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Streetcars bound to be in Mid-county

Publisher’s note: Welcome to Perlman’s Potpourri for May — a roundup of news items from the Gateway and Parkrose neighborhoods of mid-Multnomah County from veteran Beat Reporter Lee Perlman.

Coming up, city agencies hold a series of open houses in east Portland to cover planning, TriMet and 82nd Avenue improvements.

A Portland Office of Transportation workshop in April was about its proposed Streetcar System Plan process and whether or not streetcars in east Portland are a good idea.

Heard of a walking school bus? Safe Routes to School at Russell Academy needs one, and you can help.

According to grant recipients, the thousands of dollars spent on the Memory Garden for Alzheimer patients in Southeast Portland is a success.

Plus, the Airport PAG makes history with a unanimous vote about a forecast.

And finally the 15-acre park in the heart of the Argay neighborhood starts its planning process. Park planners want to know what you want to see there.

But first, to the open houses ...

LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

Open houses bring public process comments
Public agencies held a series of open houses — with exhibits, handouts and staff to give information and receive public input without a traditional meeting structure — in and near east Portland last month on a series of inter-related issues.

• East Portland Action Plan. About 120 people filed through this event over the course of three and a half hours on April 2 at the East Portland Community Center, 740 S.E. 106th Ave. At press time, Bureau of Planning staff was still sorting through verbal and written comments received but, according to Project Manager Barry Manning, three topics emerged as particular areas of concern for those responding: housing development, public safety and transportation — including lack of sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure, traffic congestion and lack of good mass transit facilities. The project’s next steering committee meeting will be held at Eastminster Presbyterian Church, 12505 N.E. Halsey St., from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 6. The planning process has already addressed graffiti removal as a target for getting visible results in the short term. Marcia Dennis, the Portland Office of Neighborhood Involvement’s graffiti removal manager, will be holding a public meeting to devise an ongoing strategy to achieve this end. The meeting will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on May 12 at the East Portland Neighborhood Office, 1017 N.E. 117th Ave.

• Eastside Max Station Community Project. This is an attempt to help the areas within a half mile of six MAX light rail stations between 60th and 162nd avenues (including the Red Line’s Parkrose/Sumner station) better do what they were intended to do: produce high-intensity development and serve the needs of the local community. To that end the Portland Bureau of Planning will be looking at factors, such as the lack of streets and sidewalks, which interfere with both development and transit use. BOP will also address unmet needs such as community gathering places. There was an open house for the project on April 14 at the Banfield Pet Hospital’s Glenhaven headquarters on Northeast 82nd Avenue. Information about the input given there was unavailable at press time. The next opportunity to weigh in will be a series of community walks, in which BOP personnel will walk around each station with whomever wants to accompany them and discuss what they see — good and bad. The walks are set for Wednesday, April 30, before press time, at 162nd Avenue; Thursday, May 8 at Parkrose/Sumner; Thursday, May 15 at 148th Avenue; Wednesday, May 21 at 82nd Avenue and Thursday, May 22 at 122nd Avenue. All walks begin at the station in question at 6:30 p.m. For more information call 503-823-3527.

At an open house last month for residents who live near Northeast 82nd Avenue, attendees fill out surveys, answering questions like, “In twenty years I want 82nd Avenue to be ...”
COURTESY KELSEY HUWALDT
• Imagine 82nd. A group of Portland State University graduate urban planning students are looking at how people would like to see Northeast 82nd Avenue develop. As part of their outreach, they held an open house on April 10 at the Banfield Pet Hospital Glenhaven Center to gather input from citizens. According to team leader Sue Lewis, 123 people came through, 84 turned in survey forms, and 78 took a visual preference survey, giving their opinions about the design of buildings they’d like to see on the avenue. The PSU group has tentatively scheduled a second open house for Tuesday, May 27, at a time and place yet to be determined, to present the results of their work.

Mid-county residents want streetcars
The Portland Office of Transportation held a workshop in April about its proposed Streetcar System Plan process. This is an attempt to plot future streetcar routes based on the following factors: whether the route in question is technically feasible, without steep grades or high-volume, high-speed auto traffic; whether the adjacent land is zoned for the kind of high intensity development that streetcar routes are intended to help produce; whether a route at this location makes sense as part of a transportation system in cooperation with other routes and other transportation modes; and, most significantly, whether there as public support for such a route.

The Mid-county session at the East Portland Community Center, 740 S.E. 106th Ave, part of a series held in different parts of the city, drew 35 people. In attendance were some skeptics, not all of them from the area, who doubted the value and cost-effectiveness of streetcars, but the majority not only supported the idea but also pledged to work to bring it about.

Citizen Working Groups are being formed to further study potential streetcar development systems in each part of Portland, including east Portland, and to gauge citizen support for them. Specific contact information was not available at press time, but ongoing information about the process is available at 503-823-7854, or www.portlandonline.com, go to “streetcar system plan” on the search field, click on “get involved,” and click again on “district working groups.” Is with Portland’s transportation system, you’ll get there eventually.

Russell Academy seeks adult walkers
Russell Academy and the Bicycle Transportation Alliance’s Safe Routes to School program are seeking volunteer help for transportation of a different kind. As Project Coordinator LeeAnne Fergason told the Russell Neighborhood Association last month, the project is encouraging more children to walk to school. To make this safer, academy and alliance members are looking for adult volunteers, not necessarily parents, to help create a “walking school bus,” a group walk that starts each day at an established time at an established location and goes to the school. A larger group of people would be “more visible, therefore safer,” Fergason said.

Russell Chair Bonny McKnight responded, “There are a lot of older people in this neighborhood who like to walk and would love the chance to be around kids.”

Fergason said she hoped that a sufficiently large network of such people could form so that it would work spontaneously and “we wouldn’t have to organize it, which would be a lot of work.”

In the David Douglas School District, she said, parents are getting together to operate a system of crossing guards.

As part of the Safe Routes program at Russell, the school has started a competition between classes to see which group has the most children walking, bicycling or riding the bus to school, with prizes for the winners. Anything that reduces the number of children arriving by passenger car is welcome, because an alarmingly large number of accidents and near misses can be attributed to such traffic at the school in the morning and afternoon.

As part of the program, Fergason and the school have been working with city traffic engineer Scott Batson to identify public improvements near the school that could make walking safer. Batson is taking longer than expected to make his recommendations; a planned public meeting to discuss them had not been set at press time.

The Safe Routes to Schools program provides funds to implement some of the suggestions. McKnight said that Russell could apply for money through the city’s Neighborhood Grants program to supplement these funds.

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