January 27, 2005

Selection Of Bridgehead Developer Delayed Until April

Meanwhile, Opus Northwest Starts Getting Cranky

In an Oregonian article today on various bits from yesterday's Portland Development Commission meeting, which we missed because it conflicted with the morning's City Council session, is a new piece of information regarding the Burnside Bridgehead timeline.

The commission's board extended its schedule to pick the winning bid for the five-block Burnside Bridgehead project, a proposed mixed-use development at the east end of the Burnside Bridge. The delay will allow more time for the outpouring of public input on the project.

The commission had planned to pick a winner in February. But the date was changed to April 27.

SInce the article doesn't go into any detail as to why the Commission opted to push the decision all the way back into April (Chair Matt Hennessee on Saturday suggested a possible March timeframe), we have emailed Martha Richmond, PDC's public affairs manager, and are awaiting a response.

In the meantime, however, earlier today we received voicemail from one Nathaniel Clevenger, who has been handling communications for Opus Northwest during this process. He said that the delay in part is due to the Commission wanting the developers to have chance to make presentations of their revised proposals to the public.

While we have not yet had the chance to discuss the matter with Bruce Wood of Opus, Clevenger had some rather pointed opinions about what's going on.

I will tell you candidly that this thing is getting kind of weird because what is really supposed to be happening here is a develoepr is supposed to be chosen who can build the project first, and then the developer, you know, hopefully has the trust of the community that then the community gets more involved in the details of what the project would look like. This now is trying to get a project designed in advance of choosing a developer, and so it's kind of gone backwards.

Clevenger also sent email as a follow-up to that voicemail, in which he had more to say on this subject, stressing that he was speaking for himself and not for Wood.

... But, how is the community being served at this stage when what they need to be considering is the viability of the developer, not the viability of the developer's plan alone. Somehow, all of us (the press, the PDC, the developers and teams) need to do a better job of letting the public know that this stage of the process is designed to select a developer who has the ability to build a project the balances fairly the community's needs and the developer's financial risk/reward.

For some time now, Opus' pitch both to the Commission and the public has been that the pictures we've all been seeing from the developers should not be the basis for anyone's opinion or decision, because the specifics of the project will change once a selection has been made and the real design and financial work gets underway.

That's certainly true, as far as it goes. But lost in that analysis, and in the expanded version offered by Clevenger, are at least two salient points worth explaining here once again.

First, it ignores the importance of the "first instance" argument, wherein the public has every right to take into consideration how each developer thought about the site from the very beginning. That starting point and initial conceptualization reveals something about the philosophy of each developer, and thankfully much of the public and possibly even some people within PDC itself understand this.

Second, it in essence relies on an institutional intertia -- "this is how things are done" -- and fails to take into account that when it comes to a project such as this, the public has a not insignificant right to determine for itself just how a public agency will conduct the process. It's clear that the public believes in the values proposition that the entire Burnside Bridgehead process should be as open as possible. And it's increasingly just as clear that Opus doesn't much care for that public value.

If we can be allowed to take a stab at our own characterization of Opus' perspectives on all of this, we'd like to suggest that they boil down to the following.

Opus feels that the process is unfair, and in essence that they have been disadvantaged by the fact that one of their competitors had the gall (read: vision) to go, in some sense, above and beyond the requirements of the RFP -- and above and beyond Opus' own conceptions of "the ways things are done" -- to propose from the beginning something with direct and specific relevance to the Central Eastside.

We don't know about anyone else, but that sounds to us more like whiny sour grapes about having been outdone by a competing developer than anything else.

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