News  WW has obtained a copy of a three-page information sheet detailing a new urban-renewal district proposed by Portland Mayor Sam Adams at his State of the City speech last Friday.The information sheet (PDF) includes a map of the proposed 31-year, 130-acre district centered around Portland State University. Unlike a much larger and highly gerrymandered new district previously floated by Adams, the ...   More

News  This afternoon President Obama's office announced he will come to Oregon next week to talk about education during a visit to Intel in Hillsboro. And that visit creates two interesting local questions for political obsessives about whether a couple elected officials will be around to greet the president on Friday, Feb. 18.One of the questions stems from when Obama last came to Oregon in October ...   More

News If you're like 60 percent of Portlanders, you feel safe walking in your neighborhood at night. And if you're like 87 percent of Portland cops, you're white.Those are two of the more interesting statistics to come out of the proposed police bureau budget released by the City of Portland this week.We'll have a piece in tomorrow's WW with a look at proposed new spending by the Police Bureau as well as ...   More

News Delivering his first State of the County speech to the City Club of Portland, Multnomah County Chairman Jeff Cogen left us with these five impressions:1. As usual at City Club events, the audience of mostly progressive and aging Portlanders left the most pressing question of the moment unasked. No one followed up previous media inquiries by putting Cogen on the spot with questions about his political ...   More

News The Portland Police Bureau is researching the acquisition of new weapons in its effort to tamp down the number of fatal officer-involved shootings in Portland, according to a budget proposal. And one of the tools the bureau wants to consider is the so-called TigerLight, a flashlight that contains a stealth pepper-spray canister that can "drop a 250 pound man to his knees," according to the maker of ...   More

News Observers at Multnomah County headquarters this morning witnessed a remarkable scene, as officials who have been feuding publicly for months over funding a new Sellwood Bridge met to congratulate one another over finally reaching an agreement.For a few minutes, the players managed to bury their mutual mistrust and make nice in a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination.First to deliver his lines was ...   More

News  Anybody who has ever wondered about the identity of an anonymous blog commenter will enjoy the current edition [PDF] of the NW Examiner, the scrappy neighborhood paper that covers Northwest Portland.The Examiner's Allan Classen and Mike Ryerson figured out that a Portland real estate executive named Brian Owendoff was making nice to Mayor Sam Adams in public and then using the veil of anonymity ...   More

News Anyone handicapping the 2012 Portland mayor's race—as we did in our print edition this week—should note one down-ballot result from the just-concluded 2010 election that could play a crucial role in one potential candidate's decision to run. Multnomah County voters soundly defeated Measure 26-110, with 62 percent voting against it. If that proposed change to the county charter had ...   More

News Mayor Sam Adams this morning vigorously defended his controversial proposal to crack down on illegal guns, telling WW it will not detract from other efforts to fight gang violence in Portland. Adams said the city has invested millions in gang outreach efforts in the last two decades but has done very little to eradicate the illegal guns used to perpetrate gang violence. "When you look back ...   More

News No downtown Portland building attracted more controversy over the past couple of years than the structure at Southwest 4th and Washington that formerly housed the Greek Cusina. After a long battle with City Commissioner Randy Leonard's Housing Interdiction Team, Greek Cusina owner Ted Papas closed his restaurant last January and lost his building to foreclosure. In May, a group called Asia ...   More