Maybe Wapato can be adapted to serve as the Convention Center hotel.

The holidays have always been a great time to slip things like this past public scrutiny.

The agency said Metro staffers have shaved some $7 million from the project’s original $247.5 million cost.

oh wow! Thats like...Thats like... A rounding error?

Nuke it from space...Kill it with fire...Drive a wooden stake thru it's heart. It doesn't matter.

The publicly subsidized Hotel Zombie always comes back from the dead.

Beware of Black Friday when everybody goes shopping.

Maybe they ought to put this thing down until we see if there's any jobs left in Portland when the recession/depression hits.

You know Adams wants another monument so when his new buddy Hankn Ashforth visits him and dangle news places for the streetcar to go there will be linchpins created.

I believe Sam stated he would support it if it "penciled" out. Great, a college dropout who declared bankruptcy is manning the business end of that pencil.

Do you have something against the NBA All-Star Jamboree? The NBA has all but guaranteed the event if only we had a proper hotel. I am sure that weekend alone would pay for the hotel in full. Wouldn't it?

No. Not even close. One weekend at 100% occupancy would be but a drop in the bucket of the massive amounts of public debt that would be needed to build the thing.

What if the city opened it's own jewelry store in the hotel lobby. With the way the NBAers crave bling, we might have a shot.

Might a Hummer or Cadillac dealership in there as well.

$7 million: oh wow! Thats like...Thats like... A rounding error?

For the [rimshot] it was all the soft costs that someone, somehow forgot.

I'm curious, how many of you voted for Sam?

I keep wondering who the customer is on this: Clearly not the voting citizens who will never use it but will absorb the whole tab. Not the honest locally-owned, tax-paying existing businesses, who will get more of the wind sucked out of them. Not the existing hospitality business, who even if owned elsewhere contribute at least jobs to the economy. Not other political leaders who are mostly smart enough to know these things are guaranteed losers. Who? I don't get it. Who are these pols trying to impress?

Worst of all, a highly respected bureaucrat was quoted to me, by someone with no reason to lie, as saying that the reason a community center at the Washington High School site is dead in the water is that the user base would include black people and the sight or rumor of race mixing in a public recreation center and pool would scare away convention center business.

It makes me wonder if that is what the convention center hotel is about -- they want to fleece us for this thing so that they can attract conventioneers who they thing would be averse to rubbing shoulders with people of color on Max or a bus.

Is this about making Portland safe for conventioneers afraid of race-mixing? Pass the barf bag.

What is worse; the hotel or $100 million to hank paulsons kid for his play package financed by dear old dad. I'm sure the kid will also get NO OVERSIGHT language in his package as sam the SHAM engineerd for Vera in the PGE park fiasco.