Leaders want a baseball stadium, but will the district benefit?
After nixing plans to put a minor league baseball stadium at the Memorial Coliseum site, Portland city planners are turning their eyes toward Lents. Some say a stadium would benefit the area, but many residents disagree.
Merritt Paulson, owner of the Portland Beavers baseball team, says his proposal to bring a minor league stadium to Lents “puts that neighborhood on the map.”
He calls his public-private venture with the city “a major transformational opportunity that’s the biggest one in the history of this area.”
Last week, Commissioner Randy Leonard tried to make that same pitch in front of a mostly hostile and unreceptive crowd, in a Lents elementary school cafeteria with handpainted sea creatures climbing the walls and piles of styrofoam trays clogging trash bins.
Read the full article in the Willamette Week.
