Update: Here’s the letter from the visions committee to those building the center. Here’s the letter back to the visions committee. And here, too, are the minutes from the visions committee’s original meeting, should you be seriously bored this weekend. I, meanwhile, am off skiing. But there’ll be more on this next week.

Original Post, December 13, 3:05pm: Plans for the permanent day access center in Old Town Chinatown are on hold for at least 30 days this Christmas following opposition at yesterday’s meeting of the Old Town Visions Committee—co-chaired by city council candidate Howard Wiener.
HOMELESS CENTER: The controversy begins…

The committee, which has been active since 1995 and is nothing to do with Tom Potter’s “visioning” project of the same name, agreed yesterday to write to those building the access center, asking them to hold their horses.

“I’m a believer in process,” says Howard Weiner, co-chair of the committee. “But in this case I think the process got broken.”

“The neighborhood should have been at the front of this process,” says Weiner. “And we’re here at the tail end, and it seems to us that decisions have been made without consulting us.”

Weiner is drafting a letter to the four agencies building the center (The Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), The Portland Development Commission (PDC), Transition Projects Inc (TPI) and the Bureau of Housing and Community Development (BHCD)) asking questions about the new center, including how many units of housing are planned inside.

“There are a lot of questions that should have been asked before this got going,” says Weiner. “We’re essentially being told what is being planned, as opposed to being part of this process. In many ways it’s no different from what happened with the Chavez rename.”

The upshot is that those four agencies are going to respond to Wiener tomorrow, saying they’ll put the plans on hold for the next 30 days until Commissioner Erik Sten can come to address the next meeting of the Visions Committee on January 9.

More in next week’s issue.