Turkish rug show coming to town Sesame and Lilies to host Murat Tasdemir By Erick Bengel Cannon Beach Gazette Murat Tasdemir, the owner and president of Tas- demir Rugs on Bainbridge Island, Wash., doesn’t just move merchandise, he con- nects clients with “the right art,” he said. “I believe that carpets are an art, and each individual carpet has a story to tell.” This personable purvey- or of rugs from the Middle East and beyond will be presenting a Turkish rug trunk show May 23 and 24 at Sesame and Lilies, 183 N Hemlock St., where Tasde- mir has sold rugs for the last few years. The show will include about 200 wool and silk rugs for sale — principally Turkish, but also Persian, Russian, Indian and Paki- stani — plus the collection of about 20 already avail- able at the store. Many of the older rugs are traditional pieces woven by Turkish women for their homes and sold to Tasdemir, and most of the newer ones are de- signed by American artists in the Turkish fashion, he said. Sizes usually range from 3-by-5 feet wide to 10-by- 15 feet long, the prices from about $120 to $12,000. A decent 7-by-10-foot rug wo- ven between the 1940s and 1960s can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $8,000, he said. Tasdemir and one of his employees will bring other Turkish and Turkish-style goods, such as scarves, tex- tiles, silk pillows and cus- tom jewelry, he said. Interior decoration Selling rugs is only one side of Tasdemir’s skill set; he also does a kind of ¿HOG ZRUN YHQWXULQJ LQWR the homes of prospective EX\HUVDQG¿QGLQJUXJVWKDW “match” their interior de- sign. He often makes an ini- tial visit to check out the cli- ent’s home, sans rugs, then makes a second visit with several rug options. “I am good on decorat- ing — seeing the house and seeing the colors and seeing what will be best to put in their home,” he said. Though the trunk show is scheduled for the Satur- day and Sunday of Memo- rial Day weekend, Tasdemir may remain in town a day or two later, just in case cus- tomers invite him over and ask him to assess their rug needs. “If they want to come and buy what they want, if they know what they want, that’s great,” he said, “but I’m also there to serve, and I’m going to be there to build a connection with May 8, 2015 | Cannon Beach Gazette | cannonbeachgazette.com • 9A clients, and I’ll do what is needed to help the people.” Besides educating his customers about the rugs they intend to purchase, he seeks to educate them about the rugs they already have. “He’s the quintessen- tial Turkish rug salesman,” said Diane Speakman, who co-owns Sesame and Lil- ies with her husband, Jay Speakman. “He’s just so full of energy, and he’s just so eager to make everyone happy.” Word of mouth A U.S. citizen since 2003, the 43-year-old Tas- demir was born in Malatya, Turkey, and at age 17 started cleaning and folding carpets for a company in Istanbul. He took his expertise from one company to anoth- er until, in the mid-1990s, he found himself working for a company that sold to the states, and he became its overseas representative. +LV¿UVWVWRSZDVLQ7XF son, Ariz., and he then made the rounds in Portland and, later, Bainbridge, where, after renting out a space for a few years, he opened his own rug store in 1999. That same year, he married his wife, Lisa, who owns a bou- tique named Lilies across the street from Tasdemir Rugs. In his travels, Tasdemir has sold thousands of rugs, decorated thousands of homes and carried products PHOTO COURTESY OF FACEBOOK Murat Tasdemir, owner and president of Tasdemir Rugs, lounges in his store on Bain- bridge Island, Wash. He has sold thousands of rugs and decorated thousands of homes in his career. through the country, he said. “Name a state, and I have sold there.” Recently, in what he called his “biggest adventure,” he traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he sold rugs and did some interior decorating for a group of prominent citizens. “For me, it’s very import- ant for the right carpet to go to the right house,” he said. “If they know what they have, they’re going to appre- ciate the carpet that they have more.” For 15 years, Tasdemir’s business has steadily grown, in part, because of word of mouth, a potent force in his line of work. “I think word of mouth is very beautiful — and very powerful, too,” he said. City eyes tax increase, capital improvements Budget from Page 1A The City Council plans to vote on the budget at its regular June 2 meeting. If additional deliberation is needed, the council will hold a special meeting lat- er that month. Tax increase With the extra $139,000, the Chamber of Commerce would be able to hire a full-time employ- ee. This person would help upgrade the information center’s operations and assist Courtland Carrier, the chamber’s executive director, with marketing, Kucera said. Because the chamber is the town’s primary eco- nomic development agen- cy, money spent on the chamber is money spent on tourism, he said. The issue, Kucera said, is not that Cannon Beach isn’t funding its chamber well enough. The city, in fact, spends more money on its chamber than does Seaside; last year, Can- non Beach spent about $71,000 whereas Seaside spent about $38,000. The issue is that Cannon Beach has a chamber-run information center, which performs the same task as Seaside’s Visitors Bureau but is funded far less — roughly $125,000 com- pared to $625,000, Kucera said. Cannon Beach’s infor- mation center sees about three times as many walk- ins annually than does Seaside’s Visitors Bureau, according to Carrier. In 2014, the Cannon Beach tallied about 54,000 walk- ins to Seaside’s 20,000. “In Seaside, the city takes that on as an ex- pense. Here, our chamber, a private organization, is doing that function for us,” Kucera said, “and doing it at a very low, low cost.” The revenue the cham- ber receives from the tax increase would be on top of the Tourism and Arts grant, which is awarded to the chamber in varying amounts every year. “You hear that phrase ‘heads in beds’ — well, that’s exactly what the chamber does,” Kucera said, referring to the de- sire of destination resort communities, like Cannon Beach, to attract as many overnight visitors as possi- ble. ‘Spending money on a problem doesn’t solve the problem. There has to be accountability and a real reporting mechanism…’ Brant Kucera, city manager Visitors and vigilance City Councilor Wendy Higgins said that, if the tax increase is approved, there should be a way to track how the chamber and in- formation center spend the money. Kucera agreed: “Spend- ing money on a problem doesn’t solve the problem. There has to be account- ability and a real reporting mechanism where we see success with the money that we’re going to give them.” Because the chamber partially relies on money from the city’s Tourism and Arts fund — an amount WKDWÀXFWXDWHVIURP\HDUWR year — the chamber has had an unstable revenue stream, Carrier said. The tax increase would solve that problem by tying the chamber’s revenue to a sta- ble source of income. The budget commit- tee should keep in mind, Kucera said, that, even with the added revenue, the information center’s needs far exceed $139,000. How- HYHU ³WKLV LV D JRRG ¿UVW step to begin to address some of those needs,” he said. He added that the ex- pected return may grow into a far greater amount down the road than ini- tially hoped for by estab- lishing a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: The increase in lodging tax revenue would allow the chamber to advertise better, which means an increase in visitors, which means more tax revenue and so on. The bottom line, Kucera said, is that the city would not have to raise the lodg- ing tax any further to gain more revenue. He said that a substan- tially large increase in lodging taxes could pro- duce diminishing returns — that is, more people might be disinclined to rent a room in Cannon Beach. The proposed increase won’t have that effect on the hospitality industry, he argued. “I think it creates the revenue to continue to promote this town, which ZLOOXOWLPDWHO\EHQH¿WWKDW sector of the economy,” he said. Capital improvements After speaking with the department heads while preparing next year’s bud- get, “it became very appar- ent to me very quickly that we have quite a bit of de- ferred maintenance that we need to address,” Kucera said. “The time is high that we begin to address some of the capital issues that we have.” Among the proposed capital improvement proj- ects Kucera, the city staff and the budget committee discussed are: • The ongoing renova- tion of City Hall; • Installing antennas at both the north-end and south-end emergency cache container sites; • Repairing and rehabil- itating the surfaces of the city’s downtown tennis and basketball courts; • Reconstructing the blocks between First and Third streets to make them ADA-accessible; • And constructing a new plaza at the west end of Second Street with benches, low lighting and a rebuilt sidewalk. At future meetings, the budget committee will consider possible improve- ments to the city’s water system, sewer system and RV Park. Though the city must maintain a healthy fund balance, Kucera noted that, after a while, a city’s sav- ing too much money can begin to seem gratuitous, especially if the money isn’t reinvested in the com- munity. “If people don’t think you have a plan for the money that you keep sock- ing away, the logical ques- tion is, ‘Why are you tax- ing me?’” he said. “I think we need to show people, ‘Here’s the plan for those taxes we’ve been putting away.’” Beach sign a tribute to Oregon’s legacy of publicly owned beaches Sign from Page 1A Lackaff — who was born in Cannon Beach and has lived on the North Coast since she graduated from high school — said that, as a child, “it just never occurred to me how special it was to have a beach like this for ev- eryone to play on,” she said. “You just take things for granted until you learn about them.” A ‘holy triptych’ Lackaff spoke before a group that included Mayor Sam Steidel, Cannon Beach City Councilors, Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department representatives, the city’s public works de- partment (which mounted the sign) and the parks and com- munity services committee (which conceived the sign). Last winter, Matt Love — the Astoria-based writer and publisher who penned the uncredited text for the sign — mentioned during a public lecture that not a single pub- lic sign in Oregon commem- orated the landmark legisla- tion of 1967. The parks committee, and its Twelve Days of Earth Day subcommittee, ran with the LGHD7KH¿QDOSO\ZRRGSDQ el is headlined: “The Great Birthright: Oregon’s Ocean Beaches.” “Four and a half months from conversation to dedica- tion has got to be some kind of record,” Love said. “The people of Cannon Beach moved it, and it was incredi- ble how this happened.” Composing the copy for the sign — which Lackaff hand-wrote in ink for the original artwork — proved to be an emotional experience for Love. “I don’t think I ever would have become a writer, or an Oregonian of merit, if I hadn’t had this ...” he said, gesturing toward the beach. “The access at all hours, all day and night, where you never have to pay a cent to go. And it matters to people who don’t have the money, that can’t check into the mo- tels.” Love, who has document- ed Oregon’s legacy of public- ly owned beaches, introduced the attendees to Blair Kramer, the son of the late Associated Press reporter Matt Kramer whose coverage of the Beach Bill help galvanize public support for it. In Oswald West State Park lies a memorial to Matt Kramer and his service to Oregon journalism. That me- morial, the plaque of Oswald West at the overlook of Neah- kahnie Mountain and, now, the Beach Bill sign compose, in Love’s mind, a “holy trip- tych” of Oregon’s conserva- tionist values, he said. ‘The great birthright’ Courtland Carrier, exec- utive director of the Cannon Beach Chamber of Com- merce, spoke of the relation- ship between private and public entities. ERICK BENGEL PHOTO Matt Love, the Astoria writer who penned (anonymously) the text for Cannon Beach’s Beach Bill interpretive sign, talks about the importance of Oregon’s public beaches. Th e sign stands near the railing platform at the west end of Sec- ond Street. “It may be sacrilege for me to be saying this, but, as a person who represents business, this is the greatest example of noncommercial activity that you can imag- ine. Were it not for (Ore- gon’s public beaches), many of our commercial business- es would not exist,” he said. “Thank God for noncom- mercial activities.” City Manger Brant Kucera, spent many years working in Michigan, a state surrounded by water. Up close, the Great Lakes look very much like oceans, he said, and he always thought it was a shame that so much of that state’s lakefront is privately held. “I think it’s a really ter- rible thing for the public not to have access to the environment, because that’s how we connect without environment, is actually be- ing out, physically, in it,” he said. “And I just think how visionary that is, for the state to ensure that people will forever be able to enjoy this.” For good measure, Love recited a quote what he con- siders “Oregon scripture” — the line that Oswald West uttered when he signed the 1913 bill and is now written beneath the banner of Can- non Beach’s “Beach Bill” sign: ³1R ORFDO VHO¿VK LQWHU est should be permitted, through politics or other- wise, to destroy or impair this great birthright of our people.” “This is the great birth- right,” he said, “right here behind us.”