The events you speak of can go on in a lot of other places in town. There will be no suitable place for the Beavers after PGE is remodeled. Furthermore, in fall and winter we already have the Blazers in the quarter; the MC is redundant. An outdoor park will bring year round entertainment to the area that the MC can’t.

And of course the MC itself is a shithole. It would take nearly as much to renovate for today’s standards as it would to knock it down.

The park will be owned by the City. Paulson will rent it. I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but it’s just not correct.

I should have written “find another piece of city-owned land to hand over for the exclusive benefit of Merrit Paulson’s commercial ventures.”

There will be virtually no other public use for his little ball park (maybe a concert here and there), which Adams wanted to put in the place of a facility that currently provides year-round public use, from high school graduations and athletics, trade shows, concerts, national skating and tennis championships, to 30-odd hockey games a year, drawing far more spectators than minor league baseball ever has or likely ever will (not to mention the possibilities for public recreation I proposed in an earlier post).

I put odds at about 50-50 that Adams will cobble something together to save face and his deal with Paulson. But the fact that a handful of architect nerds were able to parry his attack on the Coliseum speaks volumes about his weakened state.