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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 2019)
May 1, 2019 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 gan region. The potential for significant wildfires is above normal west of the Cascade crest in Washington and Oregon through August, the re- port said. Some high-elevation portions of the Great Ba- sin and the central Rocky Mountains could experi- ence below-normal wild- fire potential, the agency said. It also said that be- low average fire activ- ity continued in April across the nation, thanks to moist conditions from the winter. “Precipitation received was above average across the northwestern quar- ter of the nation and across a majority of the east,” the agency said. While the wildfire sea- son might be delayed in higher, timbered eleva- Couch Park to Open New Playground Thanks to funding from the 2014 Parks Replacement Bond, Metro, Harper’s Playground, Metropolitan Learning Center’s Friends of Couch Playground and private many donors, Couch Park has a new inclusive playground, plaza, and Portland Loo. From 1 to 3 p.m. May 4 the park will hold a ribbon-cutting and party to celebrate the newly competed playground at Couch Park, NW 20th Avenue and Hoyt Street. There will be free cake, food and activities. cont’d from pg 3 April 20, greenHAUS gallery is scheduled to open in May and Cason’s Fine Meats will open at the new location in June. There will be a grand opening for Alberta Commons as a whole on June 22. Dayna and Cole Reed co-own greenHAUS, a gallery and gift shop featuring vintage, cus- tom and salvage art and household items on Northeast Killingsworth, which opened in 2016 and is moving to the Al- berta location in May. “We’ll be ready for the Fourth of July holidays,” said Theotis Cason, the owner of Cason’s Meats, who started his career as a butcher working for Safeway and Fred Meyer and eventually opened his own store, operat- ing at several locations in North and Northeast Cannabis Portland over the years. The new Cason’s lo- cation will sell locally raised beef and chicken, raised without hormones or antibiotics and will of- fer services like catering. His nephew, Barry, who has worked with him for six years, is learning the trade, but is also a source of ideas and advice about doing business in 2019. “We don’t need to go backwards. We need to go forward,” Cason said. Jamaal Lane, who has operated Champions Barbershop at MLK and Failing for 10 years, and still operates Champions Barbering Institute on Northeast Killingsworth. The institute is staying put, but the barbershop is moving — increasing the number of barbers, adding a front desk and updating its look to a more “promenade-type feel.” The new location also includes services like scalp treatments, beard treatments and mini-facials. “I just had a vision of longevity on MLK,” Lane “ We don’t need to go back- wards. We need to go forward told The Skanner. “I want to be celebrating 20 years still right here.” Business owners said Prosper Portland ap- proached them about the possibility of relocating to Alberta Commons, which completed con- struction in 2018. In 2013 the city agen- cy – then known as the Portland Development Commission – inked a deal to sell the lot for far less than market value to open a grocery store. A deal with the Califor- nia-based grocery chain Trader Joe’s fell through after protests from the Portland African Amer- ican Leadership Forum. Activists hoped afford- able housing would be built on the site; they also released a list of demands that included small busi- ness assistance for mi- nority-owned business- es and job creation for minorities. The city also committed $20 million in urban renewal funds for urban housing in North and Northeast Portland. Ultimately, the city made a deal to bring Golden, Colo.-based Nat- ural Grocers to the lot, but hired a Black-owned construction firm — Co- las Construction — to build it and said the new development would offer space to minority-owned businesses. Since discussion about the fate of the lot began in 2006, the population surrounding the sur- rounding neighborhood, which was once majori- ty-Black and was already beginning to gentrify, has become Whiter and wealthier, and housing prices have climbed upward. Currently the Albina neighborhood is about 14 percent Black. “For us, it’s not just selling goods. We want you to purchase hope, because we are in a time right now when a lot of us as Americans are feeling pretty hopeless. People of color in Port- land are feeling isolated and hopeless, and so we look for the brilliance in the other underdog,” said Cole Reed. Cole Reed is Black; her wife, Dayna, is White, and they have a four-year-old son. They moved to Portland from Arizona in 2015 due to Oregon’s more inclusive adoption policies, and in their new location, they hope to make space for community conver- sations about race and identity. “We talk about race every day. We live in a city where it’s 75 percent White people, 25 percent ‘other,’ and of that other, it’s an extremely dimin- ished amount of Black people,” Cole Reed said. “So we talk about the oth- er, and we hope to have so many conversations that it’s no longer necessary to talk about the others.” cont’d from pg 1 testified that SB 582 would give Ore- gon cannabis producers “a major head start” to corner the national market share, thereby turning the state’s over- supply into an asset. He warned, “If we’re unable to com- pete even for a matter of six months, it would permanently cripple our ability to export one of our best cash crops in Oregon. What we need to do is prepare so that we are ready with the trucks in a safe and organized manner to get our products out of the state and capitalize on it on day one of federal legalization.” To that end, SB 582 would allow the governor to work with leadership in other recreational marijuana-allow- ing states to hammer out the details of export and sales. The bill is current- ly worded to allow such agreements to happen only in states that either abut Oregon, or that can be reached through ground travel that does not pass through states where there is any kind of prohibition against recreation- al marijuana use. Currently, that would include potential agreements in Wash- ington, California, and Nevada. An amended version of Senate Bill 582 passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with a 5-2 vote after a work session in late March. “ Oregon has been an exporter of canna- bis for decades. We know prohibition doesn’t work Advocates emphasized the economic cost of having a surplus with nowhere to send it. “The result is thousands of companies fighting to survive, putting thousands more jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of local capital at eminent risk of loss,” Casey Houlihan, executive di- rector of the Oregon Retailers of Can- nabis Association, told the Senate Judi- ciary Committee in February. He explained that Oregon’s “perishable excess supply” would find its way to other states no matter what. “That’s already happening,” Houlihan said. “Oregon has been an exporter of cannabis for decades. We know prohi- bition doesn’t work. We want those sales to be legal and reg- The Oregon legislature is considering a bill that would allow ulated and taxed. The solution the export of cannabis to other states in the event of federal is fairly simple: We need to cre- legalization. ate a structure for exporting Christopher Dolinar, CEO of Pilot that excess supply into other state and Farm in southern Oregon, said his com- countries as soon as we possibly can.” pany was one of the first 15 OLCC-li- Travis MacKenzie, founding mem- censed farms, and that he has had to bers of TJ’s Gardens, told the commit- cut nearly 80 percent of his staff since tee that his company had reduced pay- opening. roll by 50 percent in the past two years “I got into [the industry] for the un- due to the excess of cannabis products precedented competitive advantage available in Oregon, and the subse- that Oregon has to play in the global quent competitive pricing. cannabis market compared to any- “That’s a lot of dollars that are not in where else,” he said, adding, “We’re sit- our local economy and a lot of employ- ting on this incredibly opportunity to ees that are no longer in this industry take advantage of this market opening when they want to be,” he said. up. Let’s be first to market.” COURTESY OF FLOSSIN MEDIA Alberta tions of the Northwest because of a slower melt of the snowpack, “an exception to this could be along the Canadian border in Washington, Idaho and western Mon- tana,” the agency said. That’s because those areas have a below-av- erage snowpack and are suffering from moderate drought. “These areas can ex- pect an average start to the season with a poten- tial for above normal ac- tivity,” the agency said. In the southwest, below normal fire potential was expected across north- ern Arizona, northern New Mexico and west Texas in May and June, the report said. Above normal fire potential was expected in southern Ar- izona in those months. PHOTO COURTESY OF PORTLAND PARKS & RECREATION Wildfires
