News Shelby Spencer, 18, and Josh Cole, 21, came to City Council today to ask Mayor Sam Adams to declare a state of emergency and create a new tent city to help address Portland's homeless problem. Spencer and Cole live in a tent themselves in a Portland park. During her three minutes of testimony, Spencer told city commissioners that Cole, her boyfriend, couldn't join her inside council chambers because ...   More

News Well, the final two City Council voices are now in on this resolution (PDF) that proposes moving forward on negotiations to revamp PGE Park by 2011 for a Major League Soccer team separately from plans to find a new home to build a minor-league baseball stadium for the Portland Beavers. Commissioner Amanda Fritz said this evening that she stands by her original objections to tapping urban renewal ...   More

News Portland City Council has waded through a number of topics this morning and afternoon, after its marathon session last night on the topic of renaming 39th Avenue for Cesar E. Chavez. Mayor Sam Adams referred a proposal to give a 10-year tax break to a new housing complex back to his office Commissioner Nick Fish's office. A handful of neighbors from North Portland had testified against the proposal ...   More

News We'll flesh this news out in a bit with more from the scene, but the basic development for the moment is that City Council just voted 5-0 this morning to rename 39th Avenue for Cesar Chavez. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know the question of renaming a Portland street for the late labor icon has been contentious and long. "For my family, we would be honored to live on Cesar ...   More

News The $31 million revamp of PGE Park, which will allow Major League Soccer to begin play there in 2011 and force the Portland Beavers to find a new baseball home, was approved Thursday by the City Council. The vote on the resolution (PDF) authorizing the city's term sheet (or as Mayor Sam Adams put it, the "basic concepts and shape" of the deal with more definitive details to come) with Merritt ...   More

News Given all the issues swirling around Portland police, here's a meeting worth noting. City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Portland Police Bureau, Commissioner Amanda Fritz, a former psychiatric nurse, and Police Chief Rosie Sizer are scheduled to meet this afternoon with Richard Harris, according to Fritz's calendar. Harris is the Oregon Department of Human Services' assistant director ...   More

News Just before City Council voted 3-2 today to let Merritt Paulson begin some construction work at PGE Park, city commissioners considered a separate ordinance related to the publicly owned stadium: the thrice-delayed zoning code change to allow limited office space at PGE Park. (They'll vote next week on that proposal.) Both agreements gave Commissioners Nick Fish and Amanda Fritz, who voted against ...   More

News Mayor Sam Adams and Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Randy Leonard voted this morning to give Merritt Paulson's company the green light to perform limited construction work at PGE Park -- even without a final financial agreement in place. Commissioners Amanda Fritz and Nick Fish voted no, with Fish noting that there are 81 issues still in dispute between the city and Paulson. The 3-2 split ...   More

News This afternoon at 2 pm, Portland commissioners will discuss the city's deal with Merritt Paulson to renovate PGE Park for Major League Soccer in 2011. They'll vote on the deal next week. Meantime, here is a summary of the deal from the budget gurus at the Office of Management and Finance, with the bureau's acknowledgment of the plan's risk (as has been pointed out elsewhere) to the general fund: The ...   More

News Without consulting Commissioner Dan Saltzman or the Bureau of Environmental Services, Mayor Sam Adams this afternoon proposed using $20 million of BES money to help build Portland's Bicycle Plan for 2030. The last-minute move appears to have been a calculated case of retribution directed at Saltzman for his surprise funding amendment last week. And the tapping of BES certainly caught BES head ...   More