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I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters elsewhere.
I've been in Portland three years, love it and want to help make it better. Let's keep it amicable!
It’s been (almost) 100 days since the mayor took office. And what does Portland think? So far, so good… but so far, not so much.
Were I an eccentric millionaire itching to throw money at bizarre flights of fancy, I’d seriously consider dropping $3.75 million or so on Portland’s currently cash-poor bike share project. Not only would a logo of my choosing (probably a miniature pastoral scene with me, smoking and obscured, Waldo-like, by a distant haystack) be spangled throughout […]
President Obama mapped a course from the Kenyan hospital of his birth to the White House. Now he wants to map your brain. Vigilance! In these fractured political times, it’s nice to see a bipartisan effort. A Democratic state senator in New York and a Republican city councilman in New York City are among six […]
It’s been three months since the city started closing the oft-chaotic corridors of Old Town’s “entertainment district” on weekend nights. Now—with the pilot phase set to end and a planned visit from Mayor Charlie Hales this weekend—the Portland Police Bureau is claiming success. In a <a href="report [PDF] obtained by the Mercury, police say they’ve […]
Dirk VanderHart As the Mercury reported earlier this week, Portland fire officials have been fretting over the stalled apartment structure at SE Division and 37th Avenue, fearing it might attract the attention of vandals or squatters. It looks like those fears were founded. As first reported by Willamette Week, Portland police arrested three trespassers at […]
Cypriots, whose keening over the government’s freezing of their personal wealth has nagged at us from headlines for weeks, finally got to re-access their bank accounts today. The real fiscal mismanagement? No bank runs! There’s nothing better than an old-fashioned bank run. That staid sniffling, meanwhile, has led to a bonanza on Wall Street. The […]
The corner of SE 37th and Division is ground zero for the city’s zoning drama.
Cougar sighting! Non-figurative cougar sighting near Oregon Health and Science University! The Portland Police Bureau just sent out the following press release (pasted below). Gather your children and pets. UPDATE, 5:40 pm: We love an animal story here at Blogtown, so we hit the phones on this cougar sighting. Our questions: Is the apocryphal cat […]
Good news from ABC’s Nightline, everybody. Portland police are hard at work tracking down your stolen goods on Craigslist. They’re also maybe our city’s greatest collective of MC Hammer fans. Just a ragtag bunch of misfit cops, ferreting out fenced goods and jittering side to side in baggy parachute pants. We apologize for not telling […]
Dirk VanderHart The feared fire hazard While rhetoric flies and the city’s tenuous stance on the permit of a controversial southeast apartment project congeals into seeming permanence, one agency is quietly fretting on the sidelines: the Portland Fire and Rescue Bureau. Fire officials worry the proposed 81-unit structure — incomplete and wreathed in garish yellow […]
Rex Burkholder Former Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder — who departed the body this year because of term limits — hasn’t been shy in his criticisms of new parking requirements city council will take up April 4. He testified at a meeting of the city’s Planning and Sustainability Commission earlier this month — part of a […]
As Portland’s back-and-forth over parking-free apartments reaches a fresh fever pitch — and council readies itself to discuss new mandatory parking minimums for bigger projects — this study [PDF] is making its way around the web. It’s a look at what happened in downtown Los Angeles when the city eased up on parking requirements and […]
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