As city council meetings go, there wasn't much unusual about this one. Public testimony. A long agenda. One proclamation from the mayor. Commissioners spent 50 minutes listening to an update about stormwater management. They even welcomed Commissioner Amanda Fritz's mother, who was visiting from England. Four hours later, the meeting was over.

But without any public comment and without a moment of discussion at that Nov. 3, 2010 meeting, the Portland City Council unanimously approved a deal negotiated in secret to take a toxic parcel of South Waterfront property off the hands of Oregon Health & Science University and a pair of the city's most prominent developers. The land would be designated for a 4-acre park serving the South Waterfront neighborhood.

Portland leaders gathered last June to christen that new park, hailing it as an example of urban planning at its finest.

"This is a huge win in Portland's history," said Mike Abbate, director of the Portland Parks Bureau. "To redevelop a portion of old industrial land and make it now habitable for people, for fish, for wildlife. That's part of our DNA in this city. ... This is what Portland does."

But an Oregonian/OregonLive investigation found that the biggest beneficiaries of the South Waterfront Greenway were the developers who unloaded the land, converting a multimillion-dollar liability into a multimillion-dollar asset.

The city would ultimately spend $5 million to remove more than 35,000 tons of waste - the worst of it bursting with cancer-causing materials like asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyl.

A deal negotiated in private and signed off by Commissioner Nick Fish transferred ownership from OHSU and the development firm Williams & Dame to the city.

And the deal stuck the city with nearly the entire bill for the environmental cleanup.

But if that weren't enough, the companies that turned over the toxic land were granted rights to develop on far more buildable property elsewhere in the South Waterfront. It was a move potentially worth millions of dollars, estimates show.

The new park ultimately cost $15.1 million - 2 1/2 times more than budgeted. It took six years longer than expected to complete. The city hopes that one day it will connect a network of pedestrian and bike trails to downtown. But today, the narrow ribbon of trails leads nowhere.

Funding for the greenway

Park development fees:

$9.2 million

Portland Development Commission:

$4 million

TriMet:

$1.4 million

Bureau of Environmental Services:

$750,000

Greenway costs skyrocketed largely because of the extent of contamination unearthed on the property, records and interviews reveal for the first time.

Portland officials initially negotiated a contract to ensure that Williams & Dame and OHSU would pay to clean the land before it became a park.

City leaders knew in 2008 that the land was unacceptably contaminated and demanded that the owners meet their obligation and pay up.

But, then, city officials caved, according to records.

The development firm principals, answering questions only through email, said they had suggested building a scaled-back version of the park, which would require less clean up. But the city decided against it.

And when it came time to formally approve the deal at the Nov. 3, 2010 meeting, city leaders deliberately took steps to keep their decision off the public radar. None of the points of controversy made it onto the city agenda. Instead, the park project and its toxic legacy was buried in the portion of the meeting calendar reserved for the mundane and uncontroversial - what is known as a "consent agenda."

It's not typically the place to find a major environmental cleanup or a sweet deal for developers.

The vision

Developer Homer Williams surveys his property along the South Waterfront in 2002.

The South Waterfront Greenway was carved from nearly 30 acres of land locked up by OHSU and developers Homer Williams and Dike Dame in 2002.

City leaders saw a bright future for the former industrial district, once home to shipbuilding, gravel crushing, concrete production and metal fabrication. They envisioned Oregon's highest-density neighborhood with condo towers, a streetcar, and an aerial tram transporting patients and workers to OHSU, the city's largest employer. In 2003, the city signed a deal with the developers and the university to make it happen.

Mark Williams, the OHSU vice president for real estate, said he couldn't put a monetary value on the rights because they were factored into land purchases and not broken out separately. OHSU paid about $26 million buying land from Williams & Dame over the years. Applying the city's own figures, from the 2007 report, would translate to at least $4.3 million.

In 2006, OHSU built the 410,000-square-foot Center for Health & Healing, tapping about 55,000 square feet of development rights from the greenway. That allowed OHSU to add the equivalent of two floors to the 16-story facility.

University leaders are now planning to redeem 160,000 square feet from the greenway for two new building, leaving them with about 450,000 square feet of development rights for future projects.

The future

Taxpayers are still paying for the greenway.

Residents of the affluent South Waterfront District now have two parks to visit. But the greenway's soaring costs left less money for other park projects in the central city.

The 4-acre greenway is also one of Portland's most expensive parks to operate and maintain, at nearly $500,000 a year compared to $327,000 for its northern neighbor, 30-acre Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Parks officials say its not fair to compare costs because they calculate greenway expenses differently, and because the greenway's complicated design and shallow-water requirements make it unique.

State officials also want Portland to test sediment beyond the park boundaries and clean up any contamination discovered in the river. City officials say that's not their responsibility, and the situation remains unresolved.

Expanding the greenway to a full 1.2 miles - from near Johns Landing to downtown - will cost more, too. Officials struck a deal last year to extend the path north, through South Waterfront property, at a cost to the city of $11.7 million.

The half-mile extension is projected to cost less than the shorter greenway because the adjoining land has already been cleared of any contamination and because the project won't involve shoreline work.

Even so, the extension won't be complete for at least a decade, according to current projections. There's no money or schedule for plans to extend the path south toward Johns Landing.

Jerry Ward, a Portland architect who spent a decade monitoring South Waterfront projects as part of a city committee, said he's flabbergasted that details of the greenway remained hidden from the public for so long.

"It's demoralizing because it's a moral bankruptcy for the citizens of Portland," he said. "And it really only benefits a chosen few."

-- Brad Schmidt

503-294-7628

@cityhallwatch