- BT Livermore
This week’s article on Forest Park details some of the dire financial straits the park is facing. But if all them doggone numbers are too snoozy for you, here’s a bit of he-said she-said bickering that didn’t make it into the paper’s pages.
Jon over at BikePortland has a piece up on the tension between mountain biking activist Frank Selker and the City Club of Portland, which will vote on a report about Forest Park tomorrow and blames cyclists for “rutted trails that gather water and create erosion.”
Selker also takes offense at a statement that’s been repeated by the City Club, essentially saying that the Forest Park Single Track Cycling Committee was formed illegally:
C-9. Currently there is organized pressure to increase biking activity in the park. The process established in the 1995 Management Plan to assess such requests has not been followed. Instead, the city established a committee whose stated goal is to increase biking in the park, without having first done the studies required in the 1995 plan.
Selker told the Mercury last week that after those accusations emerged, the city asked its Bureau of Development Services if the formation of a cycling advocacy group was in fact against the plan. “The BDS replied that the plan does not specify an order in which things have to be done,” he says.
In addition, he says, some people on the single-track committee, ostensibly looking “to increase biking in the park,” were actually trying to sabotage its chances.
“Some of the people on the committee really just wanted to kill the committee,” says Selker. “You can imagine how much fun that was. They claimed [like the City Club] that we were acting in violation of the management plan, which was completely false. I’ll buy you dinner if you can show me that.”
Selker gained notoriety when he organized a push for cyclists to join the Forest Park Conservancy in late 2008. This contributed around 100 new members to the organization of 1,600—hardly a voting majority, but definitely a greater presence. Conservancy Executive Director Michelle Bussard says that’s fine: the organization has a “y’all-come” attitude.
The biking debate is “a conversation that’s very divisive,” says Bussard. “People come to it with a lot of personal agendas.”
Selker raised his objections at a recent City Club town hall meeting, much to the chagrin of some Club members. He’s proposing some small changes to the City Club report before tomorrow’s vote. Again, check out BikePortland for details.