If the county would like Milwaukie to remain in the parks district, Mayor Lisa Batey said this month, then it should complete the long-awaited construction at Milwaukie Bay Park and ask district residents to increase property taxes for park services.
Batey noted that 54% voters within the North Clackamas Parks & Recreation District turned down a tax-increase proposal in 2014, but the measure passed within the Milwaukie portion of NCPRD. Batey is hopeful that the county board will again refer a measure to NCPRD voters who she hoped would be even more receptive to increasing funding for parks than they were a decade ago.
“There may be a way forward with NCPRD,” Batey said.
Batey made the comments during a March 14 speech to Milwaukie’s Rotary Club, which she said might be the closest she will come to giving a State of the City this year. Since she’s only taken office as mayor in January, she said that she wants to wait until 2024 to give an official State of the City.
During the presentation, Batey also discussed sidewalk and housing construction, along with removal of the Kellogg Dam, which she says is still on track for completion in 2027. Following the success of obtaining federal funding last year for preliminary engineering, Batey said that the city would have to obtain additional grants for actual demolition that could start as early as 2025. Along with opening up 16 miles of Kellogg Creek for lamprey and Coho salmon habitat restoration, Batey said Milwaukie will suddenly have “13 acres of new parkland under what is today a mucky, messy lake.”
“Because the dam is attached to the highway, it’s always been huge and expensive (to remove it) and we have to convince ODOT to do it,” she said.
Milwaukie accelerated its pace of sidewalk construction lately by implementing a sidewalk fee and by taking out low-interest loans. Clackamas County has just started construction to extend Milwaukie’s Linwood Avenue project to build sidewalks and bike lanes to the north of the city’s project completed in 2021.
Batey pointed out the irony of the previous lack of sidewalks around Milwaukie’s busy shopping areas, like the 42nd and King Road center anchored by a Safeway grocery store.
“You could live a block from Safeway and not have a way to safely walk there,” she said.
After 20 years of no growth in Milwaukie, 1,800 apartments and over 200 single-family homes have been or are in the process of construction from 2016-26. Batey noted that the city’s “smattering” of accessory dwelling units is expected to expand exponentially after the city adopted state-mandated regulations to make construction of grannie flats easier.
While most of the new housing construction has been market rate, Milwaukie officials hope to expand public housing programs.
“The biggest challenge is keeping Milwaukie affordable for people who grew up here,” she said.
Batey expects city councilors will choose to keep their goals the same this year, but more long term, she’d like to see more project-based goals like Milwaukie Bay Park and Kellogg Dam, versus ongoing goals like housing affordability and climate action.
“We ought to be able to incorporate that work into the city’s budget,” she said. “If we said today, ‘We’re not going to make climate a goal anymore,’ we’re going to end someone’s job, or they would probably move them to a different job.”
