Next Up at City Council, 7/9 – 10, 2008

By far the most important issue on the Portland City Council Agenda this week is on Wednesday afternoon:

992 TIME CERTAIN: 2:00 PM – Support a Replacement Bridge Crossing with Light Rail Transit as the Locally Preferred Alternative for the Columbia River Crossing Project (Resolution introduced by Commissioner Adams)

A $4.2 billion bridge should be of interest to all. Bring snacks, as there is likely to be lots of testimony.

The Wednesday morning Agenda starts with four folks testifying under Citizen Communications. Two plan to speak on the Petersons store lease at SW 10th/Yamhill, which has received coverage in the media.

Then two interesting, unrelated Time Certain items:

961 TIME CERTAIN: 9:30 AM – Willamette River Combined Sewer Overflow program update (Presentation introduced by Commissioner Adams)

962 TIME CERTAIN: 10:00 AM – Adopt the Sgt. Jerome Sears United States Army Reserve Center Reuse Master Plan and recommend redevelopment of the site for a mixed-income, rental and ownership housing development that includes permanent supportive housing for homeless single adults and homeless families with special needs and designate Community Partners for Affordable Housing as the preferred developer of the Sears site (Previous Agenda 877; Resolution introduced by Mayor Potter and Commissioner Fish)

The latter site looked like it was going for housing at the first hearing, then seemed likely to end up as an emergency preparedness depot at the second, now may be back to housing. Don’t miss the exciting conclusion of this three-part series, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel (any other recovering fans of Batman, the TV series, out there?).

This is good for public process and citizen involvement:

991 Change filing deadline date for documents to be included on the Council Agenda (Ordinance; amend Code Section 3.02.030)

The Ordinance says that providing on-line access to Ordinances, Resolutions, and documents linked from the City Council Agenda is causing a hardship for staff with the current filing deadline for those items. But instead of asking for more staff, or discontinuing the service, it says:

4. After a year, the Auditor’s Office has determined that while we were meeting our goal of providing this information online it has created a hardship on our staff to gather, organize, and link the documents to the agenda within the current timeline outlined in City Code. In order to continue this program we will need to change the filing deadline for submitting agenda items to our office from Thursdays at 5:00 pm to Wednesdays at 5:00 pm.

Good work, Auditor Gary Blackmer and Council Clerk Karla Moore-Love.

The Council will hold hearings this Thursday afternoon (traditionally the time/day reserved for land use issues):

993 TIME CERTAIN: 2:00 PM – Amend Portland Comprehensive Plan map and Zoning Map for properties along and adjacent to Killingsworth St between NE 14th to 17th Aves (Ordinance introduced by Mayor Potter; amend Title 33)

994 TIME CERTAIN: 3:00 PM – Declare intent to terminate local improvement district formation proceedings to construct street improvements in the SW 51st Avenue and Buddington Street Local Improvement District (Resolution introduced by Commissioner Adams; C-10028)

995 Declare intent to initiate local improvement district formation proceedings to construct street improvements in the SW 53rd Avenue and Buddington Street Local Improvement District (Resolution introduced by Commissioner Adams; C-10029)

Following the handy-dandy links to the ordinances to figure out what’s happening in the last two items, we find that the local taxation district for funding street improvements in the Far SW neighborhood was approved with 53% of the properties being “waivered”, i.e. the developer sold them without providing street improvements, leaving future owners to foot the bill. The City rightly has the policy that it “does not recommend initiation of local improvement district formation proceedings due to the waiver of remonstrance support being higher than petition support.” So a subsection of the original petitioners are moving forward in Resolution 995 to fund a smaller area of street improvements. On the surface, it sounds like several residents are getting their needs and desires met, in different ways. I will be interested to hear if that is indeed so.

Read (or re-read, for longtime visitors to this blog) this excellent historical background article about funding of street improvements in Portland, by Frank Dufay in a Guest Post on this blog a year ago.