For decades powerful corporate industries have set the stage for much of the city’s development along the lower Willamette and Columbia Rivers through a little known process known as the Economic Opportunity Analysis, or EOA. Currently the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability is updating this document in order to prepare for the North Reach River Plan. Despite the far reaching impact it has on human health and safety, few people in Portland know about it or how it works.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Sarah Taylor, with the Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group and the Braided River Campaign. We discuss grassroots efforts to wrest control of this process from the industrial lobbyists who have for decades been the dominating voices making decisions that rezone residential, open space, recreational and riverfront lands for heavy industrial development.
- KBOO