Isaac Laquedem

A Convention Center headquarters hotel would increase business by . . . only 8%?

I've written several times already, over the last five years, about the quirky math that Metro uses to justify the proposed Oregon Convention Center headquarters hotel.  I noticed another odd math fact in Metro's renewed flirtation with the idea.

This April 25 story from the Daily Journal of Commerce says that, according to Metro, in 2011 the conventions at the Convention Center produced $450 million in community spending in the Portland area.   The same article says that, because the Convention Center has no headquarters hotel, it lost 30 conventions in 2011 that would have produced an additional $35 million in community spending.

Maybe I'm understanding this incorrectly (and if so I invite anyone from Metro to help me out here) but if those numbers are apples-to-apples, then by adding a headquarters hotel we could attract about an additional 8% in community spending to the Portland area.  Put another way, without a headquarters hotel we're already getting 92% of the economic impact that we would get with one, according to Metro's figures.

I don't object to Metro selling its parcel of land to a hotel developer who wants to build a 600-room hotel without any public subsidy, but it seems a bit thick to allocate scarce tax dollars to subsidize a project that will result in only a small additional community benefit.

Bath time! City Hall lets loose its inner Mary Poppins on the protesters

OregonLive reports that the protesters who are camped out in front of Portland City Hall have been told to move.  I chuckled over the headline, which reads: "Portland City Hall protesters reminded to comply with code, will be moved Monday for power-wash."  Ah, the nanny state.  They looked fairly clean to me.

It's time to pull the plug on the Columbia River Crossing

When video cassette recorders came out, some manufacturers had a good idea: build a VCR into a television set so that viewers could record, play back, and watch television all in one unit, with no messy cabling.  The idea was logical, but the product didn't sell: it turned out that consumers would rather buy a good television and separately buy a good VCR, than get a not-so-good television in the same box as a not-so-good VCR.  Products designed to do two things invariably must include some compromises, and they don't perform either of their functions as well as products designed to do one thing well.  Imagine if the electronics manufacturers had added a popcorn popper to the TV/VCR.

So it is with the Columbia River Crossing project.  Designed to do too many things -- carry cars, provide truck service to West Hayden Island without disrupting the commercial area, hold a light rail line, not interfere with river traffic, not block airplanes, and be iconic -- the current proposal accomplishes none of them very well, and is a lamentable failure for at least two of the objectives.

The head of the Portland Business Alliance, Bernie Bottomly, famously wrote two years ago two years ago to the CRC Independent Review Panel that if the region did not get this project underway promptly, the "alignment of federal stars will evaporate, and with it, our hope for significant federal support."  Since then, "stars are in alignment" has become a pet phrase of the CRC boosters. 

Whether or not the federal stars remain in alignment, the planning process has revealed so many problems with the current CRC proposal that the local stars have moved out of alignment.

It's time to admit that the CRC planning process has failed and to pull the plug on this TV/VCR/popcorn popper of a project. 

The $150 million wasn't totally wasted.  Here's what we've learned:

1.    Light rail can't use the CRC bridge without cutting off the river from the federal government and a major employer.  Light rail will need to find some other way to get to Vancouver, unless the new bridge is also a drawbridge.

2.    Building a larger bridge will push traffic congestion south to the Rose Quarter.

3.    Most of the bridge lifts that tie up traffic are because the current bridges aren't aligned with the swing span of the Burlington Northern bridge half a mile downstream.

4.    Bridge traffic isn't growing anywhere near as fast as projected.

5.    A small decrease in traffic from current levels, and eliminating one or two short on-ramps, would eliminate most of the traffic jams.

The CRC planners framed the problem incorrectly, as being how to remove the one stoplight on the freeway between Canada and Mexico, instead of evaluating how to move traffic more effectively between Portland and Vancouver.  That, and their failure to comprehend that fixed-span light rail is impracticable because of its effect on maritime commerce and the Corps of Engineers, inexorably led to their work ending in an embarrassing failure.

It's time to stop this waste and to get a new group to consider how to improve the connections between Portland and Vancouver -- or just to agree to leave the Interstate Bridges as they are and move on to more productive things.