I am not a fan of the portals because I don't believe they contribute to what you want people to do which is register.
Let's say I am living in your area, and I arrive at your landing page, I am immediately inundated with news-site like information. Lots of content is competing for my attention, some of it like the Twitter box has a bunch of cryptic characters in it, and the one thing that truly tells me what the site is about (Welcome to ...) and why I should care is too long and doesn't stand out.
If it were me I would ditch the portal altogether and provide a landing page where you tell folks who are not registered users yet what the value proposition of your site is. Answer them why they should care. In my opinion 140 characters is the limit to answer that question because you can tweet/sms it, and people don't get bored reading through a few paragraphs as to why they should care. Humans, collectively, have ADD. If you don't get your message across in the first few seconds then you lost the opportunity.
If you want to keep the portal then I would either ditch the Twitter feed or create a new Twitter account specifically for the forum. I think it's fair to say that forum users, or yet to register guests, don't care about tweets like this one: "Good morning people! I just got home from work. Checking things out, then it's off to bed for me." If they want to follow you specifically then they will, otherwise the tweets should be about the forum only without personal stuff mixed it.
I would eliminate the shoutbox until you have a larger community going. You want people to create content, not spend their time monkeying around in some sort of IRC/IM mode.
I would rename "Say Hello!" into the tried and true "Introduce Yourself!", the later holds more of a command and it's-expected-of-you value. I would add a sticky to that forum giving some guidelines as to what people should include into their introductions, i.e. how long have they lived in the area, if they are not local then where did they move from, how did they find the forum, etc., this provides non-personal identifiable information yet can help build community. Don't ask them to include for example "their favorite summer hangout spot", you don't want some crazy stalker to go over there and wait for them.
Create a personalized screencast that demonstrates how members can change their avatar picture. Camtasia is a good program to use, maybe there are free ones out there as well depending on which OS you are using. Potentially reward people who update their avatar but that would probably need an add-on that doesn't exist yet.
I would move Feedback & Suggestions to the bottom of the forum list. It's not your prime content destination, it imho shouldn't be "above the fold".
I would remove Singles & Dating for the time being. This section can backfire on so many levels. Visitors could assume that the site is geared toward singles, family and religious types could assume that there will be a bunch of rated M content, etc. etc., that section currently adds no value to your forum.
I would rename Local Chat to Local Chatter and then preface the remaining forums with Local, like Local Sports etc.
I would eliminate the Fun House and roll off-topic joke threads into This n That. This is mainly because I firmly believe that too many forums, especially at the beginning, spread your content too thin making it even more appear as if nothing is going on.
Let's have a look at a post you made in the Politics forum, the "WHO exactly is Gov Kasich for?" one, here's the content of that post (it's just a random one I picked, the first one I clicked):
What's the issue with this post?
Well, it provides your terse opinion and then directs people
away!!! from your site. I would include a relevant quote (like a whole paragraph that is relevant, or maybe a couple sentences in support of your opinion, then follow with some more discussion of your own and then another quote from the paper), so that folks only need to navigate away from your site if they really care to know all the details. You need to provide enough information in your post so that they are less likely to navigate away from your site. Yes you could argue that they will go to the paper and then return to post their opinion. I'll argue that they will go to the paper, read the article, and then see other interesting links there which they will spend time on.
I would get rid of the "Your link could be here", it looks incomplete on the one hand and cheesy on the other. You currently have no users, there's no value for advertisers to buy space on your site. I would also drop the NameCheap affiliate link. Folks who want to buy domain names aren't going to somehow be reminded of that by the little ad on your page, they will go to a registrar they already know or recognize from the hundreds of millions GoDaddy spends on media ads.
I would look into VigLink and see what they can do for you.
Lastly, I would create a few dummy accounts and post as them. Right now when one enters a forum one looks at a row of threads which were all created by you (your avatar shows). That really needs to be changed. Fake it till you make it comes to mind.
Obviously all of these are just opinions, feel free to mix and match and pick whatever you think is a good idea. Good luck with your forum!