January 29, 2005
New Timeline Being Established For Burnside Bridgehead
Revised Schedule Should Be Announced Soon
It's been known since the Portland Development Commission's meeting on Wednesday that the selection of a developer for the Burnside Bridgehead project has been postponed until April 27. Within the next few days, we should learn just what the schedule leading up to that date will look like.
Earlier this week, The Oregonian said that the decision was delayed in order to "allow more time for the outpouring of public input on the project", while a spokesperson for one of the developers said the delay would give the developers the chance to make presentations of their revised proposals to the public.
So here's what we know as of today.
According to Lew Bowers, a senior development manager at PDC, the new timeline extending into the end of April was driven by several factors.
Wanting to give the development teams several weeks to reflect upon the new public input and update their proposals; the need to have a firm date after which no changes to the proposals would be accepted; the need to have some time for the updated proposals to be disseminated and for the public to have time to review them; a desire to have another public presentation by the developers; and, finally, the constraint of the Commission's schedule of meetings.
While the specific dates and events are still being finalized, in its essence the revised schedule functions almost as a reboot of the entire process.
Think of it as if all of the public comment generated since the original proposals were announced in essence now has been incorporated into a kind of new Request for Proposals, with community priorities incorporated into its requirements or suggestions. Drafts of the proposed schedule suggest some combination of the same types of events we've seen thus far.
Some members of the community will find this expasperating, to be sure. With so many people falling in behind what we've called the "first instance" argument, the Beam proposal has never lost its position as the community favorite. The extended timeline, many argue, is a front for allowing one of the other developers to convert its proposal into something sufficiently Beam-like to give the Commission enough cover to select a more favored developer.
Our own observation is that once the evaluation committee pushed all three developers for responses to various questions and concerns that both it and the public had, and once the Commission permitted the developers to begin making alterations to their proposals, there was little choice but to have another round of public involvement process based upon those revised proposals.
Whether or not the Commission should ever have allowed the developers to have a second crack at their proposals is something to which we don't have an answer. But once they did, it would have been difficult to avoid further public process as a result, as aggravating as that can be for supporters of the Beam proposal, amongst whose ranks we count ourselves.
In all likelihood, supporters of Beam will have to ramp-up their "first instance" argument as the new proposals are rolled out, at least if the initial revisions by Gerding/Edlen provide any indication, since some of its concepts appeared to be driven not so much by public feedback as by the lifting of elements from the Beam proposal.
With a little luck, the new schedule should be made clear early next week, and we should be able to start reporting on the revised proposals themselves starting sometime next week as well. Then we can all start taking stock of where the Burnside Bridgehead discussion is going to lead next.