Tri Met Starts Ripping Up Neighborhood For UNFUNDED Milwaukie Light Rail Line

September 14, 2011

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Photo Credit: Oregonian

Here’s a backgrounder from John Charles from Cascade Policy here. 
Money quote:

If this goes forward, it will be one of the worst public decisions in Portland’s history. TriMet will wreck an entire neighborhood simply to replace the No. 17 bus line with a slow train, at a cost of $205 million per mile. There will be no new service, and a beautiful Portland neighborhood will be ruined.

This demonstrates one of the fatal flaws of light rail: The infrastructure needed is out of scale with quiet, pedestrian-oriented urban streets. Once the street is destroyed and redone as a set of rail tracks with ugly overhead wires and a huge station, the beauty of the neighborhood is permanently lost. 

Don’t forget the polling on this!

So how’s that funding for Milwaukie Light Rail coming along? The Commishes at Clackamas County are doing everything in their power to smite the will of the voters. Commissioners lost the car tax vote and now a citizen’s initiative has qualified for the ballot to force votes on the use of urban renewal funds for pet projects. The battle between anti light rail/pro voter forces and the Clackamas County Commishes has been waging for several months as we told you here, here, here, here.

Clackamas County Commissioners have been trying every which way but loose to pull an end run around a planned vote on the funding for light rail AND using urban renewal funds to plunder for light rail.

Now they’ve written and approved their own initiative. This week blogger Jack Bogdanski ran down the verbiage of their initiative and believes the language is intentionally vague. Read his post here. 

Money quote:

Are these two ambiguities deliberate and malicious, or are they accidental? It’s hard to tell. In the original version of the decoy measure, there was reference to actions taken by more or less than 51% of the voters in the “urban renewal” area. That was bad drafting, too. As anyone who’s thought about it knows, a majority is 50% plus 1 vote — not 51%. 5,001 to 4,999 is a majority — you needn’t get to 5,100. Somebody down there is a truly poor drafter, or diabolically clever.

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com