Aww. It's outgoing Metro President David Bragdon's last week in office before he resigns to take a top job in New York and he's penned this little goodbye letter (pdf) to the Columbia River Crossing and Governor Kulongoski. In very measured tones, Bragdon points out that after the stagnation and division of the past three years, the CRC was able to move forward recently because it started working with community ideas and looking at new solutions... something that Bragdon thinks could be carried forward with a new, responsive project manager.

Another letter written earlier this month takes a sharper shot at the CRC: the bridge's design advisory group wrote to the project sponsors complaining that the current CRC design is not the bridge they imagined at all. The design advisory group wrote up a list of design guidelines, but the CRC never used them, instead bringing on a "new and relatively inexperienced bridge designer" without any explanation. "In general, the CRC process was been opaque and reactive, leading to a project with a striking lack of coherent and compelling design," says the letter, before telling the project that it should reconvene the design group and hire a new designer. Read the whole letter here and here.