this article is from the 10/18/02 issue of the Portland Tribune


City's top planner backs ballpark idea
Stadium would go where school district headquarters are now

BY ANDY GIEGERICH
Issue date: 10/18/2002
The Tribune


As the Montreal Expos reportedly prepare to troll for relocation sites, a top city official is pushing an old idea for a new Portland baseball stadium.

Gil Kelley, the city's planning director, says the site of the Portland Public Schools Blanchard Education Service Center, at the corner of North Dixon Street and Interstate Avenue, would provide an excellent stadium venue.

During a meeting with Tribune editors and reporters, Kelley made the pronouncement as he analyzed uses for the Memorial Coliseum site, which sits across Northeast Broadway from the district's administration building.

"If we're going to (build a baseball stadium), the best place to do it is not on the coliseum site but on the Blanchard site," he said. "If you leave a block of development in between, you could have a very urban ball stadium, like in Baltimore or San Francisco. It could actually work. It's clearly in the nexus of the regional transportation system."

The Blanchard building houses the district's administrative headquarters, among other departments.

Stadium support is first step

The comments breathed a bit of life into the big-league stadium issue, which has lain dormant since Eliot neighborhood residents criticized the proposal last year. The neighbors blasted the stadium notion after the Portland Development Commission included it in a series of proposed Rose Quarter design plans.

Baseball, though, has crept back onto Portland's radar with word that the Expos could play a regular season series in Portland next summer. Mayor Vera Katz said City Hall harbors hopes that big-league ball will make its way here on a more permanent basis.

"(The Blanchard site) would be wonderful," she said. "It would add vibrancy and life around the Rose Quarter and coliseum area. But remember that we don't own the property and we don't own a team, and no one's come up to say they'll build a stadium."

Stadium supporters, such as Steve Kanter, president of the Portland Baseball Group, say a commitment to build a stadium could provide a crucial first step toward attracting a relocated major league baseball team.

"It's not a ˜build-it-and-they-will-come' fantasy, but we'd like to have some stadium financing in place," he said. Kanter helped lead a 2001 legislative drive to use lottery funds for a Portland baseball stadium; the effort failed as the state Legislature's regular session ended.

The Portland Baseball Group has included looks at seven potential stadium sites on its Web page (www.portlandbaseballgroup.org). One proposal would place a stadium on the property that contains Portland's main U.S. post office, at the corner of Northwest Broadway and Hoyt Street.

Another supporting organization, the Oregon Baseball Campaign, continues to tout a proposed 40,000-seat stadium at the Blanchard site designed by Portland architect Steve Fosler. The Fosler design includes such touches as a water taxi station.

Expensive proposition

Kelley acknowledged that the baseball stadium concept, at this point, borders on the whimsical. For starters, Portland needs deep-pocketed investors to raise the necessary dough for a major league team. The Expos, who might relocate after posting dismal attendance figures and deep operating losses, likely would fetch around $350 million.

Someone also must buy the property, assessed by Multnomah County at $56.8 million. Then there are the stadium costs: Seattle's Safeco Field cost $517 million, a bill footed by taxpayers.

"Certainly, moving teams around or opening new franchises is an expensive proposition, and in a smaller market, it's not a paying proposition right now," Kelley said. "They've got to come up with a better revenue-sharing scheme before you see a whole lot of interest.

"But we are the largest market not yet served" by major league baseball, he added.

Larry Brown, a PDC project director who collected suggestions for the Rose Quarter redesign, said the stadium option was dropped after Eliot neighbors expressed concerns about parking and traffic.

Sarah Cloud, chairwoman of the Eliot Neighborhood Association, said, "This hasn't come up for the last year and a half, and the last time it did, we were almost unanimously opposed to it."

Cloud said the neighbors fear what she calls "tripleheaders, that is, nights when there would be events at the Rose Garden, the coliseum and the baseball stadium."

Lew Frederick, spokesman for Portland Public Schools, said the question of whether the district would relocate its headquarters to make way for a stadium "is so premature that it's hard to express any solid comment."

The administration building contains a cafeteria from which all Portland Public Schools meals are distributed. Some 400 employees work in the building, down from 1,400 10 years ago, Frederick said. Part of the structure is subleased to Multnomah County maintenance teams.

Contact Andy Giegerich at agiegerich@portlandtribune.com.