Portland ready to break out the plastic again (Jack Bog's Blog)

It's been a while since we've written about the huge debt load being taken on by the City of Portland. It's not because we've stopped paying attention. It's just that the city hasn't been borrowing money at the feverish pace that it did last year. There may have been a few sneaky lines of credit opened up here and there, but as far as a public, formal bond offering goes, it's been a quiet year indeed.

We've been wondering why that is. Part of the slowdown was no doubt attributable to the legal action challenging the city's abuse of the "urban renewal" finance system -- a challenge that has now reportedly been bought off. But even outside of "urban renewal," one would have expected some stray boondoggle or other to have sent the city back to Wall Street for another hit of burnable cash. And it hasn't been happening. If we didn't know better, we might suspect that fiscal responsibility has begun showing up at City Council meetings.

Whatever the reason for the quietude, it's about to be broken. The Portland Development Commission is about to ask the council to authorize around $36 million in new bonds to pay for the new one-stop homeless shelter and studio apartment building (above) that's going to go up in Old Town. The money will be paid back, with interest, with property tax dollars from the Pearl District.

It will be interesting to see what kind of interest rate the city is charged on these bonds in such hard times. Yes, the credit is the Pearl, but even Fake New York has seen brighter days financially.

Comments (7)

I hope it will have street-level maintained toilets, urinals and shower facilities...for those who can't even get into this 'one-stop' facility.

(What the hell does 'one-stop'mean? It sounds faintly pernicious.)

Okay....okay...ANYTHING proposed by PDC sound faintly pernicious.

Posted by godfry | October 8, 2009 6:05 PM

The PDC is doing this to in order to skim millions to pay themselves.

No boondoggle no skimming no pay

The PDC has redesignated the empty site next to the Strand in SoWa/Riverplace for student housing and is negotiating with none other than Homer Williams to develop it.

Why? To pay themselves and because no one will do a damn thing about it.

Posted by Ben | October 8, 2009 7:52 PM

PDC says there will be 130 studio apartments and 90 beds. The cost per sleeper comes to more than $760 per month.

Posted by Garage Wine | October 9, 2009 7:59 AM

I like to begin my morning with a chuckle.

Paid for with property tax dollars from the Pearl? Tell me again how many buildings in that part of town fall under the 10-year-tax-abatement umbrella.

And the good citizens near Jamieson Park don't even want a LOO in the neighborhood.

Posted by NW Portlander | October 9, 2009 9:34 AM

What a joke. How much less would it cost to use one of the many VACANT buildings elsewhere downtown rather than building another place in Old Town? Oh yeah, no way to line the pockets of the construction company patrons.

Posted by Mike (the other one) | October 9, 2009 11:01 AM

Sam and Randy couldn't get their insane hotel deal rammed through so now the developer weasels will still get all the dough they were promised, it will just have to happen in 30 or 40 million installments like this one...

Posted by RANZ | October 9, 2009 11:29 AM

"pay for the new one-stop homeless shelter and studio apartment building"

Didn't we formally call these "projects"

Remember how well that worked out?

Posted by What_Logic | October 19, 2009 9:32 PM

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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Portland ready to break out the plastic again

Comments (7)

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