Mayor Sam Adams' end-of-term agenda suffered a pair of staggering blows last month. The day before a long-awaited hearing on a $31.5 million public-private plan to fix up Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the Winterhawks—the arena's main tenant—was slapped with a series of discipline sanctions so costly that the team might find itself out of business. (If the team goes away, so do the millions it pledged to help along the stadium project.) Adams held the hearing anyway on Thursday, November 29—letting city commissioners publicly beg the Western Hockey League to lighten up. Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, November 27, the city's Planning and Sustainability Commission, as we reported was likely, punted the fate of Adams' West Hayden Island plan to 2013. If a deal to develop the natural area does go through next year under Mayor-elect Charlie Hales, Adams will still get to take some credit for moving it that far... but not all of it. DENIS C. THERIAULT

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The Bureau of Planning and Sustainability has rounded up some stats from the first year or so of the city's experiment with food-scrap composting and semi-weekly garbage collection. The result? We should all give ourselves a pat on the back. From November 2011 through October 2012, Portlanders sent just 58,300 tons of trash to landfills—a 38 percent reduction from what we tossed during the same period the year before. Also during the same period, the amount of compost collected went up by nearly 55,000 tons. But the best part? To check on how many Portlanders were going with the new trash flow, the city actually sent out workers to personally inspect compost carts for the presence of real, actual food detritus. Meanwhile, people cranky about a program that's hardly been an imposition remain cranky. However, the city's report points out, those cranks are a distinct minority. DCT