Colwood neighbors lobby for park

Trib Town • City Council to decide whether golf course will be rezoned industrial

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Jun 12, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Tony Fuentes, co-chairman of the Concordia Neighborhood Association, is one of the neighbors of the Colwood National Golf Course trying to halt its rezoning from open space to industrial land. The group would like the city or Metro to buy the lands.

Neighbors of Colwood National Golf Course will have to wait to learn whether public agencies will preserve the greenery near them.

But their lobbying for a regional park already has added to the politics around whether City Council will rezone the land, a vote expected to happen later this summer.

Since March, the company that owns Colwood, which spans about 138 acres in Northeast Portland, has been pursuing a rezoning of its property from open space to industrial land – a change that would increase the property value and allow the land to be used for warehouses or, eventually, even a new runway for Portland International Airport.

Upon learning about the proposal, however, neighbors such as Tony Fuentes, co-chairman of the Concordia Neighborhood Association, mobilized to stop it.

“It’s a pretty irreplaceable asset,” says Fuentes of the land. “When it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Fuentes and his allies hope that the city of Portland and Metro, the regional government, can come together to purchase the land – which is for sale – and preserve it as open space.

What has provided them some hope is the decision of a hearings officer late last month to recommend that the rezoning application be denied, and the land be preserved for open space.

Public agencies certainly are interested in preserving the land at the right price, and already have approached the landowner through an intermediary, the nonprofit Trust for Public Lands, said Rex Burkholder, the Metro Councilor whose district includes the property.

“It’s a great idea,” said Burkholder of the property. “It could be restored pretty easily.” He said of the landowner, “They know that there’s a lot of interest out there.”

Metro has funds from its last open-space bond measure, and the city of Portland also has money for parkland acquisition from its development fees.

But the owner, a group called Colwood Partnership, does not seem optimistic.

“We’ve been talking with Trust for Public Lands for a number of months about the possibility of turning some of it into parkland,” said Bill Saunders Jr., a representative of the partnership.

But he said the hearings officer’s recommendation makes him more pessimistic about the possibility of compromise, not less. He said the recommendation amounted to “the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.”

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