OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Marina village a
worthy concept
for the Port
A
bold future vision is in the works for the area around the
Port of Astoria’s West Mooring Basin, but a messy court
case could quash it from becoming a reality.
William Orr and Chester Trabucco envision the Port property
with an appealing hotel, conference center and restaurant that can
attract more guests, especially during the winter. With the marina
and riverfront nearby it can be a majestic setting for a marina vil-
lage project and would be an attractive basin-area centerpiece that
would be a key asset for the community.
Trabucco’s brother-in-law, former Astoria Port Director Peter
Gearin — although he ran into trouble on other matters — had
appealing ideas for broadening the Port’s luster as a maritime
service center. It was under Gearin that the Port began courting
cruise ship business, for example. He recognized, as Trabucco
and Orr clearly do, that a more polished west-end marina can
play an essential role in revitalizing Uniontown. Studies have
identified this community gateway as needing attention and
beautification.
Distinct improvement
Once the best hotel in town, years of inattention and lack
of reinvestment turned the former Red Lion at the Port into an
embarrassment. There already are distinct signs of improvement
under the operators.
How can proposed next steps become a reality?
Orr is president of Signature Seafoods in Seattle and has long-
time connections to Astoria. Trabucco is a developer who was
behind the restoration of the Hotel Elliot. The pair, through two
local companies, Astoria Hospitality Ventures LLC and Marina
Village LLC, currently operate the Astoria Riverwalk Inn —
once the Red Lion. They also recently signed a lease with the
Port to take over daily operations of the Chinook Building, which
includes a seafood market, a charter boat company and several
other office tenants, including the Astoria Yacht Club. The build-
ing’s upstairs has 7,500 square feet of available meeting space.
Between the Riverwalk Inn and the Chinook Building is the
former Seafare restaurant, which has long been vacant and dilap-
idated from storm damage. Because of its condition, it would
likely need to be demolished and rebuilt as a new restaurant.
With improvements to the hotel, restaurant property and
Chinook Building, and potential development of other available
property, the marina village vision could become a reality, creat-
ing another magnet attraction along the riverfront.
Potentially complicating matters, though, is a messy lawsuit
that is scheduled for trial next month.
Legal clash
The lawsuit was filed in 2015 by the Param Hotel Group, a
Portland hotel operator, against the Port, which owns the hotel.
The hotel was previously operated by heavily indebted Brad
Smithart. Param contends it had been courting him about the
lease since 2014 and had an agreement with the Port to take
over operation. The Port canceled its contract with Smithart in
2015 but transferred short-term operation of the hotel to Astoria
Hospitality Ventures, whose majority owner is Orr. His wife Sara
Orr’s brother is former Port Commissioner Stephen Fulton. The
suit contends the Port breached a contract and favored the locally
connected company. After the action was filed, the Port put long-
term plans for the hotel’s operation on hold pending the outcome
of the case. Param is seek-
ing the seven years it would
The lawsuit
have gained after taking
over from Smithart, or $4.5
certainly bears
million in damages.
watching. Its
The lawsuit certainly
outcome could
bears watching. Its out-
come could have a seri-
have a serious
ous financial impact on the
financial impact
Port and determine whether
the vision ever comes into
on the Port
focus.
and determine
The stakes are defi-
nitely high. Such civil law-
whether the
suits nearly always end in
vision ever
negotiated settlements. That
comes into
should be the outcome in
this case. Without weighing
focus.
in on the equities of Param’s
case, lawyers and the court
must look for an outcome fair to all parties, and which clears the
way for redevelopment of this key site.
It is worth noting that another Trabucco project, involving
the landmark Morck Hotel in Aberdeen, Washington, has been
slow to come to fruition. The Port of Astoria must make sure the
marina development moves along at an expeditious rate, whom-
ever ultimately does it.
Trump’s empty culture wars
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
T
he secret of culture war is
that it is often a good and
necessary thing. People don’t
like culture wars
when they’re on
the losing side,
and while they’re
losing they often
complain about
how cultural con-
cerns are distrac-
tions from the “real” issues, usually
meaning something to do with the
deficit or education or where to peg
the Medicare growth rate or which
terrorist haven the United States
should be bombing next.
But in the sweep of American
history, it’s the battles over cultural
norms and so-called social issues —
over race and religion, intoxicants
and sex, speech and censorship,
immigration and assimilation —
that for better or worse have often
made us who we are.
Still, even a proud culture
warrior should be able to concede
that not all culture wars are created
equal. A good culture war is one
that, beneath all the posturing and
demagogy and noise, has clear
policy implications, a core legal or
moral question, a place where one
side can win a necessary victory
or where a new consensus can be
hashed out. A bad culture war is one
in which attitudinizing, tribalism
and worst-case fearmongering float
around unmoored from any specific
legal question, in which mutual
misunderstanding reigns and a
thousand grievances are stirred up
without a single issue being clarified
or potentially resolved.
Unfortunately for us all, Donald
Trump is a master, a virtuoso, of the
second kind of culture war — and a
master, too, of taking social and cul-
tural debates that could be important
and necessary and making them
stupider and emptier and all about
himself.
He is not the only figure push-
ing American arguments in that
direction — cable news, reality
TV, campus protesters and late-
night political “comedy” all have
a similar effect these days. But he
is the president, which lends him a
unique deranging influence, and he
is unique as well in that unlike most
culture warriors — who are usually
initially idealists, however corrupted
they may ultimately become — he
has never cared about anything
higher or nobler than himself, and
so he’s never happier than when the
entire country seems to be having
a culture war about, well, Donald
Trump.
The NFL-national anthem
controversy, the latest Trump-stoked
social conflagration, is a quintessen-
tial bad culture war. It was trending
that way already before Trump,
because the act of protest that Colin
Kaepernick chose to call attention to
police shootings of unarmed black
men — sitting and then kneeling
for “The Star-Spangled Banner”
— was clearer in the calculated
offense it gave than in the specific
AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid (35) and quarterback Colin
Kaepernick (7) kneel during the national anthem before an NFL foot-
ball game against the Los Angeles Rams in Santa Clara, Calif., in 2016.
The NFL-national anthem
controversy, the latest Trump-
stoked social conflagration, is a
quintessential bad culture war.
cause it sought to further, clearer in
its swipe at a Racist America than
its prescription for redress. (That
Kaepernick sported Fidel Castro
T-shirts and socks depicting cops as
pigs did not exactly help.)
But in his usual bullying and
race-baiting way, Trump has
made it much, much worse, by
multiplying the reasons one might
reasonably kneel — for solidarity
with teammates, as a protest against
the president’s behavior, as a gesture
in favor of free speech, as an act of
racial pride — and then encouraging
his own partisans to interpret the
kneeling as a broad affront to their
own patriotism and politics. So now
we’re “arguing” (I use the term
loosely) about everything from the
free-speech rights of pro athletes
to whether the national anthem is
right-wing political correctness
to LeBron James’ punditry on the
miseducation of Trump voters
… and the specific issue that
Kaepernick intended to raise, police
misconduct, is buried seven layers
of controversy deep.
You could say, it’s always thus
with culture wars and racial battles,
but in fact it isn’t and doesn’t
need to be. Arguments about race
were often toxic in the 1970s and
1980s, but there were core policy
issues that could be argued and
ultimately compromised over —
crime and welfare and affirmative
action — and across the 1990s they
were, to some extent, and as they
were overt racial tensions eased
considerably. In 2001, two-thirds of
Americans (and more blacks than
whites) described race relations as
somewhat good or very good, and
while the white view was usually
slightly rosier thereafter, the two-
thirds pattern held for more than a
decade — until Ferguson, Missouri,
and Black Lives Matter and the
other controversies of the late
Obama years, followed by the rise
of Trump, sent racial optimism into
a tailspin.
For hope to resurface, we need
specific issues and potential com-
promises to re-emerge. In particular,
we need a public argument clearly
tethered to the two big policy ques-
tions raised by police misconduct
and the broader crime and incarcer-
ation debate.
First, can we have the greater
accountability for cops that activists
reasonably demand, in which juries
convict more trigger-happy officers
and police departments establish a
less adversarial relationship to the
communities they police, without
the surge of violence that’s accom-
panied the apparent retreat of the
police in cities like Baltimore and
Chicago?
Second, can we continue the
move toward de-incarceration —
supported, not that long ago, by
Republicans as well as Democrats
— without reversing the gains that
have made many of our cities safe?
These are hard questions that can
be answered only gradually, through
trial-and-error and with various false
starts. But they are questions that
could have answers, that could point
to a stable policy consensus around
race and criminal justice, in a way
that our present “Make America
Great Again” versus “You’re All
White Supremacists” culture war
does not.
For those answers to matter,
for them to depolarize our country,
we need a social and cultural
debate focused on the substance
that Colin Kaepernick’s choice of
protest unfortunately obscured, and
Donald Trump’s flagsploitation
has deliberately buried. Not an end
to culture war, but a better culture
war — in which victory and defeat
can be defined, and peace becomes
a possibility.
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