Old Town renewal takes a new turn

With fire-station move nixed, new player eyes a long-vacant space

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Jul 28, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. Baskow / The Portland Tribune

After some deliberation, city officials decided the Central Fire Station will stay at 55 S.W. Ash St., also dashing hopes that a public food market would set up shop in the space. That means the Import Plaza site’s again up for grabs, a fact that hasn’t escaped the growing aid organization Mercy Corps.

Winners and losers already are emerging in the wake of City Hall’s surprise decision not to move the aging Central Fire Station to the site of the Import Plaza building in Old Town.

The decision was made earlier this month by Mayor Tom Potter and Commissioner Erik Sten after cost estimates for the new station jumped from $22 million to $30 million and threatened to go even higher. A public process to reset development priorities in the area will begin Aug. 2 when the community-based Old Town Vision Committee meets for the first time since the decision.

Even before the meeting, one winner is Mercy Corps, the Portland-based humanitarian organization that is considering building its international headquarters on the Import Plaza site, along the west side of Northwest Naito Parkway between Couch and Davis streets. Current plans call for the construction of a 70,000- to 75,000-square-foot building with an interactive museum on the causes of, and solutions for, world hunger.

“The idea of being part of an emerging neighborhood is very appealing,” said Mercy Corps new home project manager Kathy Cooke.

Other winners could be community organizations in Old Town, which now stand to receive some of the $20 million in urban renewal funds that would have been spent on the new station. A likely candidate to benefit is Portland Saturday Market, the nonprofit that operates a weekend art, craft and food fair under the west end of the Burnside Bridge from March through December. The organization also owns the historic Skidmore Foundation Building but needs help paying its $3.3 million mortgage.

“Saving the Skidmore Fountain Building is something we need to look at,” said Rich Rodgers, an aide to Sten, who oversees Portland Bureau of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services.

Losers include the fire bureau, which now will not receive a new, state-of-the-art station and headquarters. The existing station and administrative offices at 55 S.W. Ash St. will be upgraded, but it is not clear how much remodeling and modernization work will be done.

Although no one in the fire bureau would criticize the decision not to move, Rodgers admitted the employees would rather work out of a new building.

“Given a choice, they’d prefer to move,” Rodgers said.

Another loser is the Historic Portland Public Market Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has been trying to open a public market — similar to Pike Place in Seattle — for more than five years. The organization had been hoping to open the market in the ground floor of the new building that would replace the Central Fire Station. Now the foundation’s board of directors face the daunting challenge of finding another location.

“We’ve looked for years and haven’t found anything that meets our needs as well as the fire station location,” said consultant Ron Paul, a board member who has worked on the project for years.

The Portland Development Commission has been actively studying the possibility of relocating the station since 2003. Working with Old Town residents, community organizations, business owners and landlords, the PDC had been exploring whether moving the station to the now-closed Import Plaza block would result in the creation of approximately 1,460 new housing units in the area, sparking redevelopment throughout the area.

The possibility of the move was abruptly quashed in a July 17 closed-door meeting between Potter and Sten, in consultation with PDC Executive Director Bruce Warner and fire Chief Dave Sprando.

“The costs were going up, but there was no guarantee the former site would actually be redeveloped as people were hoping,” Rodgers said.

Because the PDC has agreed to pay the bulk of the construction costs, the increase meant the PDC would have less to spend on other redevelopment projects in the area.

It is unclear when and where the PDC will decide to spend the $20 million freed by the decision not to relocate the fire station. PDC board Chairman Mark Rosenbaum and agency executive director Bruce Warner are scheduled to discuss potential options at the upcoming vision committee meeting.

Also to be discussed is the planned relocation of Saturday Market’s weekend operations. Because of the financial difficulties with its building and the redevelopment work in the area that is already under way, Saturday Market is looking for a new, permanent home.

Lured in part by the redevelopment potential, the University of Oregon decided to open a branch of its school of architecture in the former White Stag building at the west end of the Burnside Bridge. Although disappointed by the decision, university officials say they will proceed with the project anyway.

Spotlight shifts to Old Town

Both the Central Fire Station — also known as Fire Station No. 1 — and the former Import Plaza building lie within the Downtown Waterfront Urban Renewal Area, one of 11 such areas managed by the PDC, the city’s urban renewal agency. The area extends along the west side of the Willamette River from north of the Fremont Bridge to the Hawthorne Bridge and includes much of downtown, including the retail stores and offices around Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The PDC considers the downtown urban renewal area one of its biggest success stories. Since it was created in 1974, assessed land values within the district have increased an average of 10.4 percent annually, from a total of $446 million to more than $1.6 billion.

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