PORTLAND DRIZZLE

🍋‍🟩Friday my oh my-day. Sunny today, high near 80. A body turned up in the Willamette yesterday, and Forest Park just got a little closer to losing trees to PGE. Portland Arts Week wraps through Sunday, and Summer Free For All kicks off with Shakespeare, movies, and the East Portland Arts Festival. I’ll be off most of next week visiting my ancestral homeland- New Jersey. Pray for me 😭See you again probably Thursday.

More than 50,000 tires turned up dumped on a Southeast Portland property this year, part of a regional habit nobody loves. Metro's illegal dumping patrol hauled over 14,000 tires off public land in the past twelve months alone. Officials suspect some of it traces back to shady haulers who promise cheap disposal, then just dump the load in a field or on somebody's private lot. Meanwhile Liberty Tire Recycling's North Portland plant processes over 3,200 tons a month the legal way, turning old tires into playground turf and sports fields. So somewhere in Portland, a swing set was probably once somebody's spare. Yahoo

After more than a year of fighting, the city and Portland General Electric have a deal on the Harborton Reliability Project, the transmission line upgrade that would clear chunks of Forest Park. City Administrator Raymond Lee signed off last week. PGE upped its environmental mitigation offer to $5.5 million, about $3.1 million more than its original pitch. Conservation groups spent months in mediation over the plan, then declined to sign the final version anyway. PGE still has to file an updated land use application before anything happens, and the city says it will process that quickly. The trees are not saved. They are just better compensated for. KGW

Multnomah County Sheriff's boat crews pulled a body from the Willamette River just north of the Fremont Bridge Thursday morning, near Portland Fire Station 6 on NW Front Avenue. The call came in around 8:40am. Investigators haven't released who it was, how they died, or how long they'd been in the water. The Medical Examiner's office will handle identification and cause of death, while the Sheriff's Office opens its own death investigation alongside it. Portland's stretch of river has had more than its share of grim mornings this year. This is one more, still unexplained. KATU

Dannybear 🤣🤣🤣

In 1953, Portland Wrestling debuted live on Channel 27 at 8:30pm, launching a Northwest institution. Local wrestling on local TV. There’s a great video of it HERE

Okay here’s my plan: I hide some airtags in some tires and see if I can find out who is doing all the illegal tire dumping. Is it time to level up from newsletter writer to investigative journalist?

by Michael Simpson Contact: [email protected]