4 hits? Two by Sam, and one each by his travel buddies.

By the time you read this, our Mayoral Pedalphile will have given his talk in the plenary session (Sam, it's pronounced plē-nə-rē) on "Oregon: A Climber City."

Right now, he's sucking down a Belgian and being thankful that WWeek and KATU can't afford Europe.

Here's hoping he can stay sober, keep his fly zipped and not run into curbs. Which may be a lot to ask of Mayor McLiar.

Ahhhhhhh, your tax dollars at work.

Let's pay the Belgians to keep him and his buddies!

Sam Adams, your pile of lies is taller than the magnificent old building you have disgraced and defiled.
Your grandest lie to date, the elephant in the room, is your statement from January that you would step down if it is in the best interest of the city to do so. Well, there you still are, at your smug, ingnorant best occupying an office that you gained fraudulently while you continue to loot the city and sell out it's financial future with one nutty self-serving scheme after another. You know what you need to do, and I'm hoping that you were just prolonging it so that you could milk one more freebie trip out of the city before you flee in shame.

Jack, I couldn't help but notice from this aerial that the density and sprawl in Belgium is more than the area around our own Villabois near Wilsonville. It would be interesting if you posted the two aerials at the same scale side by side. Notice that there is a freeway next to Villers-le-Bouillet and that there are 18 towns just within the aerial scale. Maybe Sam, his staff and his Planning Bureau is studying how to create urban sprawl with bicycles.

Adams and Leonard: The new Imelda and Ferdinand. Anyone remember the uprising and coup that caused them to flee Manila?
...I'm just sayin....

With a bustle of packing at her hillside mansion in Honolulu that called to mind the hurried crating of pesos, gold and jewels as she evacuated Malacanang Palace in 1986, Mrs. Marcos prepared to return home to face more than 60 criminal and civil cases based on the contention that she and her husband robbed the country of billions of dollars during his 20-year rule.

Manila officials said she could be charged in her first week home with tax fraud. Other charges will be aimed at recovering at least $356 million the Marcoses secreted in Swiss banks.

Gee, Jack, what an encouraging thought-- that Sam (and Randy)might actually READ this blog! I have so often wished that we could force-feed them comments from here. But, darn it, on second thought, if Sam HAS been reading it and still stubbornly refuses to see Merritt's plans for the enormous risk that they are, then there is even LESS hope that he will ever see the light.

Sam's minders probably read the blogs for him. It would be difficult to get through the day after reading some of the posts, particularly the nasty ones on the media blogs.

Sam and Randy and the rest of that mob deserve nasty...and so much more.
They are petulant, churlish, and childish.
I only hope the replacements will be an improvement, but I have my doubts unless someone with integrity and intelligence is elected to City Hall.

Thankfully, Adams will be telling everybody that he's the mayor of some other, larger, more important city.

Quite a thumping on Saturday, Channel 2 with Anna and Nigel giving their 10 cents worth followed by a "liberal" and "conservative" consensus that Mayor Sam is a hamstrung liar and an embarrassment and should step down toute de suite (that's "right away" in French for those still loitering in Belgium - not sure what the Flemish translation would be).

Besides Sam and Co. studying Belgium urban sprawl, they are studying the single tower cable stay bridge in Liege. Icon searching.

"Sucking down a Belgian."

Yikes, didn't really need that image rattling around in my head, GW.

lw: the density and sprawl in Belgium is more than the area around our own Villabois near Wilsonville.

It's dense, no issue there. But the model of their "sprawl" is quite a bit different: Zoom in and look closely; there's agricultural lands and woodland interspersed among the residential areas. And likely no Mcmansions - just a guess, given the tax structure there.

But the biggest difference is the availability of public transportation - when there are plenty of options available, living 80 kilometers outside of Brussels isn't such an issue - so they're not totally auto dependent like Wilsonville would be. And they're also connected to the rest of western Europe's major cities by high speed rail, which I've used.

You can't compare this to Wilsonville based on density figures and aerial Google images. It's apples and oranges.

John Rettig, the point I am making is that on a comparative scale (exact same scale of photos) there is a very similar appearance of the two areas around Villabois and Villers-de-Bouliette. There is a major river (not quite as large in gallons per minute as the Willamette) just on the fringe of the aerial. There is a "freeway" just like I-5, there are "county" highways through and nearby. And there are open fields, open space just like around Wilsonville. Leige and Boulitte has bus and rail service like Villabois and Wilsonville.

Another point is that there are two primary ways that Planners in the past century have advocated to allow increased density and keep the lungs (open space, etc.) near the population densities.

The advocates of the "Garden City" concepts, more in tune with the mid century up until the 80's, planned density to be evenly spaced without so much reliance on increasing major, high population centers.

There were to be pods of smaller urban centers with industry, housing, open space. These planners saw the disadvantage of energy consumption, renewal costs of aging, high density cities, the psychological impacts, etc. in high density.

The more recent planning has called for maximizing density in already existing cities, and increasing all components three or more times regardless of the existing attributes, or desires of the citizenry. A city like New York of 15 Million should become 30 Million. A city of 500,000 like Portland proper should become 1.5 Million in 30 years (so says Sam). Yes there will be some parks, but the open spaces occur farther out on the fringes and beyond. The lungs of the city are in your toes.

There are positive and negatives to each concept. But what has been lost in this Metro is even a discussion. Somehow, somewhere, as time has gone on and density in the region has increased a great deal, the citizenry hasn't had the opportunity to learn about other options to our high density models, nor even to comment. A committee of seven with like minded thinking is not the consensus of the citizenry.