Part 3: The Town Gets Mad

At this point, having endured wave after wave of deception, false numbers, and, well...what some intemperate souls were calling "lies", the People of Portland began to sense they had been sold a...

A tram meeting was scheduled with this blogger in attendance. Not only did the presenters stall to kill time and limit actual questions by giving a prolonged history of transportation through the ages, but they struggled just to get their slide machine to work. In short, it became clear that it was a dog and pony show. Here's the crowd arriving:

The meeting didn't really seem to matter. Enough commissioners had expressed a reluctance to throw more money at this - the votes were not there to continue and many citizens felt the tram project would be killed.

However, Dan Saltzman, facing intense pressure from the Mayor, caved in. He flipped and then he folded, stating that it would be more harmful to stop the project now that it was underway. See the post above for more on that move. Instead of the project being stopped, the tram went ahead. The local paper talked about the "steel" it took for Dan to do this, which was in keeping with their gushing tone at every stage of this scam. Here is an actual picture of the Mayor getting Dan to give in: