April 13, 2005
To Beam Or Not To Beam?
That Is The Question
In today's Oregonian, columnist S. Renee MItchell waves a flag of caution to those supporting the Beam Development proposal for the Burnside Bridgehead project.
Mitchell, in essence, appears to argue that that Beam's supporters have gotten ahead of themselves, almost reflexively (and perhaps unthinkingly) latching onto that proposal without thinking things throught.
In the course of making this argument, however, Mitchell manages to be somewhat, well, misleading when she states that the Beam proposal "needs more of an upfront public investment" than the other proposals. Unfortunately, the final recommendations of the evaluation committee say otherwise.
On page seven of that document, there's a comparison of what they call the Financial Feasibility Gap for each proposal. While the total subsidy for each is broken out into different areas, here are the totals: Beam requests $20,601,442; Gerding/Edlen requests $50,710,867; and Opus requests $19,428,513.
You tell us: Which one of those is the largest public investment? Hint for those who still might require one: It isn't Beam.
Meanwhile, there's also a reponse to Mitchell from Brian Libby over at the Portland Architecture weblog. Only one point on this: Libby keeps pushing for the proposal with the "best buildings" to win. The problem, as Bruce Wood of Opus (or, rather, formerly of Opus but still working with them) has pointed out, is that the proposals are not yet at the stage where we can judge the architecture.
At this point, all we can judge is the philosophical (for lack of a better term) direction of the proposals from the different three development teams. The architectural specifics come much later.
One final note. We're not going to be able to make it to today's Portland Development Commission meeting at which the evaluation committee findings will be presented and further public testimony taken. So any of our readers who will be there are specifically invited to post reports in the comments to this item.