think our city always needs is bold vision so it's great to hear your voice to me when somebody asked my name is Lisa Whited I also sit on the planning board somebody mentioned parking earlier and adding people to our city and I was reflecting back 1988 for a couple of years I commuted to Boston and two days a week and would park on Newbury Street without a problem and then now you know and over time as I would go back I'm like it's harder and harder to find a spot now I don't even try and so I was thinking about as we think about our own behavior and expectations things change and the other thing I was thinking about is in the 70s we had 10,000 more people than we do today so the capacity I'm really glad you talked about the capacity talk and then we have the capacity and sometimes it's just changing our expectations and behavior around how things have changed and that requires people to be open-minded and realize the value of progress but also the inclusive conversation that you're having and supporting to make positive change Thanks Hi I'm Paul Drinan I'm the executive director of Friends of Fort Gorgeous and I've had the pleasure of working with Bill but I haven't met you yet Tuck I want to just backtrack and touch back on a couple of points you made when you talked about the big vision for the city and the 30,000 foot view you mentioned the word connectivity did you mention commerce or economy I'm assuming that's in there Here's kind of the bold vision of the community value statement the economy is interspersed in all of those values housing is interspersed in all of those values the waterfront is interspersed in all of those values so when you ask what Portland's economy is it should meet those six value statements it's not a separate section but in and of itself is not part of the community value statement Great As those things relate to the overall vision I also heard the word data and I'm wondering if the comprehensive plan allows for any conversation as the use of Fort Gorgeous pertains to all of these things economic impact job opportunities tourism working waterfront etc yeah it does I think if you look at the open space recreation section the historic resources section the waterfront the economy section all could kind of be applied to what we're trying to accomplish in Fort Gorgeous part of authenticity is our history our shared history and our historic resources section kind of takes a three fold approach identification of our historic resources and making sure there are people out there doing the work on Fort Gorgeous education I think a lot of people don't in their day to day experience how rich our culture is and why it's related to our history and then the third piece is preservation and then on the open space side connecting the chain is one of the key components of both the future land use plan and the open space plan and Fort Gorgeous is a piece of the chain that's not really connected right now and actually bringing that back into the web is really important thank you very much