The Big Shaft

[July 30th, 2008]

Tucked away in a tiny converted gas station on North Willamette Boulevard, Golden Harvesters has been distributing food to North Portland’s neediest residents for 20 years.

The nonprofit helps more than 100 members, who pay $15 a month for up to 30 pounds of food donated by area supermarkets. This sustaining service has given Golden Harvesters a solid, if low-profile, reputation.

“They’ve been doing good work for a long time,” says Rev. Bill Van Nostran of Northminster Presbyterian Church. “The community benefits from their services.”

But Golden Harvesters’ future is now at the mercy of the city’s Bureau of Environmental Services and its massive shaft.

The shaft is an offshoot of the bureau’s proposed $70 million Portsmouth Force Main, a 16,000-foot pressurized sewer pipeline to be built as part of the city’s Combined Sewer Overflow Program. The federally required $1.4 billion program, paid for by sewer rate payers, seeks to significantly reduce the number of sewage overflows that spill sludge into the Willamette River after it rains.

The main will take combined sewage—stormwater mixed with sanitary sewage—from the Swan Island Pump Station to the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant.

One of the main’s northernmost shafts, nearly 12 feet in diameter, will run 125 feet beneath Golden Harvesters’ headquarters. And its installation will require major digging and drilling. The result: The nonprofit’s service station-turned-food pantry will be leveled.

In March, Nathan Pool, a right-of-way agent paid $24,000 by the city to assist the five properties affected by the project, told Golden Harvesters President Jim Bull that his nonprofit had to move from its longtime University Park home.

This news came less than a month after Golden Harvesters completed major renovations, including new cabinets and countertops for its 1,800-square-foot building with $3,000 from a Metro grant.

“We’d just finished up remodeling,” longtime volunteer Linda Beug recalled, “and almost the next day [the city] came and told us we had to move.”

“It was like somebody slapped us in the face,” said Sandy Guyot, Golden Harvesters’ grant writer. Fighting back tears, she added, “They’re not even letting us take some of the new fixtures we just put in” because, Pool told her, the city may use the building as an office during construction.

Pool declined comment through bureau spokesman Linc Mann.

Larry Harper, who owns the property that houses Golden Harvesters and his own auto body shop, sides with his tenant of 20 years. (His body shop won’t be affected by the tumult.)

Commissioner Sam Adams, who’s in charge of the Environmental Services Bureau, says he first learned of Golden Harvesters’ predicament last week during a meeting with bureau director Dean Marriott and other staffers.

“I asked whether there wasn’t another site we could use [for the shaft],” Adams says, “but they told me that based on geography…there was no other choice.”

Adams says his office is committed to “doing anything we can to help this incredibly worthy organization,” such as helping Golden Harvesters find a new space or a landlord willing to charge the nonprofit below-market rent.

But any relocation is further complicated by the needs of Golden Harvesters’ clientele, many of whom are disabled, elderly or otherwise reliant on public transportation.

“We’ve got to be on a bus line,” says Bull, whose current building is on a TriMet bus route. “Otherwise our members can’t get here.”

Curt Potter, who uses a wheelchair, has relied on the bus for 10 years to get him from Southwest Portland to Golden Harvesters twice a week.

“I just hope that they don’t move too far from me,” Potter says. “I can’t take two or three buses to get there.” Golden Harvesters now pays $375 a month in rent. And in an area where the average house rent is $1,000 to $1,500, relocating will be costly even with the $10,000 in re-establishment assistance the city pays businesses and nonprofits displaced by any highway or public project.

Bull says Golden Harvesters, which has an annual budget of just $16,000, will perish without a benevolent landlord or co-tenant to split the rent.

The recent economic downturn has brought more people than ever through its doors, including young couples with small children, Bull says.

“We’re an agency that’s helping people in need,” says Bull. “Don’t throw us to the wolves. Help us.”