I Stand Corrected, sort of...

It's a classic case of spout off now, study the issue later...
I finally dug a little bit into the West Hayden Island project proposal only to find it aint what I thought it were.
Sam Adams apparently wants to make this his legacy gesture to the city, annexing the west end of the island so that the port can build a new docking/freight/container/bulk facility on the land it already owns.
The whole shebang is about 800 acres, land that has been left alone to become a rather impressive cottonwood forest with attendant wildlife all complete.

There's a little tiny deer out on that gravel bar minding her own business.

It is a nice place, quiet, rich in that distinctive leather-like smell that makes a cottonwood forest so hypnotic embellished with birdsong amidst the calm of the forest, far from care or travail. Nice soft sand beaches line the Columbia side, the Oregon Slough side not so much, there's lots of evidence of old industrial activity like log storage and places where the hoi polloi rid themselves of big useless things made of metal, in one spot there's a collection of old air compressors rotting to rust on the beach, a toilet, plenty of old logging cables and a dead microwave or two.
But the Columbia side is nice and the sand is clean and it feels like a wild place next to the hustle and bustle of a very active part of the river. More than one major barge line uses the shallows to store their barges in a kind of a valet parking situation, in between times when the grain barges are called to load up and go someplace. And the barging of grain on this river is a very big business indeed.

SO there are two concepts on the table, and surprise #1 is that they only involve 300 of the acres available, leaving the entire end of the island just as it is. On the Oregon Slough side of the island there are  fairly extensive mitigation projects to clean out the rip-rap and the old dead pilings and restore some freshwater marsh areas sadly diked off and filled  years ago, along with some removal of dredge spoils making some new shallow water habitat like the old habitat long buried under the crap of industrialization. Net gain.
There are the usual amenities for a port facility, a giant loop of train track with some extra sidings and, lo and behold, a proposal in one concept for a separate bridge to send the trucks across the slough with their containers or bulk over to North Portland Harbor Terminal 6 to join the already built facility there. Good idea.
Two wharves are in the drawing I saw, one for break-bulk cargo, for grain or scrap or sawdust or whatever, and a larger wharf for containers, dunno how big but not very, more or less the size of the Terminal 6 docks, 1400 feet or so, which can handle 6 or 8 more cranes.
This whole thing isn't very big.At all. The port acts pretty disappointed about not getting to use the full 800 acres, but fuck them, of course they want more. The point, my point, is that this size of facility just might wind up usefully utilized in the forseeable future.
Portland will never be a player in the container world, it is too far up the river, and the river is too hard to dredge. The Corps of Engineers spent millions and many years getting permission to deepen from 40 to 43 feet and just barely pulled it off. That's it. They will never get permission to go so much as a foot deeper.

This Post-Panamax behemoth will never see Portland anyway, in fact there are no harbors in North America big enough to accommodate its very deep draft. There is a scheme afoot to get it into Coos Bay, but that is another story [EDIT: this information is 12 years old, Regina Maersk now calls at NY and Long Beach, CA.]

The new Post Panamax ships will service the deepwater ports of the world, but there is plenty of tonnage of fairly new and well-built ships to service the secondary ports of the world, and Portland is comfortably within that realm, for many, many years to come.
The thing is right now there's a glut of shipping capacity, and the cranes at Terminal 6 are sadly underutilized. But that will not always be the case.
So if the port can figure out how to get the freight on and off the island without destroying the quality of life for the residents that have come to love their quiet backwater of a neighborhood, this new port facility might be a good thing to have built.
We shall see how it turns out, some public agencies don't respond well to public feeling,  but for now, I stand corrected.