Rails on new Sellwood Bridge…? City explains

By Eric Norberg

The Bee, Nov 4, 2009

Eric Norberg / THE BEE

Patrick Sweeney of PDOT shows the current Portland Streetcar Plan – with the current and identified potential future routes in dark green and the “someday maybe” routes in light orange. The potential route across the Sellwood Bridge east on Tacoma Street to the Tacoma MAX station is ranked the lowest of the current potential routes, said Sweeney, and would be built only if the neighborhood asked for it – but as a contingency, the city wants rails included on the new Sellwood Bridge.

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Various political deals have been made to help raise the money to replace the Sellwood Bridge.

Multnomah County owns the bridge, but doesn’t have the money for the replacement — which is basically what has held up this needed project for nearly three decades. The need to replace the bridge is now recognized as urgent, which has brought in cooperation to fund the replacement from the city, the state, and the federal government.

State funding for the bridge replacement has taken the form of direct appropriation, and special legislation allowing Multnomah County and Clackamas County to enact a special additional vehicle registration fee, for a prescribed period of time — and only if the raised funds go towards replacement of the Sellwood Bridge.

The City of Portland has joined this effort by committing to $12 million a year for several years. All of these commitments which have been assembled to date have permitted Multnomah County to show the needed funding matches to the federal government to apply for a share from that source.

But, in recent weeks, the city has been attaching a condition to its part of the funding: That the new bridge be built with streetcar rails embedded in its surface.

That’s it — rails on the bridge, and no rails beyond it.

The reason, city officials explained in a public meeting with the SMILE Land Use and Transportation Committees, at SMILE Station in Sellwood on October 19th, is that it would be very costly and disruptive to retrofit the bridge with these rails at a later date, and it could be decided later on that a streetcar over the bridge is a good idea for the neighborhood.

Such a streetcar could provide access between Sellwood and the streetcar between Lake Oswego and Portland at the west end of the bridge, and to the Tacoma MAX station on the east.

Sellwood-Westmoreland neighborhood officials and residents have been concerned that such rails on the bridge could be the “camel’s nose under the tent”, by which a streetcar line could then appear on Tacoma, and/or high density zoning could be imposed along Tacoma Street, contrary to the city-accepted Tacoma Main Street Plan, or the current needs and wishes of those in the neighborhood.

At that October 19th meeting, the city officials in attendance — who numbered five — were quick to respond with strong assurances that the city’s condition for funding was simply prudent forethought — to incorporate a feature into the bridge that could be desired later — and to do it at a time when doing so would be relatively inexpensive.

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