The Port of Astoria is back in the news as its commission considers whether to appeal a $4 million verdict against it related to the Riverwalk hotel on its property.
The Riverwalk Inn at the time was being operated by Brad Smithart, who was heavily indebted, and Param was negotiating to take over the lease. Testimony showed the Port Commission approved contracting with Param, but the lease wasn’t executed. The Port eventually terminated Smithart’s lease and awarded it on a short-term basis to a local firm, Astoria Hospitality Ventures, which had been formed by Chester Trabucco and Astoria native William Orr, a brother-in-law of then Port Commissioner Stephen Fulton.
Although Port Executive Director Jim Knight was dismissed as an individual defendant, the jury’s verdict found Knight knowingly made fraudulent misrepresentations to Param’s owner, Ganesh Sonpatki. At its only public meeting since the verdict, Port commissioners did not discuss the verdict but gave Knight a vote of confidence by inking him to a three-year contract extension with a 4 percent pay increase.
So in Astoria, they reward a guy determined by a jury to have engaged in fraud. That's just how they roll. Nepotism, anyone?
Moving further east up the Columbia River, our governess from Minnesota has decided, as Democratics almost always do, that the people of Cascade Locks who want Nestle Corp to build a $50 million plant there to bottle water from Oxbow Spring don't actually know what's best for them. So after a long and involved process to transfer rights to the water from Oxbow, which is currently used in a salmon hatchery to some extent, in exchange for rights to some of the water from the wells at Cascade Locks, the governess has decided that the transfers should not take place.
It's trendy to hate on Nestle, among the Left.