Isaac Laquedem

Where have the Zoo parking revenues gone, if not to pay Metro's debt?

The more I look into the City's efforts to charge people to park at Washington Park, the more interesting it gets.  (Background: the City of Portland owns Washington Park and leases the Oregon Zoo and the Zoo parking lot to Metro, which operates the Zoo and the parking lot.)

Two days ago I'd posted a snippet from the proposed agreement between the City and Metro, which says that in 1997 Metro borrowed $4,940,000 to help out with the Zoo light rail station, that Metro expected to repay the $4,940,000 with revenues from the Zoo parking lot, and that Metro hasn't repaid the debt yet.  My own experience with the Zoo parking lot is that no one seems to be charging for using it, although it has booths and gates set up.

Later that day Rick commented that the Zoo does charge for parking, and folds it into the ticket price for admission.  So if Metro has been collecting for parking by surcharging Zoo admission tickets, and if Metro hasn't been using the parking fees to repay the $5 million it borrowed, what has Metro done with the money it did collect?  Inquiring minds are curious.

Surprise! Metro has charged you to park at the Zoo since 1997; you just haven't paid

One of the documents prepared by the Portland Parks Bureau, and passed on to me by the Knower of All Things, gives a clue to why the Bureau wants to charge Portlanders to park in Washington Park.  The reason isn't, as I archly speculated yesterday, that the Parks Bureau wants to discourage East Portlanders from using Washington Park.  Rather, it goes back to the construction of the West Side Light Rail 15 years ago.  It turns out that in 1997, Metro borrowed $5 million, which it contributed to the cost of building the Zoo light rail station and other improvements to the Zoo parking lot.  Metro operates the Zoo, and expected that revenues from the Zoo parking lot would be available to repay the $5 million.  As it happened, the revenues weren't available.  Here's how the City's phrased it:

WHEREAS, in 1997, METRO issued debt instruments in the amount of $4,940,000, in order to contribute to the cost of the construction of the light rail station at the Main Parking Lot and construction of improvements and modifications to the Main Parking Lot, which debt was expected to be repaid using the proceeds of parking fees to be paid by users of the Main Parking Lot, but was not so repaid (“Metro Bond Repayment”);

The joker in this deck is that although the City owns the Zoo parking lot, Metro has leased it from the City since 1979 and the lease doesn't expire until 2014.  Metro could have charged for parking any time it wished.  It's not that the revenues weren't available to Metro, but that Metro didn't bother to collect them.  (The lot actually has booths and gates for collecting parking revenues.  I've never seen them staffed, but they may have been used sporadically for a while.)

This makes the City's parking plan a little more mysterious: Metro's been entitled to charge for Zoo parking for years, but hasn't; Metro's unhappy that it hasn't been collecting the parking fees; so the City is going to charge visitors everywhere in Washington Park to make up for this.  Something's not quite right here.   Perhaps someone in the parking meter business needs the repeat business?

Parks Bureau to East siders: You'll have to pay to play at Washington Park

Not yet noticed much by the media is a proposal percolating through the Portland Parks & Recreation Bureau to install pay parking for visitors to Washington Park.  The proposal, which may come to the City Council as early as the second week in July, calls for charging Park visitors $1.60/hour to park.  (Here's a link to the map of the pay stations that the Parks Bureau proposes.)

One point not yet perhaps considered by the Parks Bureau is that although the attractions at the west end of the park (the Zoo, the Children's Museum, and the Forestry Center) all charge admission, the east end is mostly free (the tennis courts, the play areas, the Rose Test Gardens, the Sacajawea hill; everything except the Zoo train and the Japanese Garden, in fact) -- and it is nestled among some of the most expensive houses in Portland.  The people who can afford to live next to the park will still be able to use it for free, but everyone else will pay.

The Parks Bureau's plan is actually a clever idea -- if the goal is to keep those pesky east-siders out of Arlington Heights.

The IBEW-ILWU battle would end if there weren't any more ships

One of the unintended results of the recent parallel efforts of Local 8 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Local 48 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to drive commercial shipping away from the Port of Portland by fighting over which union's members get to plug and unplug refrigerated freight containers (two jobs total) is that the general public is going to become less inclined to support keeping the bridges on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers high enough to accommodate ocean-going trade -- an attitude, which, if it continues for a while, may make the whole union labor battle moot.

The world's most vexatious litigant comes to Lake Oswego

In March, several plaintiffs filed suit against the cities of Lake Oswego and West Linn for violating affordable housing laws.  The plaintiffs have an unexpected ally:  Jonathan Lee Riches, identified as the world's most vexatious litigant, has moved to intervene in the case on the side of the plaintiffs.  He states that he has newly-discovered evidence to support the plaintiffs, though his reasons for intervening (which you can read here in his own all-capital-letter words) range far beyond the formalistic.  For example, in his words: "The City of Lake Oswego continues to violate my constitutional rights.  They are hiding important documents in an underwater bubble capsule  at the bottom of the lake which holds secret documents" including "Barack Obama's Kenya birth certificate."  The lake, he says, also holds the bodies of Jimmy Hoffa and Natalie Holloway.  On the positive side, he asserts that he and Kim Kardashian skinny-dipped in the lake together.