For Cascade Station, different rules, bigger signs
Billboards - Commissioner Randy Leonard asks the city attorney to investigate the legalities of Ikea's new sign
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
The Oregonian
The city of Portland has been to the Oregon Supreme Court and back fighting for its controversial size limits on billboards and commercial signs.
But it took only the prospect of the Swedish company Ikea coming to town to get the city to relax its rules.
The evidence now rises at Cascade Station, at the intersection of Northeast Airport Way and Interstate 205, in a new calling card that's four times higher and 10 times larger than any new sign allowed elsewhere in the city: 100 feet high with three panels that are each 13 feet by 52 feet.
"It's so big it has to have blinking lights so that a jet doesn't plow into it," says City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who oversees city signage but knew nothing of the sign until he drove past it.
"I'm not convinced this is legal," he added. "We have clear public policy. The sign code is rooted in land-use law. There are requirements for public hearings."
Since the early 1990s, Portland has limited new commercial signs to a height of 25 feet and an area of 200 square feet. And for most of that time, the city has fought AK Media and Clear Channel in court over the regulations.
In a Multnomah County courtroom Thursday, Clear Channel will make closing arguments in another attempt to force Portland to allow dozens of new billboards across the city.
But in 2003 as the city was fighting Clear Channel, Leonard says, then-Mayor Vera Katz set into motion a different set of sign rules for Ikea.
"She called people into a room and told them, 'I want this Ikea to happen, and I don't want anything to stop it.' "
Ikea doesn't see it that way.
"We came to the dance after the rules were made," said Joseph Roth, public affairs director for Ikea United States. "We made very clear what our store and signage requirements were. And we were told that they would be compatible with Cascade Station."
None of the other officials who negotiated the deal -- the Port of Portland, the Portland Development Commission or Katz -- could be reached for comment.
But the sign regulations governing the Cascade Station Development -- and Ikea -- are dramatically different from those that apply to the rest of the city.
The city's "Title 32" code outlines numerous sign requirements throughout the city, many of them specific to particular areas, from the so-called "Broadway Bright Lights District" to Old Town Chinatown. But at Cascade Station both signs and building designs are approved by a four-person committee created under a development agreement negotiated among the city, the Port and Cascade Station's main developer, Trammell Crow.
The city and the Port of Portland hatched Cascade Station in 1997 in a complicated deal in which international construction giant Bechtel Corp. received development rights to 120 acres of long-dormant Port land for constructing Airport MAX. The rail line opened in 2001, but development sputtered until Ikea signed on.
The store -- which sells everything from candlesticks to kit-of-part houses -- at 280,000 square feet is more than four times the size of Cascade Station's originally planned 65,000-square-foot limit on single stores.
"We want to make sure that we bring businesses to Portland that support good business practices, including family-wage jobs and benefits," Mayor Tom Potter said in 2005. "Ikea measures up on every count."
But Leonard, who locked horns with Katz over the city's restrictive sign code soon after his election in 2002, calls the Cascade Station's sign arrangement "a scheme not a process, negotiated with clear intent to get around city design-review procedures." And while he and the city attorney's office investigate its legalities, he has put a halt to any more sign permits in the district.
Leonard's move has stopped several signs, among them a 65-footer with five 90-square-foot panels advertising other new stores at Cascade Station. That's more than two times higher and larger than what's allowed elsewhere
"It's not that we necessarily disagree that signs should be smaller," says Fred Bruning of CenterCal Properties who submitted the permit. "But you can't unring a bell. We have signed leases based on certain signage."
City planner Joe Zehnder declined to comment on the legalities of the process given the city attorney's investigation. But he pointed out that the City Council passed the allowances for different design guidelines in 2000 -- long before Ikea began its negotiations with the city.
"All along," says Zehnder, "there was a sense of needing additional flexibility at Cascade Station because of the big risks and public benefits involved, like bringing light rail to the airport."
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575;
randygragg@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...190.xml&coll=7
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