October 31, 2003

Mysterious New Transit Mall Options Remain Unseen As Public Comment Deadline Nears

At last week's public hearing on the Portland Mall Revitalization Project, the distributed Fall 2003 Progress Report & Comment Form asked for comments on three questions relevant to this particular stage of the protect:

Should a Portland Mall light rail extension be built on 5th and 6th Avenues? Should light rail extend from Union Station to a southern terminus located at SW Jackson Street near Portland State University?

Are the seven pairs of proposed Portland Mall light rail stations on 5th and 6th avenues located optimally along the alignment to serve th eneeds of the downtown and transit communities?

Which type of station configuration (left side, island or right side) would best serve the three sets of stations in the Central Mall and why? (Note: all six locations do not necessarily need to be configured the same)

Responses to these questions were requested by November 17, slightly under one month from the date of the public hearing.

Problem is, as was revealed at the hearing, there are now three additional station configurations available for consideration, which according to Mayor Katz somehow relate to the design theme of "great pedestrian and transit streets around the world." Except they weren't made public at the hearing.

Last week, a spokesperson for TriMet told me that the three new platform designs would be on their website "late next week" (which, of course, means this week). As of this evening, this does not appear to be the case.

Where the entire process is headed at the moment is towards the recommendation by the Mayor's Steering Committee of the so-called Locally Preferred Alternative, which then passes through TriMet, Portland City Council, and Metro Council processes. In essence, public comment on the Conceptual Design Report is meant to be taken into consideration when formulating the LPA.

As TriMet has held various open houses this year (one set in July and one set in October), culminating with last week's public hearing, the public has been commenting on the only three designs presented to them.

Now, as the deadline approaches for public comment prior to the Locally Preferred Alternative recommendation, three still-unreleased design alternatives wait in the wings, within increasingly less time for anyone other than the Mayor's Steering Committee to have an opportunity to respond to them.

Certainly, this is not a circumstance into which the public involvement process has been deliberately manipulated. For whatever reason, it was determined that the three existing station configurations weren't quite providing what the Steering Committee wanted to see, and three more proposals made their way into consideration. That sort of flexibility is not somehow irresponsible or necessarily unwarranted.

But if new designs are going to suddenly be injected into the deliberations right at the tail end of the public comment period leading into the Steering Committee's decision on an LPA, then it would seem that the powers-that-be need to insist upon an extension of the public comment period.

Certainly, that would be the proper thing to do. At the very least, looking at it from the standpoint of politics, the last thing Portland needs these days is yet another public involvement debacle.

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