To: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Portland Mayor & Portland City Council - City of Portland owns RedTail 

To: Beaverton Mayor Lacey Beaty & Beaverton City Council - RedTail is located in Beaverton

To: Tigard Mayor Heidi Lueb - adjacent city & community

We are petitioning you today against the current plans to sell the RedTail Golf course to the Portland Diamond Project (PDP) and Craig Cheek, its founder. This will transform beautiful 164 acres of green space into a concrete landscape.

The PDPs' Baseball stadium, its housing, and its entertainment district will not “transform and create a brand new district for Portland” (Craig Cheek, Portland Diamond Project Founder) nor would it be sustainable.  It will destroy a precious natural resource in Washington County for generations to come and something that can not be restored once it has been leveled.

Currently, the public RedTail Golf course is not only a green space that people use to recreate, but also provides humidification, air purification, and has a cooling effect on the city. It is quite literally a breath of fresh air.

It is a valuable natural habitat for many species, especially birds, which is also what gave the park its original name. We like our bald eagles soaring over the neighborhood and would like to keep it that way. 

There are so many other concerns that have already been voiced when it comes to the feasibility of this project and its infrastructure (1) (browse any public online forum where this is being discussed) and the lasting environmental impact that this will have.  

We have a duty to generations to come to preserve green spaces in our ever-growing cities that increase the strain, reduce important wildlife habitat, and impact our wetlands.

Once the RedTail Golf course lease expires, it will be a perfect opportunity to restore this green space to its previous wilderness, as it has been done in many other cities already (2) such as Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

After all, Beaverton City Council’s strategic goals and council priorities, include to “facilitate and implement initiatives to conserve and restore natural resources and reduce energy consumption.” So how is this project compatible with these goals given the large acreage of the park? 

We also want to bring to your attention, that this is not the only potential strain on the Garden Home neighborhood's natural resources. Just a few miles away other modifications are pending that will have a significant impact on the Fanno Creeks Parkway and its animal inhabitants, as highlighted by the Neighbors for Wetland Preservation (3). 

Mayor Wheeler, Mayor Beaty - we asked you to take the long view here for our neighborhood and cities and generations to come. Use your critical thinking skills and not get fooled by the short-term economic boost this project is promising. Data would indicate that “most studies find that building professional stadiums does not promote local employment or per capita income growth.” (4) So please, do your homework!

 

References: 

1/ OBP: Feb 10, 2024 “Portland Diamond Project wants to bring MLB to Beaverton. How will people get there?” https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/10/portland-diamond-project-mlb-baseball-beaverton-oregon/

2/ New York Times: Feb 15, 2024 “After Shutting Down, These Golf Courses Went Wild” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/climate/golf-courses-conservation-nature.html

3/ See https://savewetland.org/ for more information

4/ Econofact: Sep 04, 2023: Stadiums as Public Investments. https://econofact.org/stadiums-as-public-investments