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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (May 24, 2016)
10A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016 Brewery: Partners grew up on the coast Analysis: Once the signatures are veriied, the measure cannot be withdrawn Continued from Page 1A the Lovell Building a block east. The Allisons and Parker will eventually install their brew- house just below the sidewalk, and add a walk-in cooler, keg washer and bottling station. “We’ve got a smaller sys- tem, so we can do a lot of experimenting, a lot of playing around,” Josh Allison said. While brewing their own sta- ples and sours, the owners said they would like to collaborate with local breweries and busi- nesses, even inviting nonproits, such as Surfrider Foundation, and agencies, such as Astoria Fire Department, to come brew a specialty batch as a fundraiser. In a room adjacent to the brewery will be a small tap room, with lounge and bar seat- ing. All of it looks out on an acrylic concrete-coated parking lot Williams has made pedes- trian-only in hopes of creating a food cart pod and beer garden. Astoria Station “If I didn’t have a brewery there — if I just had an auto parts store — I wouldn’t put a food cart there,” Williams said. A few of the previous food carts left for the corner of 11th and Duane streets. Part of the inspiration for Williams, who acquired the building about eight years ago, comes from the Happy Valley Station, a pod of more than 20 food carts sur- rounding a large indoor pavil- ion with a tap house southeast of Portland. In addition to food carts, beer and cider, Williams has said Continued from Page 1A Edward Stratton/The Daily Astorian Jared Allison removes a tank from the delivery truck outside Reach Break Brewing Monday. he wants to potentially project movies and sporting events on the wall of the adjacent Norblad Building above. Clean then sour Don’t expect sour beers on tap any time soon. The partners say they want to start with their own “clean” beers. The term describes beers with more sub- dued fermentation lavors, such as pale ales, stouts, porters, Pil- sners and lagers. “The clean line pays the bills until the sours are ready,” Parker said. What gives sour beers — Berliner weisses, saisons, Flan- ders ales and lambics — their signature tart taste are wild yeasts and the acidifying bac- teria the beers age in. Reach Break’s sours will spend a year or more in barrels beneath the main brewery. “The process takes, depend- ing on how you’re doing it, it takes a long time,” said Jared Allison, who recently worked at De Garde. “We’re going to do it more of the traditional way of long-aging it in oak.” Reach Break will offer most of its beers on tap, with some bottled for special releases. While letting people bring in growlers, the brewery will also sell recyclable, 32-ounce alumi- num containers. Why Astoria? The partners in Reach Break all grew up in small coastal towns; the Allisons in Coos Bay and Parker in California. They started planning the brewery from Sweet Home, even win- ning an award at Seaside’s Pour- ing at the Coast for their Sym- biosis Stout collaboration with Coos Bay’s 7 Devils Brewing Co. Searching for locations, the owners said they had an afin- ity for Astoria because of their backgrounds, along with the right combination of small-town charm and inluences that come with being less than a two-hour drive away from Portland. “It’s a very artistic, out- wardly weird town that just makes it really amazing to be a part of,” Parker said. “I’ve been here ive months, and it just kind of grows on you. It just gets bet- ter and better the longer you’re with it.” Landslide: ‘It seems like Mother Nature always wins’ Continued from Page 1A bend in the river. Last Decem- ber, a month’s-worth of rain fell in the irst 12 days, thoroughly saturating the slope down to its foundation of decaying rock. The slide started roughly 150 feet above the road, where a hulk of weak, fractured silt- stone is poised above a nearly vertical incline. At irst, there was a gradual trickle of debris that led the county to mark off part of the road with orange cones. A couple days later, a few thousand cubic yards of soil, evergreens, crumbling rock and small boulders tum- bled down, taking out a sec- tion of a low retaining wall that the county had built to hold back small slides. Some of the debris landed in a 15 foot-deep heap on the pavement, but most of it careened over the edge of the road and down into the can- yon, a total distance of 300 or 400 feet. ‘Signiicant risk to public safety’ In the middle of winter, the Lewises and Tallmans were sud- denly even more cut off from civilization than usual. Despite their repeated requests to county oficials, the slide remains untouched. The two couples ind the lack of action frustrating, partly because the current situation is inconvenient and dangerous, and partly because they think the county Department of Pub- lic Works might have prevented the slide by giving more atten- tion to the road. They also think the county suddenly allowed an inlux of logging truck trafic in the midst of December rains, and wonder if the two events are linked. County oficials counter that the road has been a hazard for years, and is now so unstable that it probably can’t be saved. In an April report, a geotech- nical team hired by the county recommended closing the road. The engineers, from the Van- couver, Washington, irm Hart- Crowser, said the “slide zone” posed “a signiicant risk to pub- lic safety.” Due to the undercut- ting at the base of the slope and the huge mass of unstable rock at the top, the engineers con- cluded that there was no eco- nomically feasible way to ix it. “In our opinion, sudden cat- astrophic failure … could occur without warning during moder- ate to heavy precipitation,” the report said. “Such a failure could feasibly cause loss of life ...” ‘Don’t touch it’ County Commissioner Steve Rogers has visited the slide site a few times, and thinks he has a pretty good idea of just how Natalie St. John/EO Media Group Bob Tallman, front, neighbor Randy Lewis and Maddy the dog hiked over the Upper Naselle Road Landslide in early May. The unstable trail is precariously close to a cliff, and there have already been a couple of close calls. Below, the river is cutting into the canyon wall, creating increased potential for future slides. dangerous Randy Lewis’ cur- rent commute is. “I almost fell, halfway, walk- ing the slide,” Rogers said. He plans to visit again later this week with state Sen. Dean Takko and Rep. Brian Blake. “We’re still working on alternatives, trying to develop the shortest route,” Rogers said. “I’m tearing my hair out trying to igure this out. I feel terrible for them.” So far though, the prognosis is grim. The Hart-Crowser team found “abundant evidence” of “a long history of failures” in the area, possibly stretching back as far as ancient times. The experts the county consulted “generally determined, ‘Don’t touch it,’” Rogers said. “Others have said they could ix it — to the tune of $50,000,” Rogers said, but when he asks if they could guarantee the road would be safe, they back down. Slides upon slides The section of road that is buried under the landslide was actually built from the rub- ble from a previous landslide. During a period of continuous rain in late March 2003, “The hillside gave away, totally cov- ering the road, and went down into the river,” a Department of Public Works road crew super- visor said. The department quickly brought in six men, two dump trucks, an excavator and a back- hoe to clear the road, but rains often made it too dangerous to work, so they didn’t complete the job until mid-May 2003. According to a May 2003 Chi- nook Observer article, “After removing several thousand yards of slide material, the county inally decided to build a new roadbed, leaving much of the slide material, which raised the road an estimated 12 to 15 feet above the old roadbed.” The crew also installed the retain- ing wall, as well as a plastic pipe culvert that now shoots water into the canyon on wet days. mas,’” Barbara Tallman recalled. “Then the slide happened.” Log truck trafic “I’d just like to have the road open,” Bob Tallman said, as his wife carefully steered their small, two-wheel drive SUV down a washboard dirt logging road. “My wife’s had two lat tires. It just beats our vehicles up.” The Tallmans worry about relying on a route where there are no cellphone signals, bad conditions and numerous pri- vate roads that could be gated at any time. What will happen if another emergency or a very bad storm occurs? “I’m always maintaining the road!” Barbara Tallman joked, noting that she’d stopped to clear rocks from a bend in the road just that morning. The Lewises also worry about how it would affect Naselle, if the only public route to the beautiful river valley is cut off. In the summer and fall, a steady stream of outdoors enthusiasts travel up to ish and hunt, Lewis said, and those vis- itors bring a lot of business to the area, and act as champions for an underappreciated natural attraction. “If that river ain’t worth sav- ing, then we’ve lost as a soci- ety,” Lewis said. “It’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of whether it can be done or not,” Rogers said. He insisted that the county is not writing off the road, the valley or its residents. “Mrs. Lewis is right,” Rog- ers said, referring to Christin Lewis’ comments at a recent public meeting. “It’s hard on the cars, it’s hard on everything. It seems like Mother Nature always wins. But we’re not tak- ing this lightly — we take this very seriously.” Both couples say that except for a short period in Decem- ber, logging trucks didn’t use Upper Naselle Road for most of a decade. During a tour of the slide in early May, they said county oficials had said they had banned the behemoth trucks in 2003 or 2004. “They said no more logging trucks would come in on this road, ever again,” Barbara Tall- man said. It’s not clear whether there were ever oficial restrictions. Department of Public Works Director Mike Collins pro- vided the geotechnical report, but did not return a call, and the Observer could not obtain pub- lic records in time for publica- tion. The county did at least tem- porarily limit trafic. “The road is limited to one- way trafic for small vehicles only, with no heavy truck traf- ic allowed,” the May 2003 arti- cle said. Randy Lewis said he was shocked when a steady low of logging trucks began using the road. One morning, he felt a sud- den rumbling, looked around for the source of the vibrations, and noticed concentric rings form- ing on the surface of his coffee. Trucks were headed up the road toward a logging site north of their homes. He was furious. The couples both called the Department of Public Works to ind out what was going on, and say that they had very sim- ilar conversations with a county staffer, who said truckers were using Upper Naselle, because a bridge on their usual route was on the brink of collapsing. “He said, ‘Right now, the log- gers want to have a good Christ- ‘Mother Nature always wins’ “We don’t have any delu- sions. We know this won’t be the inal word on it,” Legis- lative Revenue Oficer Paul Warner said Monday. “We know there will be a lot more work and analysis to do, but hopefully this will be a start- ing point.” Known as Initiative Peti- tion 28, the gross receipts tax measure backed by pub- lic-employee unions and oth- ers around the state would increase the corporate tax by 2.5 percent on businesses with annual sales above $25 million. The initiative would not affect the taxes directly paid by thousands of smaller corpo- rations in the state. It would, however, be the largest tax increase in state history. Trickle down to consumers An analysis by the Legisla- tive Revenue Ofice presented Monday to the Senate Interim Committee on Finance and Revenue in Salem, showed the measure would stabilize the state’s budget. At the same time, the costs of the tax would likely trickle down to consum- ers, increasing prices on daily items. “The impact of IP 28 on consumer prices means that the marginal impact of the tax will be regressive,” the report states. A household with median income of $51,075 would lose an estimated $613 in income in the form of higher prices and slower economic growth, the report shows. Job growth would slow by 1.6 percent in the private sector, but increase by 5.8 percent in the public sector. “If it were in place for the 2012-13 iscal year (the most recent year with complete state-by-state census data), IP 28 would have increased Ore- gon’s per capita state and local tax burden by roughly $600 to $4,501,” according to the state analysis. “This would have moved Oregon to the ninth highest taxes as a percent of income versus an actual rank- ing of 26th.” Fall hardest on wholesalers, retailers The heaviest impact from the tax would fall on wholesal- ers and retailers, Warner said. The union-backed cam- paign, Our Oregon, submitted 130,000 signatures in support of the measure to the Secre- tary of State’s Ofice Friday for veriication. Only 88,184 are needed to qualify for the November ballot. In a statement, Our Oregon said the report shows that by stabilizing the state budget, the measure will help hire back thousands of teachers, reduce health care costs and enhance senior services. “Oregon’s unstable rev- enue stream has meant that economic crises consistently put vulnerable Oregonians at risk,” the statement says. “By making large corporations pay their fair share, IP 28 will bet- ter position the state to weather a future recession without making deep cuts.” At the same time, Our Ore- gon spokeswoman Katherine Driessen questioned whether the analysis gives an accurate picture of the tax’s impact. The Legislative Revenue Ofice “couldn’t model IP 28, so they, instead, applied a lower rate to all businesses,” Driessen said. Warner acknowledged the techniques his ofice used to analyze the measure’s impact does not capture micro-level details at the individual indus- try or company level. “However, we believe they do capture broad overall effects on the state economy pretty well,” Warner said. Disputing claims Pat McCormick, a spokes- man for a coalition of 500 businesses opposing the mea- sure, disputed Our Oregon’s claim. “The impact on the econ- omy is going to be very dif- icult on Oregonians, espe- cially those who are unable to bear those costs,” he added. “All of the aspects of the eco- nomic impact on those most struggling in our economy and the impact overall on the economy, the loss of jobs and so forth is of signiicant concern.” “IP 28 would be a multi-bil- lion dollar blank check for state lawmakers to spend with no plan or accountability for how the billions in new tax revenues would be used,” a statement from the business coalition, Defeat the Tax on Oregon Sales said. Lawmakers in the state Senate had been interested in offering an alternative to the tax measure during February’s session, but have encountered resistance from the House. ‘Potent forces’ State Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, chairman of the interim committee hearing the analysis Monday, proposed a smaller tax on corporations in February, but his bill never gained traction. On Monday, he renewed his call to lawmakers to offer an alternative to the tax. “There will be potent forces at work here to keep it from passing so that $6 billion could be zero, and yet our revenue issues will remain. When I look at this and … the regres- sive nature of it makes me think if we can do this and guar- antee revenues without that force, without that ight, why wouldn’t we do that? We can do that. I know members of this committee would like to do that without going to a world war.” He called on House Speaker Tina Kotek, Gov. Kate Brown and lobbyists to ind a way to compromise. “We can do this and try to avoid this divisive ight in the fall. The last thing the state needs is a bitter campaign.” Kotek, D-Portland, made it clear at the end of the ses- sion that she supports the mea- sure. Brown has not taken a strong position on the mea- sure or offered to negotiate an alternative. House Republican Leader Mike McLane issued a harsh statement Monday against the measure. “Come November, Ore- gonians will see IP 28 exactly for what it is: an ill-conceived, disingenuous measure that would have dramatic conse- quences for family budgets and the economic future of our state,” McLane said. Any compromise that comes at this stage could dampen the campaign for the measure, but it would do noth- ing to keep the measure off the ballot. Once signatures are veriied, the measure cannot be withdrawn. The Capital Bureau is a collaboration between EO Media Group and Pamplin Media Group. Supporters of Oregon’s Measures 66 and 67, designed to raise taxes on high-income earners and corporations, hold a rally in Portland in January. AP Photo Don Ryan