April 27, 2010 – Mayor Sam Adams sent the following letter to the Stakeholder Advisory Committee:
Dear Members of the Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee,
Throughout this extensive planning process, our focus has been on transparency and flexibility. One of the many benefits yielded from this commitment to transparency and flexibility has been the fostering of both competition and collaboration among concept proposers.
Both SAC members and City commissioners have expressed a desire to see collaboration among ideas and concepts, and I’m proud that the process we’ve been following has allowed for this kind of innovation.
In the past few days, all three of the finalist teams (Trail Blazers, MARC and VMAAC) have informed me that they have begun conversations about collaborating on a potential joint RFP response. All three teams have identified commonalities amongst their concepts and want to explore the benefits of working together.
As you know, we issued the RFP on April 16, and at the request of the teams, extended the RFP response deadline to allow time for the teams to discuss potentially collaborating.
We will ask teams to communicate their intent to the Portland Development Commission no later than Monday, May 10, 2010.
In the meantime, staff continues to work on updating the base case, which will serve as the point of comparison for evaluating RFP submittals.
I look forward to moving the process forward and discussing this latest development at our meeting on Tuesday, May 11. In the meantime, if you have questions, please contact Kevin Brake with the PDC at brakeK@pdc.us.
Thanks for your ongoing service and commitment to Portland.
Sincerely,
Sam Adams
Mayor, City of Portland
Chair, Rose Quarter SAC
Response from marcpdx.org:
The MARC team has committed to Mayor Adams that they will work in the spirit of cooperation to explore areas of common interest between the MARC, Blazers/Winterhawks and VMAAC teams between now and May 7th. At the same time, the MARC team recognizes that significant hurdles exist relative to melding the potentially competing interests, ideas, skill sets, levels of expertise involved in the three proposals. In addition, the MARC team has significant concerns with the RFP and has not yet had the opportunity to communicate these to PDC. Depending on the outcome of the discussions with the other teams, and PDC’s response to the concerns with the RFP, the MARC team will decide what direction it will head prior to the deadline established by PDC and the Mayor.