Skip to main content
City Commissioner Steve Novick has sent an email strongly criticizing city officials—including a staffer in Mayor Charlie Hales' office—for reversing course and seeking a quick permit for a controversial Southeast Division Street apartment building.
The city had issued a stop-work order for Beaverton-based developer
Dennis Sackhoff's 37th Street Apartments last month, after a state
land-use appeals board ruled the building was illegally permitted.
Development Services officials told neighbors fighting the project that
it would need a new application and a public hearing on April 8.
But on Tuesday, the Bureau of Development Services announced it was reviewing a revised permit application—without telling City Council or neighbors.
Novick's email, addressed to Bureau of Development Services Director Paul Scarlett and Hales' policy director Ed McNamara, says the "surprise reversal" is "inexplicable and indefensible."
Novick's email personally speaks to Scarlett and McNamara's roles in the reversal.
"Paul, I appreciate your years of service to the city, and especially your and your office's work on seismic issues," Novick writes, "and Ed, you and I go back a long way and I love ya, but this situation is (to use a genteel phrasing) messed up six ways to Sunday."
WW first reported Wednesday that City Commissioners didn't know that the Bureau of Development Services was working with the City Attorney's Office and Hales' staffers to offer a revised permit to the much-decried 81-unit project, described by Commissioner Nick Fish as "a poster child" for oversized infill apartments without on-site parking.
Notably, the stop-work order came after the state Land Use Board of Appeals rejected the project not based on its lack of parking, but on a technicality: The apartment lacked an entrance on Division Street, which violates city codes.
WWeek 2015