TriMet’s proposal to close four underused MAX stations has produced a powerful opponent that helped pay for one of the stations to be built in the first place: The Multnomah Athletic Club.

The tony Southwest Portland club expressed strong opposition to TriMet’s proposal to close the Kings Hill/SW Salmon Street station, one of four underperforming stations floated in early September as ripe for potential closure. The Kings Hill station is adjacent to the club, and documents show the club paid $150,000 in the mid-1990s to make the station a reality. The station opened in 1997.

The MAC club joins Portland Saturday Market, which has protested the proposed closure of the Skidmore Fountain station, as powerful voices speaking out against the TriMet station closure proposals.

MAC leaders wrote a letter to TriMet’s top brass Sept. 26, but the club’s concerns and those from neighborhood residents came to light Wednesday at a TriMet board meeting.

The athletic club’s opposition doesn’t center on its roughly 22,000 members.

“Closing the Kings Hill station is a safety and security issue for Multnomah Athletic Club employees,” the club’s trustees and executives wrote in the letter obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive on Wednesday, “especially given the increase in illegal camping and drug activity in the area.”

The transit agency has said closing four stations could speed up light-rail trains’ travel times by two minutes on a one-way trip between Goose Hollow and Chinatown. The Kings Hill stop, which sits between the Goose Hollow and Providence Park platforms, has the lowest weekday ridership, at 1,357, of any of the four stations being considered for elimination.

Some stations are just 500 feet from the next stop, and there are 14 stations on the Red and Blue lines clustered in the downtown’s core.

TriMet has said it has not made a determination about whether it will close any or all of the stations.

Roberta Altstadt, TriMet’s communications manager, said the agency is still thinking of bringing the station closure plan to the board in spring 2019, “but we don’t want to rush the outreach needed for this,” she wrote in an email, “so that could change.”

The club, which has a 600-space parking lot for its members, said 37 percent of its employees are transit dependent. Many of them – 34 percent -- start work between 4:30 and 7:30 a.m., while a small percentage leave late at night. “Having two nearby stations is likely not an issue during regular business hours,” the club wrote, “but it becomes a serious safety and security concern off hours,” club officials wrote.

“With the camping and drug activity in the area,” the club’s leaders wrote, “the station platform feels like a safe oasis.”

Sherry Salomon, one of many Southwest Portland residents who testified Wednesday, said she and her husband moved to the area specifically because of the abundance of public transit options. She and other speakers accused “1 percent giant corporations” like Intel and Nike of driving the attempt to close stations. “I will persist, and I will resist,” she said, “I’m not going to go away.”

While ridership may be tepid now, many neighborhood residents said they expect that to change.

MAC officials pointed out that the neighborhood is expected to see some 2.5 million square feet of development – which is either planned or underway – open in coming years.

The Goose Hollow Foothills League, the official neighborhood association, wrote a letter in October blasting the proposal. “The alarming growth in [the] area in crime, discarded needles, trash, harassment, and traffic at the Providence Park and Goose Hollow MAX stops has caused students, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled to avoid these stops,” Michael Mehaffy, president of the neighborhood league, wrote Oct. 18. “Kings Hill Station is a much safer location to embark and disembark, especially at night, dusk, and dawn.”

Altstadt said she’s not sure where the MAC club and neighborhood groups heard Intel and Nike were driving the project. “We have not received letters of support or any other formal support from those companies in regards to the station closures proposal,” Altstadt said.

While Skidmore and Kings Hill have strong advocates in their corner, no group has rushed to back the Mall/SW 4th Avenue and Mall/SW 5th Avenue stations, which could also be closed.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen