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Good morning, Portland! We’ve got another wet and windy week ahead of us, with a mid-week ray of sunshine expected on Wednesday. Get out your puddle-stompers and get up to speed on this Monday’s news:
– Cool news: An estimated $1.2 million from President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill will be going to the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). Less cool: Most of it is going to highways. SNORE. The Mercury’s Isabella Garcia breaks it down here
– More than three years after first agreeing to form a union, Burgerville Workers Union are weeks away from finalizing its first contract with management. (Yes, this means you might be able to stop boycotting them soon!)
– What’s this? Columbia Sportswear leadership attempted to crush a union drive among its warehouse employees at the start of the pandemic? All while Columbia CEO Tim Boyle collected praise for cutting his salary in 2020? Our hero.
– In other union news:
Saturday morning we reached a tentative agreement with @AHCunions on a new 4-year contract that continues to reward our employees and address health care affordability. Alliance unions have cancelled their strikes planned for Monday morning. https://t.co/LJnxSPJFUU
— Kaiser Permanente (@aboutKP) November 13, 2021
– The Portland Thorns season is over after losing a semi-final match against the Chicago Red Stars Sunday. We love you, Thorns!
– A Multnomah County judge has ordered Portland Police Bureau (PPB) to turn over a list of internal personnel numbers that correspond to the identities of PPB officers who responded to protests in 2020. ‘Bout time.
– Oregon’s rental assistance program for people who’ve been financially impacted by the pandemic is set to pause for six weeks, beginning on December 1. The state housing agency will use that time to work through the long backlog of funds promised to those risking eviction who have yet to receive support.
– Price inflation due to “a toxic combination of staffing shortages and supply chain woes” has cash-strapped Americans teetering on the edge of poverty. It also has President Biden’s approval rates plummeting, which is something I could care less about.
– Britney Spears is no longer under the creepy control of a conservatorship that she’s been living under for the past 13 years. Cheers for Spears and for Entertainment Weekly, who finally got to use the kicker “It’s Britney, bitch” in an article.
– Today in metal PSAs:
Soon. pic.twitter.com/KgEFfROIKD
— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) November 14, 2021
– Closing arguments are set to begin today in the criminal trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Wisconsin teen accused of murdering two protesters during a 2020 protest against police violence. Rittenhouse has maintained that he acted in self defense. Allow NPR to get you up to speed on where the case stands.
– The Austrian government has prohibited unvaccinated people 12 and older from leaving their homes over the next ten days except for basic and essential activities, amid a surge in COVID-19 cases across the European country. Unvaccinated Austrians can be fined upwards of $1,500 if they’re found in violation of the policy.
– Storms in southern Egypt have roused venomous scorpions from their hidey-holes and into people’s homes, leaving three people dead and at least 450 injured from stings. This is a symptom of climate change I was NOT prepared for!
THE MILE of Interstate 5 through the Rose Quarter is the most dangerous stretch of the freeway in the state, with 120,000 cars passing through every day and nearly 100 crashes a year. A plan to add shoulders to that mile, and another lane in both directions, is supposed to cut crashes there by as much as half—but some neighborhood leaders say the project’s $400 million pricetag and years of disruptive construction is too steep a price to pay for a wider freeway in Portland’s core.
A community stakeholder committee signed off on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and city I-5 Broadway/Weidler Interchange Improvements plan at a key meeting last Thursday, June 7. But eight of the 18 representatives expressed some or serious concern about the project.
“This is maybe the most important thing to happen to Eliot since I-5 went through,” Eliot neighborhood chair Allan Rudwick told the group. “Pushing this forward will delay development in the area for maybe 10 years. Why would we do that to add one auxiliary lane and shoulders to one mile of freeway?”
Portland’s section of I-5 is less than 50 years old, and the wounds from its construction still run deep in an area that was once the heart of the city’s African American neighborhood before construction of the Memorial Coliseum and the freeway demolished 1,100 homes.
Freeway building is always expensive. The proposed I-5 revamp (see info box at right) will require tearing down five overpasses and shifting the southbound on-ramp to help traffic flow more smoothly. To put the $400 million project’s budget in perspective, the projected annual cost for all of Portland’s bike infrastructure projects is about $2.7 million, the total budget of the Eastside Streetcar Loop project is $148.3 million, and the total cost of the Columbia River Crossing project planned north of the Rose Quarter is $3.6 billion.
A major part of the revamp is the city and ODOT’s promise to rebuild the torn-down overpasses as better neighborhood streets with a two-way cycle track on North Williams, several crosswalks, and a concrete “lid” over the freeway that could be land for parks or buildings (like the I-5 lid that supports Seattle’s downtown Convention Center). The project also includes a new $15-20 million bike-pedestrian bridge to the Lloyd District.
Eliot neighborhood representative Mike Warwick, who voted against the project last week, is frustrated that the surface street improvements promised by the project are coupled with the freeway expansion.
“It’s a devil’s bargain,” says Warwick. “The 800-pound gorilla in the room is that when the time comes to fund this, it would not surprise me if for some reason the freeway components get paid for but the surface street improvements are cut.”
The I-5 revamp is still in the planning stages and doesn’t have money in hand, though the bulk of the budget would likely come from federal funds. Project planners are adamant that the neighborhood and freeway aspects of the project can’t be carved away from one another.
Mercury deleted what I tried to explain what was wrong with the Rose Quarter I-5 widening and Columbia River Bridge widening, widening, widening, widening for more rush hour car traffic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJeLguRecYc&list=RDGMEMQ1dJ7wXfLlqCjwV0xfSNbA&start_radio=1&rv=0rLhJZTHYo4
I have no thought of leaving. I do not count the time.
Who knows where the time goes?