Multnomah County gets into the ramrod act on Paulson stadium deal
Did you know that the Multnomah County board of commissioners gets to pass on the remodel of PGE Park for Little Lord Paulson and his soccer team upgrade? There it is on Thursday morning's agenda -- the county has to approve the City of Portland's recent zoning change to allow a 15,000-square-foot private sports clinic to be built inside PGE Park as part of the stadium's re-renovation.
And get this -- the county is declaring an "emergency," rather than going through the normal process for adopting ordinances. Other than making up for bad planning on the part of the city and Paulson, it's hard to see what makes immediate adoption of this ordinance "necessary for the health, safety and general welfare of the people of Multnomah County," as it declares.
Shame on Wheeler and Cogen if they rubber-stamp this without a full process. They don't need to join in the kissing of Paulson's ring.
| Posted at 8:46 AM | Permalink |
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Comments (7)
Emergency ordinances do two things: 1) are effective on passage, and 2) keep the item from being referred to the voters. Normally, any regular ordinance can be referred to the voters if enough signatures are collected after the Commissioner's second vote for passage. Emergency ordinances can't.
Posted by Stu | March 1, 2010 9:55 AM
Horse's heads in the beds of the Multnomah County commissioners or worse????
Posted by Portland Native | March 1, 2010 10:12 AM
Why don't they just stop this charade and kabuki dance, tell the taxpayers of Portland to sit down, and shut up so outsiders can be enriched at the public expense. We'd better hope they don't levy an additional tax to ensure the endeavor at least breaks even (including a reasonable profit for the "owners") regardless of attendance at the stupid games.
Posted by Joe | March 1, 2010 10:16 AM
Jack you are incorrect.
The county’s approval or lack thereof has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that is going forward at the stadium. As is clearly stated in the memo accompanying the ordinance, the impact of a no vote would be the invalidation of an intergovernmental agreement about cooperative land use planning for areas that are outside the city limits but inside the urban service boundary.
In order to keep that small group of citizens from getting caught between two different codes, we keep them identical. That periodically requires that the county adopt provisions that don’t impact us and over which we have absolutely no control. It is solely the discretion of the City Council as to whether or not the stadium deal goes through. A no vote won't stop the stadium, but it will end our IGA with the city around code consistency.
Posted by Ted Wheeler | March 1, 2010 12:05 PM
"We have to rubber-stamp what the city does." Well, then, why bother having both levels of government voting on this? Seems like an awful waste of time and money.
Posted by Jack Bog | March 1, 2010 12:40 PM
why bother having both levels of government voting on this
It's generally a good thing that the areas that Ted is referring to are covered by the IGA, and the codes that apply are CoP urban codes, not rural county codes. These areas likely will be pulled into the city at some point, and the city will then be responsible for services.
We have many examples from past decades of urban-like enclaves in rural areas of Multnomah County that were not well thought out, planned, or executed, and all of the taxpayers pay the price of serving these areas. I don't want to go back to doing things that way.
They will be urban. But for now, these areas are in the county. And we thus need duplicate codes.
Posted by John Rettig | March 1, 2010 11:27 PM
In other words, the Paulson bunch has something on Teddy. Can we expect more of him working in tandem with these villains?
It's the Detroitisation of Portland.
Posted by RANZ | March 2, 2010 9:14 AM