As 2009 wraps up and Portlanders hustle to complete their holiday to-do lists, City Hall also faces several unfinished projects from Mayor Sam Adams’ first year in office.

Of course, there’s dealing with last week’s E. coli scare (which produced a two-day boil alert for Portland water users on the west side), which may have taxpayers wondering what’s in their pipes. And there’s the ongoing Police Bureau controversy that has some Portlanders questioning the politicos who oversee their public safety (see “Cops and Wobblers,”).

But here’s a list of other remaining tasks from 2009 that are no less daunting—or politically fraught.

Illustrations: Jonathan Hill

Budget talks for the fiscal year starting next July began Dec. 1, and already the financial forecast for 2010 looks bleak.

In order to balance its budget, it now appears City Hall will have to forgo cost-of-living increases to its employees in 2010. That move would save $8.3 million, but it will be unpopular with city employees, who got 2.8 percent cost-of-living increases in 2009.

Richard Beetle, business manager for Laborers Local 483, which represents about 800 of Portland 6,000-plus employees, says workers will probably accept sacrifices, “if the money is going to be used to save jobs.”

One big difference between 2009 and 2010? All but one of the city’s labor contracts—with the District Council of Trade Unions, the Portland Police Commanding Officers Association, the Portland Police Association, the Portland Fire Fighters Association Local 43, the City of Portland Professional Employees Association and the Bureau of Emergency Communications union—are up for renegotiation in 2010. And because inflation is so low, it’s possible the Consumer Price Index will be negative. That’s bad news for unions, because Portland typically uses the CPI to calculate annual cost-of-living adjustments for municipal workers.

City commissioners were scheduled to hear a proposal Dec. 2 that would help pave the way for the redevelopment of PGE Park for Paulson’s new Major League Soccer team in 2011. But that proposal was pulled from the agenda Dec. 1 after having been pulled from previous City Council agendas twice before. It’s not at all clear as of Dec. 1 whether Portland’s tentative deal with Merritt Paulson will be cemented this year.

In October, when the development agreement was supposed to have been inked, Mark Abbott, president of Major League Soccer, said he had no concerns about the delays. MLS didn’t respond to new requests for comment. Construction on the stadium is slated to start in February.

On its own, the proposal that keeps getting pulled from the agenda is relatively minor, but the clock is ticking. The proposal already has the thumbs-up from the Goose Hollow Foothills League Neighborhood Association and the Portland Planning Commission. The proposal calls for changing the zoning code for “open space,” a designation that falls on PGE Park, to allow limited office space. Paulson would like 15,000 square feet of office space on three levels of PGE Park. A proposed sports medicine clinic from Providence Health & Services would occupy part of that.

Adams, recovering from a failed attempt last spring to put a new minor league baseball stadium where Memorial Coliseum now stands, convened a citizens advisory group this fall to study possible ways to reinvent Memorial Coliseum and the surrounding Rose Quarter.

So far, the effort—detailed at rosequarterdevelopment.org—has produced about three dozen general “concepts,” including ideas for a Seattle-style public market, a casino or a natural history museum. Meantime, the deadline to submit new “concepts” has been extended from Dec. 1 until Jan. 8.

Only the idea from the Trail Blazers, to create an entertainment zone they’re calling “JumpTown,” appears to have real, private money attached to it.

That could change. Doug Obletz, president of the development group Shiels Obletz Johnsen, says he’s resurrecting his idea from five years ago to build a public recreation facility that reuses Memorial Coliseum. Responding to criticism his proposal got in its last incarnation, Obletz says the newest proposal for a large-scale rec center would include “revenue-generating uses that would allow the public recreation facility to be self-sustaining.”

That’s important because the Oregon Convention Center Urban Renewal Area that includes the Rose Quarter expires in 2013. And although a group has been convened to study whether the Interstate Corridor Urban Renewal Area could be tapped to provide additional funding for construction in the Rose Quarter, more money would be necessary to maintain whatever is built.

After the deadline closes for submitting concepts for Memorial Coliseum, the mayor’s citizens advisory group will draw up a “short list” of ideas. City Council is expected to weigh in on the ideas in late winter. Only then will the city begin work on the broader plan for redeveloping the Rose Quarter.

Call it VisionPDX 2.0. Picking up where former Mayor Tom Potter left off in his survey of Portlanders on their dreams for Portland in what Potter called “VisionPDX,” Mayor Sam Adams is now asking residents to prioritize their aspirations to create a “Portland Plan” for the next 25 years.

The first step? A series of community meetings that started Nov. 17 and will run through Dec. 15. (Details at portlandonline.com/portlandplan.)

“We’re going to be addressing more than just land issues,” says Eden Dabbs, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. “We’re going to be taking a look at things that affect people’s everyday lives.”