My day in a nutshell: The oatmeal cookie I just snagged at tonight's Bicycle Advisory Committee/Pedestrian Advisory Committee joint meeting was lunch. Thankfully, it was a substantial cookie.

Here's a download of the action.

First up, the council work session on the Portland Plan. As a work session, the council didn't decide anything—they got a presentation on the massive, three-year project's status, and batted around ideas.

The presentation was a bit wonky: There was an outline of the steps in the plan, which starts with the visionPDX data (turns out it'll be put to use!). Then, Mayor-elect Sam Adams has directed the Planning Bureau to come up with some "baselines," so the impact of the Portland Plan can later be measured. The last big pieces are "focused strategic directions," and "performance measures for community indicators" and "feedback loop." In English, that's means the plan will have concrete things we can do to improve Portland, and then there will be ways to see if the planning accomplished the things we decided we wanted to accomplish.

Commissioner Randy Leonard brought the conversation back down to earth with a great—though slightly tangential—observation. He's interested in "increasing density within our city," but often finds himself butting up "against people who would otherwise be in favor of that but are offended by skinny houses." What can the city do to adopt design standards that improve the quality of infill housing, he wondered? Then he and Commissioner-elect Amanda Fritz—who joined the work session—got a bit mired in zoning versus design guidelines, and how to best achieve Leonard's idea.

"That's a really fruitful area to explore," Planning director Gil Kelley said. Moving on...

They also talked about "20 Minute Walkable Neighborhoods," the newest buzz idea in Portland planning. What it means: In a great neighborhood, all your needs—or at least most of them—could be met in a twenty minute radius from your home. On foot. Which also means your neighborhood is pedestrian friendly. It's a nice way to mesh all of Portland's values together into an idea people can grasp. But Commissioner Nick Fish had a question: "How do you calibrate a 20 minute for someone who's 21 versus someone who's 65? For someone who's older and has mobility issues, a 20 minute neighborhood means what?" Planning will look into that. Finally, they discussed community involvement on the plan... and the acronyms for the different citizen involvement panels started flying. For such a huge project, finding an effective way to involve Portlanders is key—but it's unclear how to do that best. "This is one of the most critical parts of the entire plan," Mayor Tom Potter noted.

Onward, to the Major League Soccer Task Force update. And then news from Adams about stimulus packages.

Mark Evans will be posting later tonight, to dissect the soccer news that came up during this afternoon's Major League Soccer/Minor League Baseball Task Force meeting. (That's a hell of a name. How about I call it the soccer-baseball task force from now on?) Evans, our resident rabid soccer buff, whispered something to me about news about Rhode Island's team or something, but it was Greek to me.

As for the city policy stuff, that I understand. This was the first meeting of a new task force, and Adams and Leonard welcomed everyone and offered some opening remarks. Leonard said he was "excited about the prospect" of a baseball stadium in Lents, his part of town. "I have never seen the community excitement as there is right now..." around that idea. Regardless of where the task force might recommend placing a baseball stadium, they need to decide fairly quickly—MLS needs an answer from Portland by March, so they can decide which cities get teams.

Adams gave a more balanced intro, noting that the task force is made of people who are "totally opposed and totally for" a new baseball stadium/MLS deal, plus some neutral parties thrown in to mix it up.

"We will get you the expertise that you need, within the resources that we have," he added. The city is interested in a proposal that "the benefits are equal to or greater than the costs," but he's definitely open to putting city money toward a stadium if it makes sense. "It is in these tough times, that you want to invest for the future," he says.

Merritt Paulson, Timbers/Beavers owner, and Don Garber, commissioner of MLS, gave their dog and pony show about how great soccer is, how perfect it is for Portland, why a new stadium is key to all their grand plans. (Note: I'm being snarky, but I'm honestly undecided about this whole idea. New stadium? Cool! Spending money on that instead of things about to be cut from the city budget? Not so cool.)

Paulson had plenty of grandiose statements: "Soccer is by every significant metric the most popular sport in the world," Paulson says. And, "for a project such as this, positive economic impact is undeniable and unequivocable."

"If we miss the opportunity this round, it is unlikely major league soccer will ever come to Portland," he says. But his goal "is not to push this thing through... it needs to be the right deal for the... taxpayers" and the city as a whole.

The task force members launched a lot of basic questions, like "What's the low club attendance, what's the high club attendance, and what, in your opinion, is the difference between those cities?" and what the impact of having an MLS team in nearby Seattle would be on Portland's team. (Answer: Yay rivalry!) Paulson says his guess is that attendance would be very close to PGE Park's capacity for the soccer games.

Task Force member Mark Williams cut to the chase, and brought up the PGE park issue: "Some of us lived through that," he says. (The city got burned on that publicly-financed stadium.)

"When the business model failed and the partnership failed, there was no one for the city to go to to collect" on the promises, Williams said. In this deal, "will the Paulson family be guaranteeing the performance... with its personal assets?"

Paulson couldn't comment on a deal because there's no deal yet. Um. They asked him if he had a preference for a new stadium location—nope. He gave pros and cons for both the Rose Quarter idea and Lents. (Pro for RQ, con for Lents? Parking.)

The meeting concluded with process about process: How would the task force communicate with each other (they floated the idea of email discussions between meetings, which strike me as a public meetings no-no), and what exactly did they want to focus their work on (Fritz, not on the task force, had chipped in three pages of ideas to add to Leonard and Adams' original charge)? Who was going to do the background research? (How about PSU grad students?)

That's about it. Next meeting's in two weeks.

Now, the BAC/PAC meeting I'm currently kind of ignoring to blog this (sorry). For the past hour, the group has been discussing the Willamette River Transit Bridge, which would carry bikes, pedestrians and transit across the Willamette. There's a discussion going on about the best width for the bridge for bike traffic. The consensus from the BAC folks? Twelve feet is not enough width for the kind of bike traffic Portland sees, especially on a bridge planned for downtown-SE Portland.

"This really is about width, it's about budget," says presenter Sean Batty from TriMet. "We're working on it, and we're going to get there." Balancing that decision with the bridge design process is tricky. "You're represented, we've heard this story before," and he's trying to explain how they can get their message across to those who will make the call.

Before this discussion got underway, Adams popped in to welcome the group, which is having its annual joint meeting. He hit a few points: He's asked Obama for $24 million for bike boulevards as part of a possible federal stimulus package and he's "feeling relatively optimistic" that we might see the cash. If we do, the city's ready to move on the boulevard network.

He's hired a second transportation staffer, Catherine Ciarlo, former executive director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance.

And on the Columbia River Crossing project—a hot topic for anyone who cares about transportation—Adams reminded the group that "the city has 23 conditions for support, and we really truly mean those conditions."

With that, he bounded out of the room. "Happy holidays, go team go," he said.