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cannot be withdrawn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