Portland Development Commission

[November 8th, 2006] Here at Rogue Central, we've been keeping our eye on how this week's designee, the Portland Development Commission, has handled a piece of property at Southwest 3rd Avenue and Oak Street (see "Suite Deal, WW, June 14, 2006).

The basic issue: In 2002, PDC paid about $1.7 million to buy and fix up that long-decrepit property, then valued it at negative $2.7 million in order to give it to developer Trammell Crow this year. (The benefit: If the property is deemed worthless, the developer doesn't have to pay union wages, which are higher.)

In July, City Commissioner Randy Leonard got suspicious enough to demand an independent audit of the 3rd and Oak transactions, a move that infuriated Mayor Tom Potter but won council support. A preliminary draft of the audit, conducted for the city by ECONorthwest and Integra Realty Resources, shows the property is worth $1.86 million—or $4.56 million more than PDC's negative valuation.

But City Attorney Linda Meng wrote an email to Leonard last week explaining the final version of the audit was taking longer than anticipated because "PDC has provided some documents for review but has not yet provided all documents.... In particular, emails and other documents they consider confidential have not been provided."

So it came to this: A wholly owned agency of the city refusing to turn over records—not to some lowly reporter, but to an auditor hired by the city attorney under a council resolution.

Leonard, who has long criticized the PDC for not sharing information and resisting a council review of its budget, took the extraordinary step Monday of filing a resolution asking Meng to subpoena the withheld records. That's a move usually reserved for adversarial legal proceedings—not inter-office communication.

After Leonard filed his resolution, PDC finally offered to turn over its emails and documents, which agency spokesman John Jackley says should be exempt under public records law. Leonard says the offer comes with conditions he's unwilling to accept.

"Their secrecy makes my point about the need for more council oversight better than I ever could," Leonard says.