The demarcation between the top five and all others was steep. The committee was well-briefed, the process has been excellent. Two or three other proposals popped in at the last moment, were given 3 minutes, and essentially discarded.

Sustainable = viable = revenue-generating. This formula may have added up to something else a year ago, but now the need is jobs jobs jobs.

How is 'Jumptown Plaza Concept' different from 'Trail Blazers and Winterhawks Concept'? If they're the same then it seems like its outdoing MARC by a few votes. If they're different... well, then MARC is walloping Jumptown.

The veteran community was geared up and ready to fight any proposal that called for the demolition of the coliseum, or even a drastically different use. It's a memorial to fallen soldiers - the dedication plaque says something about "Bring your family here, have fun, remember us, and we who fell will never really die."

Glad to see that the top proposals don't seem to conflict with that!

So we're going to be stuck with building something with no established indication of public demand (and in the case of the stadium concept, a very established indication of lack of public demand), just because those are the proposals who have the most organized backers who can lobby hardest / get people to show up to the meetings. Yep, that's going to work out well.

Get some polls showing how many people would actually go to each of the different options (not just which is their favorite), or it'll be a closed-down bankrupt white elephant within about a year.

Or, you know, we could just decide based on sentimentality for an ugly box, whatever.

That's too bad about the roller coaster, I rather liked the idea. But it really was too cool for Portland. We'll get stuck with something lame and boring again.

Sarah, were you even at this meeting? You grossly over-simplified, in fact, left out major items that were of importance in this meeting. Poor journalism, indeed. You neglected to mention such significant news that it renders your story nearly false. The Oregonian had a much better take on the events...
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.s…

And it would seem the roller coaster (among other individual concepts) is NOT out, because it is not a proposal to do with the Memorial Coliseum itself, rather, an idea to compliment the entire district and generate revenue for the city. The committee is only considering concepts that address the Coliseum right now, they will be considering the entire district later in the process. This was clearly understood to anyone who actually attended the meeting.