The closure of North and Southeast Precincts last summer was supposed to save the Portland Police Bureau nearly $3 million and make a significant dent in the Bureau’s spending.

Instead, PPB is the only city bureau in danger of spending its full budget this fiscal year, using $1.6 million more than was budgeted  to pay for overtime and hiring new staff without adequate funds to do so.

We've just received terrible news via city PIO Beth Sorenson: North Portland's Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center will cease operations later this spring due to declining revenues. Last year, the arts nonprofit was initially cut from Portland Parks and Recreation's budget - for the third time since 2005 - but rallied support from the community and was spared. This time, it seems, not even the city's many arts boosters can save IFCC from the throes of the recession.

UPDATE 2:36 p.m. - I just got off the phone with Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center Creative Director Adrianne Flagg, who's understandably being slammed with phone calls about today's announcement that the multicultural arts center will be closing its doors this spring (see below). She didn't have a lot of time to speak, but had this to say:

"I have a long history with IFCC, and I am extraordinarily sad. I know how important this place is to the community, how important it's been to me as an artist, how important it was to me as a child. I'm brokenhearted to see it not succeed." 

Any journalist will tell you that a good lede is elusive. The first sentence of a news or feature story, the lede must hook readers with irresistible brain bait that lures them into the next paragraph and beyond.

We’ve pored over thousands of articles here at The Sentinel, so many that after a while stories of brownfields and Business Boosters and Bachelor’s Clubs and brouhahas blend together, regardless of an individual piece’s quality. There are some stories, however, whose ledes lift them from interesting to instantly memorable. Mara Grunbaum’s lede for “Grand Masters from Astor” is a prime example.

In a few short years, Jeff Joslin went from mild-mannered land-use manager to headline-making rabble-rouser to redeveloper of Clackamas County’s decommissioned Bull Run Powerhouse.
Joslin made waves — and Sentinel headlines — in late 2007 when he spent nearly $40,000 of his own money fighting the expansion of the ESCO landfill across from his Sauvie Island property on Northwest Gillihan Road. At the time, he was still a city of Portland planner.

Hayden Island residents have made some headway in their drive to make the Columbia River Crossing project focus more on their livability through several key engineering adjustments.

 At last month’s CRC Project Sponsors Council meeting, CRC Transit Manager Steve Witter spoke about the numerous meetings between the CRC and various Hayden Island citizen groups that took place in the wake of December’s PSC meeting, where residents spoke out against the CRC cost-cutting project refinements.  

Intended to shave $650 million off the project’s $4 billion budget, the refinements were seen by island residents as going against the livability requirements of the city’s own Hayden Island Plan, primarily by choosing a project design that would cut the island in half and bulldoze its only grocery store and pharmacy.

Nena Botto is ready for her close-up – and so is St. Johns.

Botto, an actress and St. Johns resident, has given her neighborhood a starring role in her new web series, Blue Fiddles. Billed by Botto as “Sex and the City meets Lucille Ball,” the series chronicles the everyday adventures of three female friends in the Rose City. 

Part of a series on North Precinct
At a standing-room-only Public Safety Action Committee meeting in late January, Chris Duffy addressed North Portland’s concerns about crime.

“No matter what the crime numbers seem to be on paper, people are not seeing our police on the streets,” said Duffy, the chair of the Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association. “The police are dashing from one end of the peninsula to East County and back again, and people are not getting the day-to-day communication with officers they expect.”

While the number of Portland police officers is currently greater than in recent years, Portland Police Bureau representatives have been saying for months that overall crime rates are down. Statistics from the PPB website and the bureau’s crime analysts corroborate those statements. But property crime in certain North and Northeast neighborhoods is up, and residents reeling from the loss of the old North Precinct in St. Johns are feeling increasingly vulnerable within the new police structure.

In the wake of mounting community concern about crime in North and Northeast Portland, and in advance of tonight's Public Safety Action Committee, North Portland is getting a new Crime Prevention Coordinator. 

Angela Wagnon (at right) joins Mark Wells at the North Portland Crime Prevention Office on North Denver Avenue in Kenton, where she spoke by phone with The Sentinel on her first day at the office since being reassigned from East Precinct earlier this month.

"It was a bit bittersweet," said Wagnon of leaving the neighborhoods she had worked with since joining the city's Crime Prevention Team in early 2009. "But for my fellow coordinators, it would have been a tougher move," since several of her cohorts in East had worked there for many years. Wagnon had the added benefit of hands-on experience working in the North Portland office as an intern in the summer of 2008.

 We've been reporting recently on the spike in property crime in North and Northeast Portland, which has coincided with the consolidation of the North and Northeast police precincts. Jim Ferraris, commander of the "new" North Precinct, claims that residents' perception of crime is higher than normal even though the overall crime rate is down in N/NE from levels seen in recent years. (Numbers from the Portland Police Bureau's CrimeStats website back this up, though there are certain neighborhoods — St. Johns in particular — where the number of residential and commercial burglaries from June-October 2009 appeared to increase over the same time period in 2008.)

As if to echo that sentiment, a pair of emails sent to our Inbox by the North Portland Business Association express extreme unease with the current policing situation — crucially, without blaming the police themselves, but rather the dismal economy and the resulting PPB budget cuts (and, implicitly, the precinct consolidation). Below is the full text of the emails, sent by NPBA President and VP Jim Schaller and Mike Salvo, both of whom urge N/NE community members to attend the Public Safety Action Committee (PSAC) meeting on Jan. 27.
(see below the cut)

The Columbia River Crossing Project Sponsors Council got an earful last month from Hayden Island residents concerned about the effects of proposed cost-saving project refinements on the island’s livability. 

In response, CRC representatives and city of Portland employees met with residents and advocacy groups throughout December to address and assuage anxieties. But will a new year bring a better bridge plan for Hayden Islanders? Depends on who you ask.

Recommended in the month of January:

A Broad for All Seasons

January 2-23, Tuesday-Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 2pm — A/Broad for All Seasons is the story of seven extraordinary women leaders throughout the world. The show features intimate encounters with such amazing women as Wangari Maathai, the creator of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Nobel Peace Prize winner; Arundathi Roy, a radical grassroots organizer, writer and political commentator from India; Mairead Corrigan and Betty Richardson, the two mothers who brokered the peace in Northern Ireland; and Portland’s own late Bonnie Tinker, lesbian and gay rights advocate, pacifist, founder of Love Makes a Family, and feisty member of Pissed Off Grannies.

[From our upcoming January Street Edition, out Jan. 6}
Part of a series on North Precinct: After the Fall

North Precinct Commander Jim Ferraris notes that while the perception of crime is up in North and Northeast neighborhoods, "Empirical data and facts tell me otherwise." Indeed, overall crime is down locally and regionally, with statewide property crimes at their lowest numbers in decades.

Try telling that to the business owners on Northeast Alberta Street and North Mississippi Avenue, where the list of locations hit by break-ins and burglaries grows longer every day. At least six Alberta Street businesses have been broken into or burglarized this fall. Add that to a trio of recent burglaries on North Williams Avenue and numerous break-ins on Mississippi — including businesses that have been hit twice or more — and you have a commercial community fighting for survival at a time when the recession has already battered their bottom lines.

Snowpocalypse '09 is threatening to bury us all in white wintry death, and transit's getting stopped in its snowy tracks. appears to be melting away as we speak. Here's the latest word from TriMet on its response to the unexpected snow:

UPDATE 9:14 a.m. 12/30

Conditions are improving around the region:

-          Most lines returning to regular routes without chains

-          One bus line on snow route

-          Four bus lines remain cancelled

-          MAX trains operating on regular schedules with no problems

-          Check trimet.org or call 503-238-RIDE (7433) for updates

Part One
As winter sets in, crime doesn’t cool

“Typically in Overlook we’ve averaged a couple car break-ins a year,” says North Portland crime prevention coordinator Mark Wells from his Kenton office on a rainy November afternoon. “In the past six weeks, we’ve had 10 or 11.”

Shoplifting is up on Mississippi Avenue. Robberies have plagued Alberta Street businesses in recent weeks. Just last month, a serial “cat burglar” hit 19 homes on or near North Lombard Street. And St. Johns has seen an uptick in criminal activity. 

As service cuts continue to bear down on North/Northeast, and last summer’s police precinct consolidation stretches officers and resources to their limits, neighbors are more concerned than ever about crime. However, residents are beginning to rally as they realize that they must take a more active role in public safety.

Jenna Forzley of Atomic Pizza on North Killingsworth Street had a close call last night, when a small group of teenagers stole a patron's purse and took off running down the street. The purse was recovered and the suspects caught by police - "they stopped the MAX train [the suspects] had gotten on," said Forzley - but nerves were frayed and the community was once again set on edge.

This is the latest in a string of North Portland robberies; according to Forzley, Blend Coffee Lounge, just down the street from her business, was robbed recently, as was the popular Lombard Street bar The Twilight Room. "That one was a real professional job," said Forzley. "They cut the phone line and everything."

These incidents, along with the string of "cat burglaries" along Lombard Street last month and numerous car break-ins on Killingsworth Street and nearby side streets, have prompted the Overlook Village Business District Association to organize a robbery prevention and business safety meeting for North Portland business owners. The meeting will take place Nov. 16 at 8:30 a.m. at Yorgo's, 5421 N. Greeley Ave., and will feature Portland Police Bureau Crime Prevention Coordinator Mark Wells (who wrote a nice post about Overlook Village on Commissioner Amanda Fritz's blog). More information in the Comments section of this post.

Read on for Jenna's account of last night's incident at Atomic Pizza:

We were all saddened when the New Orleans-inspired restaurant extraordinaire Roux shut its doors earlier this year. The festive red space has sat vacant on North Killingsworth Street since July, waiting for the perfect tenant to bring food, drink and merriment back to the Overlook neighborhood.

It appears that the wait may be over.

The former Roux space may be transformed into the newest outpost of venerable PDX brewpub The Lucky Lab!   According to blogger and former Willamette Week columnist Byron Beck, The Lucky Lab wants to establish its fourth Portland-area location in the Fifth Quadrant - yet another boon for an area that's seen the rise of numerous independent cafes and bars in the past year (Posies, The Hop and Vine, and Saraveza, to name a few).

UPDATE 11:22 a.m. - Erin Benddik, the manager of Lucky Lab's Hawthorne and Multnomah Village locations, says that while the company is very interested in the ex-Roux space, "it's not a definite yes yet. There's still a lot of hoops to jump through - loans, paperwork, etc." According to Benddik, The Lucky Lab has been considering opening a fourth location for quite some time, but Killingsworth only entered the picture as a possibility "very recently." Should all necessary hoops be jumped through and the space acquired by Lucky Lab, Benddik says that work would not begin on the new location until 2010.

"It's a great neighborhood," adds Benddik. "We'd love to be a part of it." Here's hoping they will be. Lucky Lab = Lucky Us.

A new Request for Qualifications for the St. Johns Brownfield Project was issued by the city of Portland on Oct. 14, nearly a year after the original Request for Proposals was turned down by developers who saw its criteria as too strict. 

“Our RFP in 2008 was far too prescriptive and expensive to respond to,” said Clark Henry, a Brownfield Program staffer with the city’s Bureau of Environmental Services. He noted that last year’s RFP for the site at North Lombard and Baltimore streets included requirements for specific design elements, as well as numerous drawings and market analyses, whose production is costly for development teams. 

This time around, the requirements are fewer and more flexible. However, the St. Johns Racquet Center adjacent to the brownfield, considered the most onerous part of last year’s RFP by potential developers, is still part of the package — albeit an optional one.