[tworivers]

Wow. If it was April Fool's Day I'd be suspicious.


Mayor Sam Adams revisits idea of rejiggering Interstate 5
Published: Friday, April 06, 2012, 10:21 AM Updated: Friday, April 06, 2012, 10:50 AM
By Beth Slovic, The Oregonian

An expensive idea that first gained traction in Portland in the 1980s, flared again in the 1990s and resurfaced in the 2000s could rise again in some fashion under Mayor Sam Adams, who has nine months left in his term.

But city officials are so far keeping mum about the recent $11,000 study that shows a rejiggered Interstate 5 near Portland's Central Eastside Industrial District, declining this week to release "a draft concept-level diagram" of the interstate to The Oregonian.

Nonetheless, Adams has reached out to former Mayor Vera Katz and Nohad Toulan, dean emeritus of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University, who in 2004 led a committee that, among other things, supported burying about one mile of I-5 near the Central Eastside Industrial District. Both Katz and Toulan confirmed this week that Adams asked them to meet, although no date has been set.

Katz, for her part, said she was told that Adams wanted "to share a plan to bury the section of the freeway."

Jonna Papaefthimiou, a sustainability adviser to the mayor, said Adams instead wanted Katz and Toulan to know that their work eight years ago "had not been forgotten."

Back in 2004, Katz and Toulan studied how changing the freeway would create space for new development and strengthen Portlanders' connection with the east side of the Willamette River. Detractors, on the other hand, worried aloud about changing the nearby property's industrial character.

The concept of remaking Portland's waterfront on the east side is even older than that, however.

In 1988, Riverfront for People pushed a plan to remake the area guided by the image of Tom McCall Waterfront Park (which used to be Harbor Drive until the 1970s). "Our gem of a river is overwhelmed by concrete superstructures," a website for the group still reads today.

(As an aside, mayoral candidate and state legislator Jefferson Smith is listed as a former Riverfront for People member along with his father, R.P. Joe Smith. These days, Jefferson Smith says the east side of the river still has untapped potential, but he doesn't see any available money to execute new plans.)

Charlie Hales, another 2012 mayoral candidate, has also been part of reworking the freeway. In 1993, as a newly elected city commissioner, he asked a citizen commission to study the area and it recommended moving the freeway. Today, Hales also says he doesn't see how the city would have the resources to undertake such a huge task.

That's not a new problem, either.

"Why not conduct a study on how to grow a money tree?" barked one critic of the plan, according to an article in The Oregonian on Nov. 18, 1993.