Portland Expo Center Looks to Sports-Focused Future While Memorializing Its History — Sport Oregon Voices

Photo by Joshua James Hough

Expo Future project building around two primary guiding principles

As Oregon’s largest multipurpose facility, the Portland Expo Center has served as an important community gathering spot for events of all types over the last century. But now, as operators look to a more sustainable future for the site, officials are rolling up their sleeves on plans to redefine the focus of the site while memorializing its historical and cultural significance.

There has long been talk of how best the Expo Center could be redeveloped to better suit the community, while at the same time taking a strategic approach to a more sustainable model for the facility to meet its mounting capital improvement needs. As it stands, several of the properties on site are more than 100 years old and in need of significant maintenance, and officials have explored the deconstruction of the site’s old exhibition halls and development of a third barrel-roofed hall over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, the Expo Center currently does not have an income stream suitable enough to meet these financial needs over time.

“Ideally, we want Expo to be able to stand on its own two feet financially and be an asset to the community,” said Jaime Mathis, senior public information specialist for Metro. “It has been an ongoing process for the last 20-plus years, where we’ve been looking at Expo and trying to decide what is the highest and best use for the site.”

Last summer, Metro received eight proposals from community groups and businesses as part of its Phase 1 Request for Expressions of Interest in its efforts to reimagine the site, which currently includes five exhibition halls on 53 acres in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood. As Metro set out to better understand the potential and value of the Expo Center site in 2019, it began meeting with community groups, stakeholders and government partners to determine a set of guiding principles to serve as a decision-making framework for the Expo Future project. From these efforts two primary objectives emerged: to memorialize the historical and cultural significance of the site and to create a long-term plan for financial sustainability by transforming the Expo Center into a sport-centered facility.

More Reading: Project Background and Overview

As a key part of this development work, a series of workshops and collaborative discussions convened the area’s Japanese-American, Black and Indigenous communities – three groups directly impacted by the history of the Expo Center. The focus of this phase was to discuss and define the project values while developing a set of guiding principles that meaningfully memorialize the significance of the complex’s Hall A and the land, itself, that holds as a site of forced displacement for the three communities.

More Reading: Site History

The goal in developing these guiding principles was to best identify future options for the Expo Center, with these two primary principles serving as the guide for the project’s efforts as it works towards its next phase.

The Expo Future project includes the creation of several governance committees. There is a committee dedicated to determining how best to memorialize the history of the site, a second committee focused on the sports-focus transition and a third, executive advisory committee that will draw all those ideas together and, ultimately, create a list of recommendations to present to Metro Council and the Metropolitan Exposition Recreation Commission (MERC) in 2024.

“We’re really intentionally cultivating these groups of people that will be able to inform Metro of the best and the brightest possibilities for making this sports pivot and doing it in a way that recognizes the historical significance and speaks to the stories that need to be told of those communities impacted by Expo,” said Mathis. “These committees are full of people who have direct-lived experience in both of those areas.”

The process also will involve the input of outside consultants. Hunden Partners, a development advisory practice, has been hired to do a more advanced sports and feasibility study for the project. Representatives from Hunden Partners will be in Portland this month for a site visit and to meet with stakeholders, community members, Expo Future committee members and sports experts in the state. Additionally, the project is in the process of bringing on a community engagement consultant, according to Mathis. This group will work directly with the historical and memorialization committee in its efforts to best tell the stories and create a space that honors them at the Expo Center.

Considering the appeal of sports in the area, Mathis says the Expo Future project presents a unique opportunity to leverage Oregon’s standing as an international leader in sports tourism with a robust sport and outdoor industry as it reimagines its future. The aim of the sports pivot is to create a space where people can compete in a variety of recreational and amateur activities, in addition to enjoying traditional spectator sporting events. The considerable work done in Phase 2 will help decision-makers understand the extent to which transforming the Expo Center into a sports-focused complex will help with business redevelopment and capital investment.

Of course, the Expo Center is no stranger to sports as part of its wide-ranging history as an event facility. But with its aging facilities, there are inherent challenges to hosting regular sporting activities, and a refined focus on sports as the emphasis of its future development plans would result in the Expo Center being much better equipped to routinely host sporting events while still accommodating the many familiar events that continue to be held there. The pivot to sports is meant to be where the focus is, while also accommodating the traditional events that have made the Expo Center home over the years.

At this time, it is yet to be determined what types of sports could be the primary focus of the Expo Center’s future, or if an anchor sport would make the most sense to build around. It's understandable that there are questions left to be answered when it comes to the specifics of the exciting future of the Expo Center at the moment, but there’s tangible momentum regarding its reimagined future.  

“Everyone involved with this project wants to do this in a way that is going to serve the community for the next generation and hopefully generations to come,” Mathis said.

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