It’s time to take the “Civic” out of the Center

  Portland was looking pretty down and out back in the mid-seventies. The forest city had just gone through a brutal period of Urban Renewal; Results of which saw the severing of the city in two by an interstate, a massive swath of Bayside obliterated with the Franklin Art and the removal of many blocks in the center of the city to make way for the Spring Street jetliner runway.

  For the latter, I can imagine the area “powers that be” decided they needed something to jazz the street up and bring it to life. Also, Portland didn’t have a venue larger than 3,000 seats with which to attract national acts that would bring people with their money into the city.

  In 1977, the Cumberland County Civic Center was born.

  And at the time, it was not only a great idea but sorely needed. Things here in Portland then seemed like they do now in places like Las Vegas. The economy just quickly died, leaving a formerly prosperous city figuring out what to do about it. And to a huge degree, the Civic Center and the business it brought here helped to make today’s Portland one of the most (long-term) economically viable and desirable places in this country to live.

  But the whole Greater Portland area has grown up from those times. We have morphed from a little city with a bunch of farmland around it to the economic nucleus which props-up the rest of this state, no matter what our Governor might think of us. We no longer need to publically subsidize large multi-purpose spaces.

  You only need to look to the awesome plan for Thompson’s Point for proof. While this wouldn’t be the case 30 years ago, Portland is viable enough now for a group of private investors to spend massive amounts of money to build an arena ten times better than the Civic Center that can perform all its major functions.

  It’s time to open the whole drab Civic Center area up to investors that could potentially create another awesome project out of it. Government is learning right now that they can’t build and operate this kind of project any more, and probably shouldn’t have in the first place. So, here we are. Now, we need to convince our government to get out of the arena business and put it up for sale. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still spend the 33 million dollars you might, but shouldn’t decide to spend to renovate it.

  That kind of money needs to be spent to further improve Portland’s future. The money could go a long way to building a light rail trolley system that has tracks coming in from Westbrook, Riverton, No Deering, the Jetport and South Portland. You could even use it to do something radical with the Franklin Street corridor. With homelessness on the rise, a permanent homeless solution could be found and funded, enabling the further revitalization of the Elm/Preble/Oxford portion of Bayside. Most of all, we could feed every mouth in this region by quickly re-establishing our local food system that grows and raises everything we need within a quick horse cart ride.

  But for any government entity to continue to publically subsidize these types of large twentieth century public arenas, when as we’re seeing now everywhere with debt that publicly subsiding anything doesn’t sustain itself long-term, seems like a bad idea to me. That money, that reported ten extra dollars on the county portion of the property tax bill, can be better spent elsewhere.