I may be sentimental, but it always touches my heart to read about cities protecting wildlife corridors. Especially when the article has photos like this;

City staff recommend denial of Alpenrose land use permit

City of Portland staff recommended denial of the Land Use permit for the proposed 263-unit Raleigh Crest development on the Alpenrose site a week ago Friday, concluding that “all of the relevant standards and approval criteria have not been met.” Although the denial was based on several issues, the most complicated of them seemed to involve a wildlife corridor located on the southernmost edge of the property.

The pinch-point of the corridor is the area just north of the intersection of SW Shattuck Rd and Vermont St. Not only is this location tricky for wildlife, it’s also not a great place to be on a bicycle or walking—but wildlife has federal and state protection.

What’s this? Denying human use because wild critters need it more? Did I just read that aloud? Someone give me a glass of water. I can’t stop whooping.

Here’s an excerpt from the decision that talks about the wildlife issue:

… the site is a critical connection point for the movement of wildlife between the upstream habitat areas along Vermont Creek up to Gabriel Park and the extensive downstream habitat areas starting at Bauman Woods and the confluence with Fanno Creek and beyond into the Fanno Creek habitat corridor.

Thus, wildlife mobility is a key functional value of the site and the ability of wildlife to continue to move through this corridor should be preserved and carefully considered in any redesign of the SW Shattuck crossing. Any increased barriers to movement (e.g., proposed retaining wall, fall protection fencing, increased vehicular traffic, etc.) and reduction of wildlife mobility through this corridor must be mitigated, as they could have adverse long-term impacts on local wildlife species, particularly semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver, river otter, muskrat, and mink as well as the flightless ducklings of locally breeding waterfowl, such as mallard and wood duck.

Beaver are of particular concern because of their status as a keystone species in wetland ecosystems and the important role they play in creating and maintaining the habitat used by a wide variety of other species in this wetland complex.

BEAVER ARE OF PARTICULAR CONCERN? Am I dreaming? Did I just fall asleep without noticing because I must be dreaming.  Either I’m hallucinating or they must hate the applicant a whole hell of a lot.

The applicant is Bike Portland which while I can imagine gets on folks nerves from time doesn’t have any dollar signs associated with. I’m sure if the request was to build a starbucks or a condo unit we’d be hearing less about wildlife.

But STILL.