Good news arrived for the Halsey-Weidler corridor work group in February when the Portland Development Commission awarded them two grants that they applied for last fall.

The first grant, for $20,000, will pay for the purchase and installation of several benches and trashcans along the corridor. The second grant, for $30,000, will fund a planning and design process for the east triangle of the corridor at Northeast 112th and Halsey Street.

The dollar amounts were slightly less than the original requests, which asked for $23,000 for benches and trashcans and $44,000 for the design process.

The grants are part of PDC’s Community Livability Grant Program, a competitive program available throughout the Gateway Regional Center URA. Other PDC grant recipients in the Gateway region were IRCO, which received $68,000 to improve education and workforce training center spaces, and Grow Portland, which received $25,000 to create a community garden at Floyd Light Middle School.

“We got very, very close to what we were asking for, and it’s more than enough for us to accomplish the goals that we were trying to accomplish,” said Tom Badrick, a member of the work group and chair of the Parkrose Heights Association of Neighbors, who volunteered to write both grants. “For the trash can grant, we put in a number for the dollar amount. We didn’t necessarily have a specified number of cans and benches.”

Neither did the grant specify the choice of vendors, leaving the group a lot of flexibility, he said. “We haven’t made a decision whether we buy something off the shelf from a company that makes trash cans or we have something very special built by a custom manufacturer,” he said.

The grant’s deadline for completing the project is the end of the calendar year, but Badrick said he hopes the items will be in place as soon as possible. “We want to do it in the season where people will benefit from using them,” he said. “I’m shooting for early summer. That’s my goal.”

The grant earmarks Nevue Ngan Associates, the landscape architecture firm that contracted with PDC last spring to design the corridor, to also create the design process, with public input and community outreach, for the east triangle.

“This public process allows an opportunity for everyone to come in and say, ‘This is what would be really great there’” Badrick said.

The outreach process will be expanded to involve all the community, not just the smaller business community along the corridor. “We have a much greater ethnic community in this area than we used to,” Badrick said. “They’re not coming to the Halsey-Weidler corridor meeting because, one, it’s in English. So I’m really big on working with the New Portlanders group [a city program attempting to integrate immigrants and refugees into city life] or something like that to ask the 30 percent of the community that isn’t the typical audience to weigh in on it. That doesn’t mean we’ll give more credence to one group or another, but let’s ask everyone, not [just] the usual suspects.”

The next meeting of the Halsey-Weidler group will be on Thursday, March 12 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Riverview Community Bank, 10401 N.E. Halsey St.

For more information, contact Badrick at tbadrick@aol.com.