Never-Green?

[November 2nd, 2005] Last week, city officials acknowledged what critics have been whispering for some time—the tram from OHSU to South Waterfront is a financial black hole.

While the $45 million tram now costs three times initial estimates, the world's most expensive flying city bus at least has a sponsor, Oregon Health & Science University, to pick up most of the cost.

That's not the case for another major South Waterfront feature, the proposed 6,500-foot-long addition to the Willamette River Greenway.

For years, drawings and models of South Waterfront have shown an elaborately landscaped 100-foot-wide path along the river, stretching from the Marquam Bridge to near the Spaghetti Factory Restaurant.

Also near the Spaghetti Factory is the $2 million Discovery Center, the marketing office for the string of high-rise condos under construction and planned for the district, where a large wall display describes the South Waterfront concept. The pitch for residents as they begin moving in next summer: "Life meets the river, city engages nature."

The city has promised developers it will provide a greenway. But there's one tram-like problem: As a consultant's report spelled out for city officials this summer, the proposed Greenway will cost at least $34 million and nobody wants to pay for it.

Some of the land is contaminated; some of it remains in industrial use, and no one has agreed on a mechanism for converting private property into a public park or paying for its maintenance.

Larry Brown, the Portland Development Commission senior project manager overseeing South Waterfront, says the PDC plans to spend $11.5 million of future tax revenues on the Greenway. But because infrastructure projects take higher priority, the city development agency won't have any of that money for at least three years.

"We will begin spending capital dollars in 2008-09," Brown says. "We'll spend half a million that year on the early design work and half a million the next year."

The rest of the PDC's share, Brown says, will be spent by 2020. He adds that it is unclear where the other $23 million or so needed to complete the project will come from. Among the possibilities: private financing or a "local improvement district," which would assess property owners in the district for some of the costs. "I would expect that to be one of the options," Brown says.

Some of those property owners—notably ZRZ Properties, a barge-building company that's already sued the city over the local-improvement-district assessment for the tram—have expressed concerns about getting saddled with additional costs to pay for the Greenway.

PDC is scheduled to present a final financing plan for the Greenway next August.