And so it continues out in Timbers country. The dissenting voices on the PGE Park renovation/Portland Beavers stadium issues are already both loud and relentless, and it appears that they have new ammunition.

A post on The Portland Mercury's website contends that Portland mayor Sam Adams has withheld an economic study that indicates a new Portland Beavers stadium in the currently proposed section of the city (Lents) would actually result in a net job loss.

This is bad news for the Timbers and their MLS ambitions. Nothing has gone right in Portland since that original city council vote way back in March. I suspect most observers, both casual and otherwise, naturally assumed that the first vote was binding and that Portland's stadium situation was sorted. We know now that the vote meant nothing in the grand scheme, and that there is plenty of work to be done in Merritt Paulson is to bring his Timbers to Major League Soccer.

It's difficult to know if the study is, on its own merits, a stadium killer. Without a new park for the Beavers, allowing the Timbers to be the lone tenant of a renovated PGE, the expansion franchise awarded to Portland could be in jeopardy.

I won't bother with the Montreal-as-backup-plan speculation, but I will say that this latest blow to Portland's stadium plan cannot be happy news for Don Garber. From an outside perspective, it appears that the chances of this deal getting done and the Timbers entering MLS in 2011 get smaller and smaller every day.

With a mentioned deadline looming at the end of the summer, it behooves Paulson and Adams to get this thing figured out sooner rather than later. The comments on the Mercury's website indicate that there may be some holes in the aforementioned study, but that's unlikely to matter in the court of public opinion.

I'm hoping that there are a few Rose City denizens out there who can shed some light on this subject and give us a sense of where things stand, with a particular focus on public opinion. If you're reading this and your from Portland, please share your thoughts.