BES Must Embrace Lessons from Columbia Building

CUB recommends that the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) embrace more oversight as a key lesson from a recently released report on its management of design and costs of the Columbia Building.

First, some background. The Columbia Building is North Portland’s Columbia Sewage Treatment Plant complex. The building’s main purpose is to provide space for BES engineers who had been working in old trailers with leaks and mold. So a new permanent building made sense, but controversy surfaced in the spring of 2014 with media coverage of significant cost overruns. The City Council requested an analysis by the City Auditor, which was released in October.

Commissioner Nick Fish then requested a legal review by the employment law firm Barran Liebman – the review was released earlier this week.

A particular trigger for the legal review was a potential conflict of interest due to a temporary BES employee also working for the architecture firm doing Columbia Building design work. The Barran Liebman report found that BES did not handle this issue correctly and that any conflict of interest waiver “should have been discussed with the City Attorney, confirmed in writing, and should not have been followed by a suggestion that the employee would be placed in a decision-making loop during a time he held dual employment.”

Given CUB’s interest in rigorous review of project alternatives, however, we want to highlight the report’s discussion of whether or not the Columbia Building needed to be an iconic building that included a community meeting room. These two points highlight the need for rigorous priority setting discussions that BES did not appear to have.

Barran Liebman found that “BES was caught up in the excitement of the design phase” and decided that dramatic, but more expensive features, were desirable because Portland “lacks so-called statement” buildings. Appropriately, BES, was also interested in demonstrating green building features but the City Council’s Green Building Policy could have been met with less expensive design features. The report suggests that discussion in a “larger group than just BES” should have occurred. CUB agrees, and though BES was particularly intrigued by “the aesthetics of the design in this industrial neighborhood” we find that to be another weak rationale for the Columbia Building design that would have benefited from more diligent oversight.

Providing community meeting spaces is a fine idea, but Barran Liebman did not hear from BES “a pressing need for such a larger meeting space” and cited the need for more “critical review” of such a proposal. CUB concurs and wonders if anybody at BES thought about community meeting space already available at the Charles Jordan Community Center, Kenton Firehouse, or BES’s own Cathedral Park water quality lab that are 0.7, 1.8, and 2.4 miles away, respectively, from the Columbia Building? If there was a determination that more community space was needed at that location, there is no evidence of it in the Barran Liebman report.

Luckily, BES has an overall good track record of designing and building projects within original budget projections. But instead of thinking that the Columbia Building was just a one-off problem, CUB urges BES to fully embrace increased oversight. We have seen positive signs in our work with BES, but are on the alert for backtracking. BES should also embrace the upcoming new Public Utility Board with its higher level of oversight and seek that group’s input on priority setting. Both the Auditor and Barran Liebman reports reveal insular thinking and resistance to oversight that must change at BES.

Other valuable lessons for BES from the Barran Liebman report are in stories by Willamette Week and The Oregonian.

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