Could attempts to scale back the Columbia River Crossing and Hayden Island's Safeway end up creating a new local or arterial bridge -– one connecting the island directly with North Portland's Expo Center and Kenton neighborhood? Since the Sentinel first reported the proposed 22 lanes of freeway spaghetti [pictured below] that the CRC would build on Hayden Island, a storm of controversy has arisen over the proposal.  [The Sentinel's consistent editorial position on the CRC has been to build a bridge of grander design and more modest scale.]

A CRC meeting on Monday night, two proposals surfaced that would greatly reduce the number of traffic lanes crossing the island. At least one proposed redesign would move a massive tangle of freeway interchanges off the island and create a local traffic bridge for Hayden Island. The local bridge would create a street grid for the largely suburban pod-style street system west of I-5 and allow Islanders and North Portlanders to get in and out of the community without having getting on the freeway.

Jantzen Beach Supercenter more or less hates the idea. So does Diversified Marine, a sizeable tug-and-barge service company that says a new bridge might wipe out precious deepwater harbor along Marine Drive.

On the table Monday: two new concepts to shrink the great gray wall of highway on- and off-lanes that would slice through the island and likely wipe out Safeway. (See pages 6-8 for maps of this PDF of the various plans, or here for the biggest plan, known as the "locally preferred alternative.")

Listening were the new co-chairs of the crossing's Project Sponsors Council: Portland business lawyer Henry Hewitt and Vancouver real-estate lawyer Steve Horenstein, who described his goal as getting the big Interstate Bridge project "on its way toward construction."

Concept 1: "off-island access." Combine Hayden Island's interchange with the one just south of the Columbia Slough. MLK Boulevard would be extended west of I-5 and would cross the slough on a large arterial bridge, closely linking Hayden Island with the neighborhoods to its south. Traffic from Vancouver, meanwhile, would drive all the way to Portland's mainland before looping up into the current Jantzen Beach development just west of Home Depot.

The new "arterial bridge" would probably handle about 75 percent of the island's traffic, Portland planner Patrick Sweeney said Monday.

Sweeney was bullish on the off-bridge plan, saying it would make the island "more like an island and a part of Portland, and less like a freeway interchange."

Leslie Sawyer, speaking for the nearby Bridgeton Neighborhood Association, liked the idea of a non-highway bridge to Hayden Island, too.

"It will support all of the communities in North Portland," she said. "They use the island."

Concept 2: "on-island access." This plan for an intermediately-sized interchange would send a new public road right through the middle of what is today Jantzen Beach's nearly vacant mall, taking in most of the highway traffic. To reduce that traffic load, a new, small auto bridge would link Jantzen Drive to the Expo Center just west of I-5.

Both the new concepts -– completed on June 3, less than two weeks ago -– got failing grades from the SuperCenter, which doubted the plans could handle traffic to the island and said they would force retail away from valuable real estate within eyeshot of the freeway.

In comments to the sponsors council, the mall warned that both ideas would "eliminate opportunities to redevelop the site and precludes opportunities to bring new tenants, including grocery tenants, to the site."

Larry Epstein, a representative for Diversified Marine, testified Monday that after a year of working on plans for Marine Drive, his client had been surprised to learn last week that new ideas for the interchange were being rapidly drawn up.

"Anything with the bridge west of us will kill us -- we won't be able to get our 70-foot high boats back and forth," Epstein said. "We want the locally preferred alternative to proceed. Move! Go! Let's get this thing started. We don't want more analysis."

Horenstein, the sponsors' council co-chair, said that Epstein might get what he wanted.

"We may wind up right back where we started," Horenstein said. "That is another possibility."