Check out the comments section beneath the
article. Holy Milwaukiestan. Does anyone have a guess as to 1.) whether or not a bunch of those comments are likely from the same person or if 2.) A simple article in the "Clackamas Review"/Portland Tribune really does inspire large numbers of people to reveal their true opposition to the evil mass transit and freedom(car)-hating socialist mafia? I suppose the former is more likely, combined with the internet being a great forum for minority-opinion voices to sound louder than they are --otherwise, I doubt Carlotta Collette (former Milwaukie city councilor and current CRC resister) would have won her Metro seat so resoundingly.
TriMet to Milwaukie: Your light-rail share is $5 million
City crafts a legal memo to protect itself from possible changes in expensive project
By Anthony Roberts
The Clackamas Review, May 27, 2008, Updated 10.5 hours ago (16 Reader comments)
TriMet officials told Milwaukie City Council last week that the city’s cost for the proposed light-rail line is $5 million, a fraction of the overall cost of the project.
Before the city moves forward on light rail, however, councilors are working to craft a legal document that would ensure TriMet makes certain improvements and lives up to promises and guarantees made throughout the light-rail process.
City council has presented TriMet with a memorandum of understanding (MOU), a 10-year agreement that would outline certain elements of transportation planning in the city. While such agreements are often non-binding, Councilor Greg Chaimov said lawyers from both sides are hashing out the agreement and considering how much weight it may hold in future deliberations.
Chaimov said the MOU came in the wake of the fallout over the Southgate site. TriMet had been working on moving the current transportation center at 21st Avenue and Harrison Street – a nightmare for downtown merchants – to the former theater site north of downtown, a move the city had been seeking for years. The transit agency pulled the plug on the project after legal troubles, leaving Milwaukie’s City Council furious.
Mayor Jim Bernard said Southgate made the MOU “even more important,” but noted that the city has wanted such an agreement for some time.
“Southgate makes it even more important. We’ve been working on this for many, many months,” he said. “Southgate just makes it so we are being more direct and this document needs to be more of a contract than a draft.”
He said the city isn’t yet close to signing off on an agreement.
“We’ve given them an agreement and basically got back nothing,” he said, “so we’re going to be very insistent with that before we move forward.”
As for the light-rail cost, $5 million is a small portion of the total cost of the project, which could run up to $1.4 billion. Most of the line runs through Portland and Multnomah County, with the largest single expense being a new bridge over the Willamette River in Portland. The project will receive more than half of its funding from the federal government, and the state has also pledged $250 million in lottery funds to the project.