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Rukaiyah Adams, a Stanford-educated attorney and businesswoman, has been building power as a moral voice for rebuilding the neighborhood of Albina, the center of Portland's black community.
On Jan. 17, she took to Twitter, dumping on the Oregon Department of Transportation over its approach to the Interstate 5 Rose Quarter project, specifically the issue of whether the project will include caps over the highway that can support development.
In a Twitter thread on the eve of the MLK Day weekend, she tore into ODOT (Pacific Northwest-style, which is to say: politely, tempered with the southern "y'all").
“Is @OregonDOT suffering from amnesia?,” she tweeted. “Caps were in the original transpo package that @OregonDOT sold to the OR Leg & PDX City Council. Yup. Y’all ran that hustle.”
In December, WW reported that the project would cost as much as $795 million, more than a 50 percent increase.
But that number does not include the sort of caps over the highway that would support buildings. The Oregonian revealed this month that, if the project includes those caps, the cost will hit $1 billion, with buildable caps costing between $200 and $500 million.
2/ Is @OregonDOT suffering from amnesia? 😂Caps were in the original transpo package that @OregonDOT sold to the OR Leg & PDX City Council. Yup. Y’all ran that hustle.
— Rukaiyah (@RukaiyahAdams) January 18, 2020
We checked. 👀
Adams' pointed criticism is a big deal. She's the leader of Albina Vision, a nonprofit looking to right the historical wrongs done to the black community of Portland's Albina neighborhood, and she's widely discussed as a possible candidate for Oregon governor.
Her thread tweet included a new takeoff on the “OK Boomer” meme: “y’all are offering a staggeringly wide range on the cost to complete buildable caps (which was generated “internally”). Oh… OK @OregonDOT. #OKODOT.”