The staunchest City Council advocate for Keller Auditorium’s future appears to be North Portland’s Dan Ryan. The District 2 councilor supplied the lone vote against an Aug. 11 council committee recommendation furthering plans for a new arts and culture center on the Portland State University campus.
Though the committee stripped the PSU plan of a specific financial commitment, the proposal nevertheless goes to the full council on track to meet its twin targets of a $44 million commitment by Dec. 1.
That wasn’t good enough for Ryan.
“I can see where this is going, and I hope I’m wrong,” he said.
“I’m really concerned that we’re once again moving something forward without any clarity on how we’re going to pay for it,” he said of the motion to consider funding a 3,000-plus seat PSU auditorium.
“I don’t want to take the risk of seeing more blight in downtown Portland [if] Keller goes dark someday,” he said.
The Keller Auditorium and the adjacent Ira Keller Fountain—“the most iconic piece of public art our city has”—are one piece, in his mind.
“What city would take that risk to have the beautiful piece of public art and not make that front and center of that part of town?” he asked his colleagues. “How would we give up on that?”
District 4 Councilor Eric Zimmerman said he did not know if the city needed two auditoriums, “but I do know that we need cranes in the air… I won’t turn down the opportunity to leverage state dollars.
“The future of PSU’s performing arts center does not mean the end of the Keller,” Zimmerman said, calling Keller “a foundational building for the community.”
Bob Naito co-chairs the Halprin Landscape Conservancy, which advocates for remodeling Keller Auditorium. He took the committee’s action as a victory in that it calls for a full feasibility study of PSU’s proposal and detailed expenses justifying its $44 million request, details PSU representatives did not provide at last week’s committee hearing.
Naito does not believe Portland needs to match more modern facilities in other cities, a theme in arguments for remodeling the Moda Center. He noted that only two auditoriums capable of handling Broadway productions have been built in the United States in the past 12 years.
Hearing council members express hope that a major investment in the arts will stimulate growth and vitality in the city, Naito pointed to the ambitious plan for a shoe innovation center in Old Town that collapsed recently despite substantial investments by the state and the city’s development agency, Prosper Portland.
“This is not the field of dreams, though they may want it to be,” he said.
While PSU touts the fact that this project will help "revitalize downtown Portland", in reality it isn't "downtown". It on the edges of downtown and will do little to bring people into the core of the downtown area which is where we really need revitalization. The Keller is much closer to the core of downtown. Parking is already available and traffic patterns are already established, unlike the PSU proposal, which has not yet done a traffic study to see if the area infrastructure can support the traffic generated when the PSU project is completed. With a private development group wanting to build a hotel and conference center, why not let them fund the PSU project? City Councilors should be supporting the Keller. The Keller and the Ira Kell Fountain are indeed an iconic piece of pubic art and should not be abandoned which is what is likely to happen if the city decides to approve supporting the PSU project with any public funds.
One aspect of this decision deserves more attention. The proposed City-owned auditorium at PSU is not really a stand-alone project. It is the centerpiece of a much larger PSU development concept that also includes a second, smaller PSU performance venue and academic facilities, parking, and a privately developed hotel and conference facility.
That makes Councilor Zimmerman’s reference to “leveraging state dollars” especially important. The state has already committed substantial capital funding to PSU’s portions of the larger project. But that raises a question rather than answering one: is Portland selecting the PSU site because it is demonstrably the best and least risky solution to the Keller problem, or is the growing financial and political momentum behind PSU’s broader development beginning to drive the City’s auditorium decision?
Before the City commits itself, Council should establish whether the large auditorium can proceed financially and operationally independent of the other PSU components, what shared costs and liabilities the City would assume, and what happens if the hotel, PSU facilities, parking or other elements are delayed, scaled back or fail to materialize.
Bob Naito’s warning about the “field of dreams” seems particularly apt here. The question is not whether a large mixed-use arts development would be exciting. It is whether Portland needs it in order to solve the much narrower problem now before the Council.