The Bollard Bulletin for May 28, 2025
The galling arrogance of "Portland Music Hall"
What the Hell Happened
Big news! Work has begun to identify sufficient parking for a 3,300-capacity music and corporate events venue in downtown Portland proposed by concert giant Live Nation and a local developer.
“What’s so big about that, and why is it news?” you may ask. Because, think about it. The team behind the proposed Portland Music Hall spent a lot of time and money planning the venue before formally announcing it last December, but — with construction initially planned to begin this fall — the traffic and parking aspects of their plan are still a work in progress. The profitability of this venture has, undoubtedly, been thoroughly researched and assured, but the actual experience of patrons, guests, employees and everyone who lives and works in its vicinity are an afterthought, a problem it’s now up to us to solve for them.
As the Press Herald reported this morning, the developer recently said it reached a deal with the owner of two parking garages in the area to offer discounted rates and longer hours during event nights, and city staff have been surveying and analyzing the capacity at other local garages. By “city staff,” I mean, of course, people Portlanders collectively pay to work for our benefit.
The local developer, Mile Marker Investments, has floated two other ideas to address parking and traffic problems, the newspaper noted: “Extended bus service” and “Coordination with the Portland Police Department.” Despite also claiming the venue will create 250 full- and part-time jobs, the developer is not proposing to provide any parking itself — a decision that saves them enormous sums.
So the Live Nation team can now offer us evidence of a discount deal it’s struck with a private garage owner (a deal it claims will be available to everyone, so those spaces are not actually dedicated to its venue), plus the suggestion that we pay to run our public busses longer (and, I guess, somehow multiply the fleet and design new, expanded routes to make a dent in demand on those nights) and task our police force with helping them address the traffic and parking nightmares they’ll be creating for us by their profit-making endeavors. Cool.
None of these are serious ideas, which sucks, but it’s even more galling when you consider that Live Nation and Mile Marker are essentially handing locals a flaming pile of shit and telling us, Here, you put it out. It’s up to the public to spend lots of our time and money to figure out how this private venture can succeed, because the investors don’t wish to invest in any parking or spend their time untangling traffic jams.
Portland’s planning board can, and should, require this developer to submit a genuinely workable plan for traffic and parking that doesn’t offload the costs onto the public. Chairman Brendan Mazer seems to be smelling their bullshit. “There’s a lot of ifs and maybes in the report and in the presentation,” he said at last night’s workshop. “I’m trying to figure out how we make sure that they actually happen.”
Right, and that’s the fucking problem: we need to do this. Brendan and the rest of the planning board work for us, the people of Portland, and it shouldn’t be up to us to write the parking and traffic-management sections of a private developer’s business plan. If a developer doesn’t submit a workable plan to the city for approval, they should be told to go back and figure it out themselves, then return with a solid solution the board can vote yay or nay on. Instead, Live/Mile dumped this problem in our collective laps, caused a huge uproar in the local arts community, and is compelling city staff and officials to do the work (on our dime) necessary to figure out how their business can make them richer.
Maybe it’s hobnobbing with all those aloof pop stars. Maybe it’s the traditional arrogance of the elite. But damn, those people got some nerve.
Oh yeah, this is what got me thinking about that damn Live Nation thing: the big Live Nation show tonight at Cross Insurance Arena (1 Civic Center Square, Portland) by metal monsters Cohered and Cambria and Mastodon. They’ll start rumbling after opener Periphery warms up the amps at 6:30 p.m., Tix: $56-$142 (all ages).
Up the street at one of the many venues opposed to Live Nation’s plan, SPACE (538 Congress St.), they’re screening Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, a compilation of work by members of the movement of experimental filmmakers that emerged in Japan beginning in the 1960s, at 7 p.m. Tix: $10.
Nature writer David Gessner will be at Print (273 Congress St., Portland) to discuss The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird, with Maine writer Bill Roorbach at 7 p.m. As you may recall, Flaco the owl escaped the Central Park Zoo and enthralled the masses with his ability to live for a year on the mean streets of New York by eating rodents, squirrels and other birds. So yeah, it’s a rather complicated morality tale. The event is also free.
And, like, extended bus routes to WHERE, exactly? It's not like there's some giant, free, municipal lot on the outskirts of town somewhere. Ask people in Libbytown if there's enough parking provided for Thompson's Point concerts.