July 18, 2003
Veterans Group To Support MARC Proposal
One thing I haven't had the time to post is a follow-up to the previously-mentioned Portland Business Alliance forum on plans for Memorial Coliseum. While there wasn't much in the way of new information on the proposals themselves, perhaps the biggest development is the one picked up by The Oregonian, who zeroes in on the same element I would have:
Portland-area veterans will toss their political support to an amateur recreation center as the best option for renovating Memorial Coliseum.
"We want to keep it for the kids," said Bill T. Scott, secretary-treasurer of the Veteran's Action Committee, a group formed to seek a consensus among veterans about the coliseum's future.
Scott announced the veterans' choice Wednesday at a Portland Business Alliance breakfast meeting. He said the announcement came after 10 meetings with veterans groups.
According to my notes, Scott also said that his Committee had actually worked with the designers of the MARC proposal on the memorial aspects. For the local veterans groups, that's a fair degree of progress, since once upon a time there were rather consistent rumblings that the Coliseum should essentially not be touched at all. As Scott himself put it at this forum, the original attitude as something akin to, "They're going to give us what we want, or we're going to burn the City down."
One other interesting tidbit from this forum was that Doug Obletz (pushing for MARC) seemed to quietly stress that the trick for the MARC right now is that various sources of funding are possibilities, not they can't get any real commitments until the City indicates it's choosing the MARC proposal. There's a sort of catch-22, in that the City might not be prepared to choose the MARC unless the funding sources are more clear, while those funding sources might not step up to the plate until they know the MARC project will go forward.
So (and The Oregonian mentions this too), while the support of the Veteran's Action Committee doesn't solve the financial issues, it at least presumably resolves on of the biggest potential political headaches for deciding which future to pursue for the Coliseum.