The estimated cost of the Fill-to-Pill-Hill Tram (pronounced "Ftpht" if you don’t like the project) has nearly tripled since 2003, with the latest bump (according to Saturday’s Whimperer) being an additional $5 million because the price of steel has gone up. The total cost is now estimated at $45 million.
As far as I can tell, most of the increase in cost above the original estimate is because the original estimate wasn’t very good. It was, however, the cost estimate on which the City based its decision to authorize the Ftpht instead of a tunnel or some other means of connecting Pill Hill to the North Macadam industrial district. OHSU, the Ftpht’s main beneficiary, doesn’t want to pay the extra cost. Sam Adams told the Oregonian he’s (in the Oregonian‘s words) "talking with property owners, Oregon Health & Science University, the Oregon Department of Transportation and the Portland Development Commission about additional construction dollars." To his credit, Commissioner Adams said he would not ask the property owners at the tram terminals to pay more.
If OHSU does not want to pay the overrun then it’s time to pull the plug on the tram project and go back to the drawing board. The tunnel option was rejected the first time around because it wasn’t cost-competitive with the tram.
It’s cost-competitive now.
Or let’s do the responsible thing, and build only as much tram as we can afford today, say from OHSU to Barbur Boulevard. When someone kicks in another $20 million, connect Barbur Boulevard to Macadam. And if it’s not worth that to the users, then the City shouldn’t be subsidizing it.
Comments
5 responses
Isaac Laquedem – great post on the South Waterfront Tram
With the cost of the tram skyrocketing – maybe, he says – its time to restart the process, as the tunnel option is now competitively priced.
The estimated cost of the Fill-to-Pill-Hill Tram (pronounced Ftpht if you dont li…
As a potential Raspberry passenger (I work on Pill Hill), I say: amen. The tram was a bloody stupid idea from day one, and I never understood why no one costed out upgrades to the roads and bus services. For $17 million or whatever the original estimate was, I bet you could build a parking structure somewhere along the #8 route, improve the existing roads and triple the number of #8 buses (instead of reducing the number, as Trimet in its wisdom (and to be fair, penury) recently did).
According to my OHSU grapevine, The story behind the tram is as follows:
OHSU’s available building space on pill hill is about zero. However, OHSU owns quite a bit of land out in Hillsboro.
OHSU leveraged that Hillsboro land with the City of Portland, threatening to basically rebuild the entire OHSU campus out in Washington County over several years if Portland didn’t go along with OHSU’s new development on the PDX waterfront and the tram.
It was out of the fear of losing OHSU’s 11,000 jobs and the tax revenue that goes along with them that persuaded PDX to cave in on the OHSU tram.
And this was just one more deal that was a done deal before the public had any “input”.
This is only my opinion based on what I heard from my OHSU sources. But I believe it’s pretty close to what transpired.
Um, what makes us assume that the city is any better at estimating the cost of building a tunnel?
“OHSU’s 11,000 jobs and the tax revenue that goes along with them”
Exactly how much revenue is that?