May 01, 2005

Our Open Questions For Opus Northwest

And Lingering Questions For PDC

Now that we've moved several days beyond the Portland Development Commission's rogue decision to select Opus Northwest over the community-backed Beam Development for the Burnside Bridgehead project, it's time to start focusing on what their choice faces as it begins its role as the preferred developer.

First, a couple of lingering thoughts from the decision itself. While PDC Chair Matt Hennessee, in the prepared statement read before the vote, said that the Board was basing its decision on what they considered to be the most important critera -- developer capacity -- we don't recall any indication in the many months of public process that any one of the many criteria for the selection was going to be weighted more than any other.

Further, on the subject of "bang for the buck" and trying to get the most for the least amout of public funding, we admit to some confusion, since the PDC repeatedly stated, over and over again, that the selection of any one of the three developers vying for the project was not a commitment to that developer's stated need for public funding. In which case, we fail to see why that element apparently was weighted as heavily as it was by the Board.

It's entirely possible that the Board members thought through those issues, and have explanations for them. "But the commission, and particularly Hennessee," to quote today's Randy gragg column, "fumbled every opportunity to help the public understand the process."

For PDC to go through what at times seemed like an endless stretch of public process, through which the community expressed a clear favorite, backed by informed opinion, and then not only vote for the other serious contender but take almost no time or effort at all to really explain that vote beyond a few catch-phrased bromides makes a mockery of that very process.

It isn't enough to engage the public in the discussion, vote the other way, and in essence reduce the explanation to some variant of, "Being listened to doesn't mean being agreed with." A public body such as PDC has a responsibility, when making a decision such a this, after a process such as this, to properly engage the community as equals by providing a forthright and detailed explanation as to how the Board arrived at its decision.

But we said this was going to be about some questions for Opus Northwest now that they are the chosen developer for the project. So, enough with the disgression into challenging PDC to fulfill its responsibility to the public to adequately detail its reasoning. Let's get to it.

First, there's the design issue. While the Opus contention (via Bruce Wood, about whom we'll have more in a minute) that this stage of the process wasn't about the specifics of the design and architecture was certainly correct, this stage was about the conceptual -- and cultural -- direction of each developer's proposals.

In the main, Wood focused on this issue of the process not yet being about design specifics mainly as a response to the overwhelming community support for Beam. But in doing so, he appeared to be insinuating that the community was, well, too stupid to understand what was being decided at this stage of the game. He tried to dismiss the community's support for the conceptual and cultural direction of the Beam proposal as a mistaken support for design specifics.

But in our experience, the community was operating under no such illusions that what they were supporting were design specifics. For us at any rate, Wood's insinuation to the contrary was something of an insult to the intelligence of the community, which in fact well understood what was and what wasn't being decided at this point.

Which brings us around to something else that PDC kept calling one of the stengths of the Opus proposal: Its unity of design.

On several occasions, community supporters of the Beam proposal argued that this unity wasn't a strength at all, because the one thing they did not want on the site was a series of buildings all grouped into a single monolithic design concept. It wanted a variety and a mix which reflected and referenced the variety of the Central Eastside itself.

So while Wood was correct that we weren't deciding on support for architectural specifics was correct, what we were deciding on was support for the conceptual and cultural direction which would motivate the eventual design specifics of each proposal. And the community made their opinion on that count achingly clear: So-called unity of design is precisely what it does not want at the Burnside Bridgehead site. Whether or not Opus gets this -- and accepts it -- remains to be seen.

Second, there's the developer capacity issue, which Hennessee says was so central to the Board's selection of Opus in the first place.

Here, the operative question for us is this: Will the fact that Opus is putting so much of its own money into this development, and in theory will require less in the way of making up a financial gap (with public funds, tax increment financing, Federal tax credits, etc.) become a rationale for them to exert far more control over the end result than would have been the case with greater public investment?

In other words, safeguards need to be put into place to ensure that Opus can't take a cue from PDC and disregard the community's wishes, and then simply say, "It's our money, we can do what we want here."

Which brings us into the third issue, at least as we see it so far. As reported here and elsewhere, Bruce Wood is leaving (or has left) Opus Northwest to form his own company, and in that capacity will be taken on by Opus to continue to spearhead the Bridgehead project. The nature of this relationship needs to be spelled out, particularly as it regards the decision-making processes and control when it comes to Opus' money.

Presumably, when Wood was actually heading this region's arm of Opus, he had a little more say over the use of its money during its development projects. Now that he's gone independent, and simply operating under some sort of contractual arrangement with Opus, to what degree will Wood lose what he said was one of the strengths of the Opus proposal, which was that there would be one person in charge?

A number of our readers have been following the Bridgehead story as closely and for as long as we have. So we invite them to post any other questions that PDC, Opus Northwest, and Bruce Wood need to answer now that the develoepr selection has been made.

Wednesday's decision caused yet another major hit to PDC's credibility with much of the community, and that credibility was pretty much shot to begin with. The fact that Hennessee and the other Board members (Gragg points out that Hennessee was the only one to make any statement at all during the vote) neglected their duty to fully roll out an explanation to the public as to how they came to their decision only makes it worse.

Given that context, it's all the more critical that the parties involved directly and publicly address the many open questions which hang in the air now that Opus has been selected.

Posted at 10:18 AM | PermalinkComments (3) | TrackBacks (2)
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