Skip to main content
A 10-acre plot of land at the northwest corner of Northeast 42nd Avenue and Killingsworth Street has sat vacant for 16 years. Now, suddenly, there’s a bidding war of sorts.
The property, owned by Portland Public Schools, has a tragic history. In 2001, WW revealed that Whitaker Middle School had dangerous levels of radon gas and poor ventilation, a deadly combination (“The Poisoning of Whitaker,” May 22, 2001). Whitaker closed the day after WW’s story and was torn down in 2007.
The question of what to do with the site, now a rolling field dotted with trees and a football goal post, has come up periodically since then, with no results. In 2021, City Commissioner Dan Ryan proposed putting a safe rest village on the site, an idea that was shot down by the Portland School Board, led by Chair Gary Hollands.
Now, Hollands is pushing hard for an idea of his own. At a meeting of PPS’s facilities and operations committee on Sept. 20, Hollands introduced a resolution directing the district to negotiate a lease on the site with the Albina Sports Program, which aims to build a $175 million complex (a pre-COVID cost estimate) with 12 basketball courts, 12 volleyball courts, three soccer fields, and a 300-meter running track, all of them indoors.
Hollands asked the committee to direct the superintendent to find capital for the project, too, by identifying “potential capital financial and other resources that could be used in collaboration to build the Albina Sports Complex and Learning Center,” the resolution reads.
The committee voted to send it along to the full School Board on Oct. 10.
The proposal is curious for two reasons: Hollands himself, and the timing.
He has been interim executive director of the Albina Sports Program since 2020, which means he wants the School Board he chairs to approve a project that he runs. At the Sept. 20 meeting, Hollands said he didn’t have a conflict of interest.
“People have talked about conflict of interest, and it’s been vetted that it’s not a conflict of interest,” Hollands said. “I don’t get paid here, and I don’t get paid there, either.”
Hollands tells WW that attorneys for both PPS and Albina Sports advised him that there was no conflict of interest. A spokeswoman for the district confirms that.
As of Sept. 18, the Whitaker property was on the agenda for the Sept. 20 meeting of the facilities and operations committee, but it wasn’t an action item. Then, on Sept. 19, the Whitaker site got drawn into the Grant High School field debacle.
Portland Parks & Recreation proposed three options for fixing Grant’s field, which the parks bureau owns. One of them was to have the bureau give control of Grant Bowl to PPS through a long-term lease, as a group of hard-charging Grant parents were demanding, in exchange for the bureau getting a long-term lease on Whitaker.
Grant parents mobilized in August after the parks bureau closed the field days before the fall sports season, citing studies showing that the turf had become too compacted, putting student athletes at risk for concussions. Parents faulted the parks bureau for not maintaining the field properly and have been pushing the bureau to turn it over to PPS, one way or another.
On Sept. 20, a day after PP&R proposed the lease swap that would give the city Whitaker in exchange for Grant Bowl, the agenda for the facilities meeting changed to show that Whitaker was now an “action item,” and a link to the resolution suddenly appeared.
Hollands made his pitch at the meeting, and School Board members asked for minor amendments. Board member Julia Brim-Edwards asked that she be removed from a list of names on a “working team of community, business leaders” shown by Hollands because she was not on any working team. That list comprised a who’s who of Portland elected officials, including City Commissioners Ryan, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps and Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal.
A spokeswoman for Rubio says the commissioner, like Brim-Edwards, is “not on the “working team.” Mapps and Jayapal say the same thing. A spokesman says Ryan wasn’t even briefed on the project.
Parents of athletes are puzzled by Hollands’ plan. PPS is starved for fields, especially in the fall, when soccer and football vie for space. Teams from around the district routinely schlep to Delta Park on the Columbia River to practice and play games. Junior varsity teams play on poorly maintained grass in other city parks.
“We desperately need fields,” says Eric Happel, a girls soccer coach at Lincoln High School. The Whitaker site is a terrific option, he says, “but if it’s run by a private nonprofit, how does PPS get access to it? That’s not at all clear to me.”
The facilities committee voted 4-0 to send the resolution to the full PPS board, with minor amendments. Brim-Edwards also asked staff to provide feedback on the proposal, which it did on Sept. 26.
In short, staffers seemed puzzled by Hollands’ plan.
They said they needed guidance from the School Board on how the Albina project fit with PPS’s long-range facilities plan, which highlights the district’s dearth of playing fields. One option is to build “athletic hubs” at Whitaker, Marshall High School and Jackson Middle School. Those hubs should provide double-wide fields for football and soccer, artificial turf, field lighting, bleachers and tennis courts, the staff memo says.
“The current proposed project does not appear to align in all regards with the existing plan, and staff will need further direction on how to align them,” the memo says.
That’s contrary to what the resolution says: “The Board finds that Albina Sports Program, Albina Sports Complex aligns with the district Long Range Facilities Plan,” it reads.
As for directing the superintendent or “a designee” to find cash for the project, PPS staff seemed equally at a loss. “Staff will need additional information on the expectations for potential capital financial and other sources and any assumptions regarding cost sharing, fundraising or other sources, as well as potential partnerships,” the memo says.
Hollands says it’s high time that something be done with the Whitaker site.
“It’s been sitting there for 20 years, and it’s not doing our kids any good,” he tells WW. “I don’t care if we do it. I just want someone to do it. The goal of the resolution is to start having all those conversations.”