by Nicole Ginley-Hidinger
In the upcoming year, Salem plans to begin redesigning their police station and work on implementing a new LED streetlight system. Both were projects that University of Oregon classes worked on in the 2010-2011 school year with SCYP.
Three years after a yearlong partnership with SCYP, the City of Salem is still sorting through proposals and plans from the 27 classes and 500 students that worked on 18 projects around the city.
For Courtney Knox Busch, the Strategic Initiatives Planner with the City of Salem, SCYP has become the gift that keeps on giving. All 18 projects have been put into motion. Some of the bigger projects, which take more resources and planning, have taken longer to start due to the recession.
“We’re implementing the big chunks but we’re also doing small things that are making our city a better place,” she says.
These big chunks include projects such as the police station and streetlights that the city is addressing this year. Currently, they are implementing outreach programs to determine the community’s interest in a new police station and using the financial budget prepared by the PPPM Capstone class to determine how to install the newly designed streetlights.
“PGE (Portland General Electric) approached us and asked us if we would buy their lights,” says Knox Busch. “We were able to say no, it didn’t make financial sense because the students had given us such a great model.”
Knox Busch believes that the best thing about working with SCYP is the energy the students bring into the area.
“We had five hundred students running around town discovering Salem for the first time and they were saying things like ‘Oh, wow! Look at that!’” she says. “As a community, the things we had kind of taken for granted we were recognizing anew. It gave us a great buzz.”
The buzz spread. The projects in Salem were being recognized and talked about nation wide. Even the New York Times did a story on the project. But most importantly, the community got involved.
“We created opportunity for the students to speak directly to the community about the work that they did and we found that that worked really well,” Knox Busch says. “We had members of our architecture community going down to Eugene and participating in the student reviews.”
In fact, the partnership worked so well that Knox Busch’s boss, the city manager, allows her to travel the country talking about the benefits of SCI and SCYP.
The best advice Knox Busch can give other cities that want to get involved in a partnership is to trust the students to come up with viable solutions to the problem.
“It’s very awkward for both parties, but mostly for the cities to serve up a problem that we don’t know what the answer is,” she warns. “It’s a lot less control.”
But the payout is insurmountable. She says that on the majority of projects, the city got more than they asked for. If they asked for a way-finding plan for Minto-Brown Park, they got a 170-page report that included not only a way-finding plan but also steps to implement it on a constrained budget.
“We got 80,000 student hours,” she says. “You can’t even put that into consulting hours.”