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LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
Publisher’s note: For your reading pleasure, we present Perlman’s Potpourri — a roundup of news items from the Gateway and Parkrose neighborhoods of mid-Multnomah County from veteran Beat Reporter Lee Perlman.
This month, Perlman’s Potpourri is be planning, The Argay Neighborhood Association is consulting a crime expert about problems with apartment complexes, rental housing and other nuisances in the north part of Argay near Sandy Boulevard, providing ideas and plans to combat the problems.
Following is an update on the city hearing, once postponed, to determine if a Wal-Mart will be built on Northeast 82nd Avenue across from Madison High School in East Portland. Planning and homework have been done — time for fun — a city hearing.
Planning with Mr. Manning is Perlman’s next potpourri item. Senior City Planner Barry Manning has become a (planned) fixture in Mid-county over the last few years, increasing neighbors’ knowledge of how city planning, zoning and development rules, regulations and guidelines work — or don’t. We’re lucky he’s here to help...plan Mid-county’s future.
The last report for October concerns planning for a summer concert series at Ventura Park on Southeast Stark Street.
Plan on some good reading!
Argay consults crime prevention expert
As this issue went to press, the Argay Neighborhood Association was preparing for a discussion with an expert in dealing with problem rental houses and neighborhood nuisances.
John Campbell, of Campbell DeLong Resources, Inc., has for decades contracted with the Portland Police Bureau to provide training for landlords and managers on how not to rent to drug dealers and other criminals. His seminars have become a national model. His career began in the 1980s when Campbell moved into the inner northeast’s Sabin neighborhood and discovered that he had five drug houses on his block. Campbell organized his neighbors and successfully dealt with the problem. When it was over, he realized that he had acquired a great deal of expertise.
Argay Chair Valerie Curry hopes Campbell can provide some useful wisdom for her neighborhood. She arranged for the consultant to address a special meeting at 1 p.m. on Sept. 29 at Fire Station #2, 4800 N.E. 122nd Ave. Prior to the meeting, she and other volunteers delivered notices to each household on north-south streets from Northeast 125th to 135th avenues between Prescott and Shaver Streets. The notice identified problems such as drug dealing, prostitution, trash on streets and yards, graffiti, and cars burglarized and stolen.
“We know we can’t stop drug dealing and prostitution, but we can make it so difficult that the people who do this will move elsewhere,” Curry told the Memo.
Big box hearing postponed
A hearing on a proposed big box development, possibly containing a Wal-Mart outlet, has been postponed for two weeks.
Smart Centres of Canada is seeking to build 240,000 square feet of retail space, including a single 190,000 square foot building, on a 10-acre former landfill on Northeast 82nd Avenue at Siskiyou Street, across from Madison High School. The site’s industrial zoning would normally prohibit more than 60,000 square feet of retail development there. City Hearings Officer Gregory Frank will hear the request for a code adjustment in a public hearing.
The hearing was originally scheduled for 9 a.m. on Oct. 1. However, according to City Planner Sylvia Cate, who is charged with making a recommendation on the case, Smart Centres failed to place signs at the site announcing the hearing 30 days in advance, as required by law. As a result, the new hearing date is at 9 a.m. on Sept. 16 at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave.
The Madison South and Roseway neighborhoods are opposing the development. They have sold hundreds of lawn signs opposing the project. They are using this and other fundraising activities to pay for the services of a lawyer and a traffic consultant to help them plead their case. Last month Roseway turned over $4,000 the neighborhood had raised to augment the war chest of Madison South, in whose territory the development will take place.
Smart Centres representatives say they have no anchor tenant for the proposed development as yet. Opponents say that in most of the company’s projects, the anchor turns out to be Wal-Mart. Regardless, they say, any operation of this kind is inappropriate for this location.
Planning processes move forward
Two long-range planning processes that affect Mid-county directly should be moving forward shortly.
City Planner Barry Manning says that he will shortly be assembling a broad-based advisory committee to help formulate an East Portland Action Plan. Earlier this year Manning completed the East Portland Review, a compilation of issues affecting this part of town. Among those mentioned were the area’s rapid housing growth and increased density, the lack of urban infrastructure such as standard streets and parks to accommodate the growth, the inappropriate design of some of the new development, the loss of trees, and the disproportionate increase in the area’s low-income and foreign-born population.
State Senator Jeff Merkley and City Commissioner Randy Leonard obtained funding for Manning to move ahead with the next step, a strategy for dealing with these issues.
Work should also begin shortly on the city and Port of Portland’s Airport Master Plan, this effort overseen by a 31-member Planning Advisory Group. (The size reflected disagreements over what groups should be represented on the body, and how the votes should be distributed.)
Citizen activists are concerned about the Port’s short-term plans to acquire additional territory, and potential long-term plans to add a third runway. The latter course, which the Port insists will not happen for years, if at all, would result in flight patterns directly over residential areas that had never seen them before, especially in Mid-county.
Potential summer concerts
There are tentative plans by the Hazelwood Neighborhood Association, the Gateway Area Business Association and the Centennial School District to schedule a series of free concerts in Ventura Park next summer. The Portland Bureau of Parks and Recreation has for years held such events in city parks in cooperation with neighborhood associations. In recent years, however, it has increasingly called on the neighborhoods to secure corporate or institutional sponsors to pay for the cost of the program.
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