Action Alert: Help Stop the Columbia River Crossing
We need your help to put the brakes on the Columbia River Crossing! Portland is known for its leadership on the environment and sustainable transportation, but it is rushing headlong toward supporting an enormous freeway project that will cost over $4 billion and will double the size of the existing bridge to twelve lanes.
Friends and Advocates of Urban Natural Areas,
We need your help to put the brakes on the Columbia River Crossing! Portland is known for its leadership on the environment and sustainable transportation, but it is rushing headlong toward supporting an enormous freeway project that will cost over $4 billion and will double the size of the existing bridge to twelve lanes. The project will increase global warming, promote sprawl, increase air polution and potentially destroy valuable wetlands at Vanport. It will also undermine the region’s ability to do critical infrastructure projects for years to come. The project is reminiscent of 1950’s era road projects. We have before us an opportunity to do the first great, environmentally conscious road project or the last truly bad road project of the twenty-first century.
Nobody is suggesting that the current I-5 Bridge does not need improvements. It needs more bike lanes, a light rail connection from Portland to Vancouver and improved access for Hayden Island. However a twelve lane behemoth is the wrong way to accomplish this objective.
Next Wednesday the Portland City Council may sign-on to a proposed “Locally Preferred Alternative” (LPA) for the Columbia River Crossing replacement bridge that could surrender its power to prevent habitat destruction and reduce green house gas emissions resulting from the new freeway bridge. We need you to call and email your City Councilors (see contact info below) today and urge them to:
1. Reject all of the options currently being proposed, including the “locally preferred option,” for the Columbia River Crossing
2. Not cede its power to state transportation agencies to build a 12 lane freeway replacement bridge
3. Support a proposal by Commissioner Dan Saltzman that would withhold support from the Locally Preferred Alternative until an independent analysis is completed of the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and induced demand of automobile travel.
Thanks,
Bob Sallinger
Conservation Director
Audubon Society of Portland
bsallinger@audubonportland.org
TOM POTTER, MAYOR
Commissioner of Finance and
Administration
(503)823-4120
e-mail: mayorpotter@ci.portland.or.us
SAM ADAMS
(503)823-3008
e-mail: sadams@ci.portland.or.us
NICK
FISH
(503) 823-3589
e-mail: Nick@ci.portland.or.us
RANDY
LEONARD
(503)823-4682
e-mail: randy@ci.portland.or.us
DAN SALTZMAN
(503)823-4151
e-mail: dsaltzman@ci.portland.or.us
