If property tax increment from the Airport URA is supposed to be used to pay off URA bonds, how can the URA size be reduced before that indebtedness is fully repaid? Wouldn't reducing the URA's size dilute the security for the bonds? That can't possibly be allowed without the bondholders' consent, can it? If I were a bondholder, I'd expect the URA to stay the same size, so that property tax increment remains dedicated to paying me back. WTF?

They gotta feed the beast, or else the beast supports someone else in the next election.

They appear to be taking off acreage which is primarily valueless wetlands and useless for property tax revenue generation.

Too bad the story was so typical and missing BIG parts.

Like the size of debt,

the amount divereted every year from basic services peoperty taxes to retiree the debt,

and how many more years, or decades, it will take to retire the debt and finally return the increment to basic services.

It wouls also be interesting to get the full stoyr on every UR distrcit and their effect collectively.

Is the PDC meeting their debt obligations? Or has revenue fallen short
because of calamities such as SoWa and the PDC is shifting monies around, legally or otherwise, to obscure their insolvency and mismanagement?

The journalist should be reporting facts and the story instead of parotting the rhetoric and tales from the PDC dark side.

"Ben" wrote "They appear to be taking off acreage which is primarily valueless wetlands and useless for property tax revenue generation."

Even assuming that all the land that is proposed to be excised from the Airport URA is completely valueless wetlands, isn't this still a bad deal for the bondholders? Taken to the logical extreme, would it be acceptable to include a valuable skyscraper within a URA, but not an adjacent and less-valuable parking lot, assuming they each occupy discrete parcels? Doesn't reducing the size of the URA still dilute the bondholder's security, because the creation of a new URA reduces receipts to the city's general fund, which is the backstop full-faith-and-credit (chortle, chortle!) security for the bonds?

Gee what a surprise - More development dollars for downtown. Sam really doesn't give rats a$$ about anything more than a block away from the streetcar, does he?

At first, I had to wonder if all of this inane redevelopment, including the bike lane fiasco, was deliberate. Someone at City Hall really, really loathes and detests Portland, and is determined to take out the whole city in the most effective way short of burying it under a half-mile of red-hot pyroclastic flow from Mount Hood. Then I remind myself of Riddell's Law, "Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy," and it all makes perfect sense.

Well deduced, Trif' -- Their power and wealth give them mass and momentum, not insight and intelligence.

Wetlands aren't useless or have no value. I have a friend who paid $75,000 for 175 acres of wetlands along the Columbia, knowing that the Corp of Engineers would pay over $250,000 for the land the next day. Sure enough, they made that offer. He held onto it, knowing that it's value would even go up more.

Wetlands are like carbon credits, money in the bank. So they do have value in an urban renewal district and they should be taxed so.

Another example was a 25 acre parcel along the Sandy river-1/2 of it wetland in the flood zone. A friend bought it for $75,000 and one year later sold it to Metro from our taxpayers funded "open space fund" for $275,000. Wetlands are a lucrative business.

Texas Triffid Ranch:
At first, I had to wonder if all of this inane redevelopment, including the bike lane fiasco, was deliberate. Someone at City Hall really, really loathes and detests Portland, and is determined to take out the whole city in the most effective way short of burying it under a half-mile of red-hot pyroclastic flow from Mount Hood.

We should have rebelled when the slogan was changed from The City of Roses to The City that Works. That was a deliberate move and significant because it has been downhill ever since. Easier to be the City that Works You Over! The City of Roses somehow wouldn't fit with all the abuse we have been through. Yes, I think it has all been deliberate.