A Smart Investment of Time Each Week.

[September 24th, 2008]

Hotel reservations? : Citing the uncertainty of market conditions and “complexity,” Metro will delay its decision on whether to move forward with a proposed 600-room, $247 million headquarters hotel next to the Oregon Convention Center. Previously, the agency had planned to vote on the long-discussed—and hard-to-finance—project by Oct. 3 but now aims to decide by Dec. 18. (Read more on Metro’s reasoning at WWire) “They are grasping at straws,” says Len Bergstein, who represents downtown hoteliers opposed to the HQ hotel. “This project doesn’t pencil out.”

Jefferson High School’s Young Men’s Academy, a boys-only school designed for students in sixth through 10th grades, lost its 10th grade last Friday after seven of its nine students decided to transfer to different district high schools. Now the entire Academy’s fate is hanging, since there are no students in what was supposed to be its sixth grade and only 33 students remaining in grades 7, 8 and 9. Toni Hunter, an assistant superintendent with Portland Public Schools, says she’ll decide by Dec. 1 the future of the Academy, which opened in 2007 as the brainchild of former superintendent Vicki Phillips.

Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is readying a new push to outlaw the state’s costly and little-used capital punishment law (see “Killing Time.” WW, Jan. 23, 2008). The group will meet with activists, defense lawyers and the ACLU this Friday, Sept. 26, at Portland’s First United Methodist Church to hash out plans for taking Oregon’s 24-year-old capital-punishment statute off the books. Organizer Bill Long thinks the time is ripe for the 2009 Legislature to kill the death penalty following the lead of New Jersey’s Legislature last year.

Man bites dog, pol keeps promise. Multnomah County Chairman Ted Wheeler promised nearly a year ago in a WW cover story about the vast property-tax differences paid by homeowners (see “Spot the Differences,” Oct. 17, 2007) to lobby for changes in the state’s unequal property-tax laws. True to his word, Wheeler met on Tuesday with members of the Senate Revenue Committee to push for changes to Measure 50, the 1997 law that set off the tax inequality. While change may seem a fool’s mission, rising homeowner anger over wildly different taxes assessed similar properties may help Ted with his excellent adventure.

For the third year running, Portland has topped SustainLane.com’s list of sustainable cities (out of the 50 largest in the U.S.). The green marketing website tries to support its rankings with some actual information, however arbitrary in ranking Portland ahead of No. 2 San Francisco and No. 3 Seattle. Portland lost points for water supply, natural disaster risk and housing affordability, but came in No. 1 in some fuzzier categories—energy policy, “knowledge base,” “green economy,” certified green buildings and “city innovation,” which includes “extra credit.” Now who’s green with envy?