Oregon Business Team

Ecotrust is exploring public opinion around creating a direct-to-consumer program for fishermen much like the community supported agriculture programs that have become so successful.

With a June unemployment rate at a staggering 14.4%, the recent news that Alcan Cable in Roseburg was shutting down was another unwelcome blow to Douglas County’s economy.

A roundup of transactions, mergers and big deals of the month.

The owners of Voodoo Doughnut took their quirky product to Eugene and found immediate success, but it might be due to summer, not sugar.

The old Bright Wood lumber mill in Bend is the latest former mill to be redeveloped into something completely different. Gone are the blue-collar jobs, replaced by a fitness studio, a salon and a coffee shop. It’s the third former mill site in Bend to be reinvented in this manner, and developers and public officials are entertaining similar plans all over Oregon.

The ultimate resurrection of the historic Granada Theater in The Dalles, built in 1929 as the first place to see a talkie west of the Mississippi, has been wobbly for many years.  So after years of trying to find the right buyer for the theater, the city has bought the theater for $387,000 in a negotiated deal with a developer.

Oregon has a lot of interest in electric vehicles, but lacks enough early-stage investment.

Boardman didn’t get a prison, it lost out on a Procter & Gamble plant to Utah and the $35 million Amazon data center at the Port of Morrow has been empty and half-finished for almost a year. It’s tough times for the small town. Yet now the port is preparing a site for another data center off Tower Road, six miles west of town that’s potentially an expansion of Amazon’s port site.

As proponents of a private casino in Wood Village continue their fight to get an amendment on this fall’s ballot, video lottery retailers in Wood Village fear for their futures.

Western softwood lumber production, including 27 Oregon mills, toppled to 10.7 billion board feet in 2009, down 44.6% compared to 2005 with 19.3 billion. However, 8.7% more board feet were produced year-to-date in June than last year.