MAY 2008: FEATURE; SMALL BUSINESS
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THE
WAIT
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He’s also chairman of the Bridge Committee, president of
the Sauvie Island Boosters Association and has a binder in his
office several inches thick of documents on the island’s
58-year-old bridge. He has testified in Salem about economic
hardships to island business due to trucking weight
restrictions on the decrepit bridge, held countless meetings
with elected officials and helped organize the island’s
residents to push Salem and Washington, D.C., for funding for a
new span.
The old Sauvie Island bridge is a sliver of metal and concrete
that stretches across the Multnomah Channel and connects the
island to the world. It’s a decaying link — a
bridge that can’t bear the weight of a fully loaded semi
truck. But what the bridge cannot bear, the island’s
farms, ranches, nurseries and lumber mill must. They’ve
lost uncountable dollars in revenue since December 2001 when
the weight restrictions were put in place. Somehow
they’ve survived. And now their burden is about to be
lifted.
Next to the old bridge, a new $40 million bridge has been
growing over the past two years. It’s wider than the old
bridge. It’s taller. It’s easier to drive onto and
off of. It’s almost done — as early as June,
perhaps. Until then, the old bridge shudders and vibrates as
each semi creeps over it. The island’s businesses wait
and lose a little more money as each day passes — like
they have for the last seven years, five months, and what feels
to some like countless days.
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KOENNECKE DRIVES HIS TRUCK over the gravel road that links the
mill to the island’s main road as he describes the
history of the old bridge: It was installed in 1950; up to that
point a ferry was the only way across the channel. In
1998, the Oregon Department of Transportation found that it met
“minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as
is.” In December 2001 an inspection crew found structural
faults on the island end of the bridge. The original weight
limit on the bridge was 105,000 pounds, the weight of a
standard commercial load. That December, the county radically
lowered the limit to 40,000 pounds. To put that in perspective,
Koennecke says, the weight of a typical empty logging truck is
30,000 pounds.
Any island business that relied on trucking faced a hard road:
the island’s farms and nurseries, which need truckloads
of lime and fertilizer; the ranches, which need truckloads of
feed; and the mill, which needs truckloads of logs. Then,
several months later, the county was able to hold the
bridge’s cracking girders together with steel
bandages.
Koennecke pulls into a gravel parking lot at the base of the
new bridge on the mainland side. He honks a hello to the
project manager who’s climbing up stairs to the deck of
the bridge. The underside is a mass of pilings and scaffolding.
Koennecke talks about them as if he knows each pillar
personally.
As he drives back across the old bridge the tires on his truck
make a thump-thump noise as they hit steel plates set into the
road. These are the bridge’s metal bandages, life support
for the bridge. They’re also meager life support for the
island’s largest businesses: JD Ranch, Bailey Nurseries,
Columbia Farms, Hall Ranch, Delta Farms, Alder Creek Lumber.
After the bandages were installed, the weight limit was
increased to 80,000 pounds — which has been just enough
to get by on.
That doesn’t mean it was easy: Some farmers, like Bob
Egger at Delta Farms, stopped growing certain crops —
sweet corn and green beans in Egger’s case — that
could only be shipped in mass quantities.
Alder Creek Lumber didn’t have the option of stopping
shipments. But a typical fully loaded log truck weighs about
88,000 pounds. The company pays the same as they would for a
full load, but loses the cost of one load every eight trips.
Multiply that by seven years.
It’s not just lost loads. Trucks with double trailers
have to park off Highway 30, unhook one trailer, drive onto the
island to unload, then come back, pick up the other trailer and
head back to island. Koennecke pays trucking companies an
additional $25 a load to compensate for the inconvenience.
The island businesses have lost collectively millions of
dollars transporting goods in reduced truckloads — every
load taking them to the wrong end of economies of scale.
Seven years is a long time for a business to bear that heavy
of an economic burden. No farm or ranch closed down because of
the bridge. If you ask why, the answer people give is
deceptively simple: Because
we knew a new bridge was going to be here someday.
THE ISLAND’S RESIDENTS didn’t just sit and wait
for that day, however. Three miles up the road from Alder Creek
Lumber is perhaps the most recognizable farm on the island: The
Pumpkin Patch. Bob and Kari Egger own and run both the Pumpkin
Patch and Delta Farms. On a mid-March afternoon, Bob is
standing in the iconic red Pumpkin Patch barn. This is where,
come late summer, everything from cabbage to strawberries will
be for sale. Today it’s cold and empty, with farm
equipment parked where weekend shoppers from Portland usually
wander.
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Egger leans against a checkout stand and describes how he stood
in front of county commissions in a meeting after the weight
limit was lowered. The island is zoned for agriculture, he told
them, but if farmers are physically unable to farm, they have
the legal right to develop their property. Egger actually likes
the current zoning; he hopes to pass his farm to his son. But
if farmers couldn’t grow crops on their land, what choice
did they have but to develop the property?
Maria Rojo de Steffey had just stepped into her job as county
commissioner for District 1, of which Sauvie Island is a part,
when the first weight reduction happened. Islanders felt
they’d been neglected, she says, and there was a lot of
anger and frustration. But unlike other bridge replacement
efforts, like Sellwood in Portland for example, the businesses
and residents of Sauvie Island formed a tightly knit coalition,
she says. And that became a powerful tool.
“It let me really pound on the economic importance of
the island to the rest of the community,” she says.
“People got it. That’s what made the
difference.”
There’s a physical example of that unity. It’s a
one-inch thick, bound volume of letters asking for help that
dozens of businesses on and off the island sent to U.S.
senators Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden less than two months after
December 2001. There are letters from farmers, from nursery
owners and their employees, from dairy and bed and breakfast
and sawmill owners. There are letters from 14 timber-related
companies from around the state explaining how Alder Creek was
crucial to their business. Weyerhaeuser wrote a letter about
the importance of a new bridge.
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There are pictures with scrawled messages from schoolchildren:
“Please help us pay for a new bridge. The old bridge has
a crack in it.” “Please give us money for the
bridge or else the bridge will fall.”
THEY GOT THE MONEY. In a county with an expected $195 million
shortfall in transportation money over the next 20 years,
Sauvie Islanders walked away with more than $38 million in
federal funding in 2003. The new bridge broke ground in January
2006. Next month, if all goes well, there’ll be a grand
opening party.
But what if the county had decided it didn’t have the
resources to fix the bridge? What if a new bridge had turned
into the same tug-of-war that’s engulfed the Sellwood
Bridge replacement efforts? Or the I-5 bridge over the Columbia
River?
Koennecke is leaving the bridge, driving back to the mill,
when he’s asked that question. He shakes his head as if
that option simply wasn’t possible. As he drives beneath
the old bridge, he stops his truck in the middle of the road
and looks up through the windshield at the underside of the
steel-plate bandages.
He points out a visible crack in the concrete.
“We’re landlocked. How would we have farmed? They
knew they were in a situation where they had to make it
work,” he says. “The county knew they owed us a
bridge.” Then he drives under the old and new bridges and
back to the mill.
Whether it was ever articulated by the islanders, the county
or an elected official, creating a new bridge was about more
than a concrete-and-metal span across the Multnomah Channel.
The steel bandages on the dying structure didn’t just
keep businesses alive, they also allowed Sauvie Island to stay
truly connected to Multnomah County. Because a bridge for only
cars is only half a bridge. Without the band-aids, it would
have been a bridge for the birdwatchers, the beachgoers, the
Sunday drivers from Portland.
But it’s the businesses that make the largest
agricultural area in the state’s most populated county
what it is. It’s the third-generation farms, hundreds of
workers at dozens of businesses, and the farmland and pastures
that make Sauvie Island what it is.
To keep it that way took patience and the ability of islanders
to shoulder a heavy economic burden. It took time. It took the
belief that someday — a crucial and imperative someday
— the waiting would end.
Have an opinion? E-mail feedback@oregonbusiness.com
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 Out of the frying pan |
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