In a story last year in The Oregonian, reporter Randy Gragg asks if it is time for a new approach to planning. He quotes national planning consultant John Fregonese, who warns that “Vision without action is hallucination.” John Fregonese will be the opening speaker at Lane County Moving Forward Together.

Ready, aim, focus. The state of Oregon is taking a “Big Look.” Metro Regional Government wants a “New Look.” And the city of Portland is testing “Vision PDX.” Oregon is in the mood to plan.

Once a generation, the region’s leaders raise their eyes to the distant horizon together. In the 1930s, for instance, Gov. Julius Meier and Portland Mayor George Baker foresaw a new era for industry and agriculture with the Bonneville Dam. In the ’70s, Gov. Tom McCall and Mayor Neil Goldschmidt fretted over the suburban bloat of immigrating Californians, a failing downtown Portland and families departing the city. The best laid plans of those two eras had very different fates. The Great Depression pretty much shelved the efforts of the ’30s. But the ’70s hatched the Portland and Oregon we know, from transit-oriented development to urban growth boundaries — and a worldwide reputation for planning ahead.

How successful this new generation of plans will be is anyone’s guess. Gov. Ted Kulongoski launched the Big Look in the wake of Measure 37’s shotgun blast into the state’s 35 years of land-use planning. The Metro Council invented the New Look to better implement its stalled Region 2040 Plan, released in 1995. Mayor Tom Potter conjured Vision PDX to “reconnect citizens and government” and forge the first city strategic plan. But national planning consultant John Fregonese warns, “Vision without action is hallucination.” Fregonese is taking his own fresh look at his home. A University of Oregon graduate in planning who worked as chief planner for Woodburn, Ashland and Metro, he also has conducted major planning efforts for Los Angeles, Nashville, Chicago, Denver, Houston and Dallas, as well as Utah and, currently, Louisiana. That’s planning, he boasts, for 60 million people.

Fregonese, 55, went to school in the McCall and Goldschmidt era. He was the major architect of Metro’s Region 2040, the 50-year vision for the 25 cities within metropolitan Portland’s urban growth boundary. But having taught a lot of the nation what he learned in Oregon, he says Oregon now needs to learn from the rest of the country. His newest gig: consulting on the state’s Big Look. Joining Fregonese at the chalkboard is Robert Grow, who oversaw the celebrated Envision Utah, and John Parr, who directed Denver’s Metro Vision 2020. Their common denominator, Fregonese says, is they both come from states, unlike Oregon, that guide land use for economic growth first and preservation second and with incentives rather than regulation.

In fact, both states once voted down McCall- and Oregon-style planning. Now, instead of corralling their cities with urban growth boundaries, they lure the development where they want it with roads and transit. If that’s sounds like a red-state strategy for tried-and-blue Oregon, consider that both Utah and Colorado have passed multibillion-dollar bonds for new roads and light rail. At their first presentation before the 10-member Big Look task force last Tuesday, Fregonese and his cohorts left little doubt about their view. Grow waxed enthusiastically about toll roads and private/public infrastructure partnerships, then Fregonese leveled his gaze at the task force to say, flatly, “I can’t think of a place where Oregon’s approach would now pass.” But with the current legislative hearings on Measure 37 packed with citizens on both sides demanding fast action, the state land-use system may get a Big Fix before the Big Look’s visioning gets focused.

Market forces is Metro’s new mantra, too. The Region 2040’s Plan to guide new growth to town centers mostly has failed everywhere but Portland, Lake Oswego and Gresham. The lesson: regulation and policy, alone, do not produce development. So with the predicted 1 million newcomers arriving more quickly than expected, Metro wants the New Look to be all action: turning 2040 into bricks and mortar. So Metro has ferried its small-town mayors to Vancouver, B.C., for inspiration. Its research nerve center has retooled with state-of-the-art technology to better predict where upfront government investment might lure more development while lessening the long-term costs of maintaining roads and schools. At the city level, Mayor Tom Potter’s Vision PDX is taking a more grass-roots approach, inviting feedback on opportunities and problems from all corners — from living room conversations to community theater to a survey that garnered 15,000 responses. The resulting vision is intended to guide more technical city planning efforts commencing this spring. But with Potter’s typical preference of fresh over seasoned, even Vision PDX’s executive committee is absent of any guides from previous Portland planning.

“It’s out-of-the-box,” says Sheila Martin, director of Portland State’s Institute for Portland Metropolitan Studies and co-chairwoman of Vision PDX. “It’s a big, open-ended process.” Longtime planners like George Crandall grumble about Vision PDX’s long timeline and $1.1 million price tag “to find out people want good schools.” But while Martin concedes that she’s generally a “more top-down person,” she says Potter’s bottom-up approach has teased out important tensions about schools, development and race. “We won’t be painting a utopian view of the future that can be,” she says of the next phase of the effort, “Vision Week” in June, where preliminary findings will be presented to the community. “We will be engaging people in a conversation about the tensions and the choices.” The most effective Oregon plans have grown out of crises, according to Carl Abbott, a Portland State University professor who writes extensively on the region’s planning efforts. He worries that all three efforts may be too high-level to be guides.

“I’m kind of bored and doubtful about the usefulness,” he says. “In the ’70s, downtown was collapsing. The Willamette Valley was in danger of being paved over and the coast was turning into Lincoln City. Planning wasn’t about envisioning a green, happy, healthy place.” Fregonese counters that, done right, plans can last a long time. Chicago, he points out, is still running off Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 vision. The plan’s centennial will be a major civic celebration. “Even though it’s 100 years old, it still casts Chicago in a light against the world that they still see themselves,” he says. “They named streets after the planners.”