Yesterday's post on the proposed local improvement district for the insane proposed Burnside-Couch "couplet" on the west side of Portland contained some familiar names. We had Mike "Streetcar" Powell as the head of the group pushing the idea, and with him Philip Kalberer, Christopher Kopca, Richard Parker, Greg Wentworth, and Vic Rhode.

A reader familiar with the planned street chop-up and the players behind it, filled our ear with some background on two of the above-named crew:

These guys are local transportation/urban renewal mafia fixers from Vera [Katz]'s time and before. Rhodes was the City (transportation) Engineer who fixed the first streetcar/mall project, Airport Way and more. He's not a by-the-book guy....

Kopca was a PDC honcho in the same era. His specialty was moving blue money and pink money and yellow money around so that it appeared to be the right color and coming out of the right pocket, and arm-twisting to get six and seven figure contributions into the pot from bystanders in order to make it all go. The whole SoWhat parking lot shell game that looked on the surface like usual and customary guvmint real estate transactions, but was actually a fancy way of putting money in a private developer's pocket had their smell on it.

A bottle of wine says that if you shook the Main Post Office project hard enough, those two would fall out. On the surface that one is just moving tax dollars around from one public pocket to another, but I'd bet there are "project management" contracts out there that get paid a percentage of real estate dollar transactions.

Go by giant SUV with blackout windows.