Murmurs: All Hail the New Weed Queen

1. Portland Mayor Charlie Hales last week publicly embarrassed City Commissioner Amanda Fritz by abruptly yanking her control of the bureau that oversees real-estate development. Fritz had angered developers with fee hikes and policies targeting skinny houses. The mayor reassigned the Bureau of Development Services to Commissioner Dan Saltzman. Fritz got the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, which she had previously run-—but that bureau now oversees the city’s marijuana policy program, about to become a major source of new cash. As reported on wweek.com, the city is poised to charge medical marijuana dispensaries $1,500 each for temporary licenses to sell recreational weed starting in October. Fritz declined to talk about her new weed empire, saying she hadn’t been briefed on it yet.

1. The Oregon Legislature went home July 6 after its usual flurry of last-minute deals. This year’s buzzer-beating winners: community-college students and women’s reproductive rights. A bill sponsored by Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton) provides free community college to needy students, as many as 12,000 annually. GOP darling Rep. Knute Buehler (R-Bend) passed legislation allowing pharmacists to prescribe birth control. The losers? Big names with grand aims.  Outnumbered Senate Republicans used a procedural maneuver to kill a bill that would have facilitated the use of $40 million in bonds for affordable housing, a top priority for House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland). Lawmakers did appropriate the money, however, and the bill guiding its expenditure is likely to pass next February's short session. House leaders killed a $337 million seismic upgrade of the state Capitol, the pet project of Salem’s most powerful lawmaker, Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem). He was unhappy. “When the magnitude 9 quake hits, the loss of life and property across our state will be tremendous,” Courtney said. “The decision not to complete this project ensures that those losses will include the Oregon State Capitol and the people inside it.”

1. Northeast’s Portland’s Cully neighborhood has gotten rid of its most notorious landmark—a sexual shopping plaza called The Sugar Shack. The cost? Making the strip club’s federally indicted owners $2.3 million richer. WW reported last year that neighborhood groups were raising funds to buy the site (“Sugar Shackup,” WW, Nov. 26, 2014). In May, federal prosecutors charged Lawrence Gary Owen with engaging in interstate commerce for illegal purposes: He allegedly operated ATMs to promote prostitution at the Sugar Shack and three other area strip clubs. Neighborhood coalition Living Cully bought the Sugar Shack site from members of Owen’s family for $2.3 million in June after receiving donations from the Portland Development Commission and Business Oregon. “After 20 years of suffering through this, the community decided that they would act,” says Living Cully organizer Tony DeFalco. “If the community didn’t do that, the property would probably still be acting as a strip club.”

WWeek 2015