This past week at City Council

Reporters have given us lots of information over the past two days, about what was said and done on important issues by the Portland City Council this week. Scott Moore’s Mercury Blogtown post has so much news I’m not even going to try to summarize here – please read it. Stop before reading the comments if you’re averse to cussing, but reading those too gives a good sense of public reaction to things like making # 6 bus riders transfer to the Streetcar to get downtown. From Scott’s write-up on funding the Eastside Streetcar:

“For the last question, the proposal has a half-million pulled away from existing bus service–the idea is that the No. 6 bus line would stop on the east side and riders would have to transfer to the streetcar in order to get downtown. Someone must have poked Dan Saltzman with a stick, because he found this possibility to be an “awkward impediment” to traveling from North/Northeast Portland to downtown.

PDOT [Portland Department of Transportation – AF] staff assured him that there’d be a public process before that happened, in order to engage the community. Saltzman scoffed: “That sounds like something we’re all too often accused of–we’ve made up our mind, but we’re still going to discuss it with you.”

Yay Dan! Yay Scott for reporting!

Amy J. Ruiz gives more information on the process (hem hem) for renaming Interstate Avenue here.

James Mayer wrote an nice summary of the Council hearing on the Transportation Systems Development charge issue in the Oregonian yesterday. The one I covered here. It’s short, so again, read it yourself, please. I greatly appreciate reading reports that seem to cover the facts rather than being slanted with opinion. Also, I forgot to note in my post, that Sam Adams deserves major kudos for having directed and published the study on which neighborhoods gain and lose in transportation funding. He said he’d do it during his campaign. He did it. And then hasn’t taken or received much credit for it, that I’ve seen. Rather, he’s kept the focus on what the study found. Nice work, Sam.