70% of Blogtown readers in our lunchtime poll say they expected more from Mayor Sam Adams on the Columbia River Crossing.

Can a mayor who travels all the way to China to preach about 'green practices' support a 12-lane freeway in his own backyard? Can he now still be considered a "green mayor"?

"Sam is definitely still a green mayor," says Adams spokesperson, Roy Kaufmann. "He has always been about trying to fuse the environmental needs of the city with the economic needs of the city. Mayor Adams has a great relationship with the environmental community and we don't think that's going to change. We have a long time to work out all the details on the project. We're not wavering on our environmental objectives."

You can see from previous Mercury coverage that a 12-lane bridge potentially creates some big environmental problems — like increasing vehicle traffic. Kaufmann and Catherine Ciarlo, Adams' Transportation Director, believe that having Portland oversight of the bridge project is more important than the number of lanes or even tolling.

"The environmental difference between 10 and 12 lanes pales in comparison to the oversight," says Ciarlo. "The ongoing commitment to be able to manage the bridge's environmental goals is the environmental prize." Ciarlo says that with oversight, Portland could do things like changing the relationship between tolling and transit fare to make transit more attractive than driving.

"Using tolling, using transit, using HOV lanes, using van pools all of those are ideas that we have now, but we don't have any way to put them into practice on a broad base level." It's possible to push those alternative forms of transit on the bridge if Portland has enough control of the project. But to get to a "win-win situation," continues Ciarlo, "there were compromises that had to be made."

This is going to be a tough argument for the mayor's office to make, however. So far, only 14% of blogtown readers seem to agree with Ciarlo's perspective, and we're rounding up opinions from environmentalists, right now. So if you have an opinion, call the Mercury newsroom.