Drugs, A Dump and a “Blue” Child

[January 2nd, 2008]

Before we leapt into the new year, WW took time to catch up with the subjects of three cover stories from 2007.

Our conclusion: Closing a landfill isn’t easy, a 16-year-old Lake Oswego boy says his “talking with God” business is booming, and the hangover from our cocaine story has lasted longer than we expected.

May 23, 2007: “Blow Back”

“I’d rather read my grandmother’s MySpace page or shave my genitals with a porcupine than even consider reading this story again.”

That’s a typical example of the 21 comments from online readers about our cover story exploring Portland’s persistent cocaine habit. Now we can report three more reasons to hate the story.

Readers ripped the fact that we named names—specifically, four bars where multiple sources told us coke was about as easy to score as a cold beer.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission has since shut down three of those four. Before blaming us, know that all three had a long list of liquor-law violations going back at least six months before our story. And those violations had nothing to do with illicit drugs.

The first to get flushed was Voodoo Lounge, an upscale club at 53 NW 1st Ave. that had its liquor license yanked in July for violations dating back to January 2006. According to the OLCC, the club had a “history of serious and persistent problems,” including “physical altercations involving fighting, kicking, punching, biting and stabbing.” Messages left for former Voodoo owner Mark Byrum were returned by a former manager at the club, who says WW’ s coverage was “absolutely not” behind Voodoo’s closure. He says the club will reopen soon in Northwest Portland with a “more mature audience.”

Second to fall was H2O, a club at 204 SW Yamhill St. that catered to the rich, beautiful and tasteless. The club lost its license in August for violations dating back to February 2006. Among the violations: failing to maintain liquor liability insurance, failing to offer meals and having unlicensed servers and security guards. H2O owner Aleksander Lupekha could not be reached for comment.

Last in line was Vintage 318 at 318 SW 3rd Ave. The dance club and lounge surrendered its liquor license last month after being hit with six violations since November 2006, ranging from failure to provide meals to having unlicensed servers and maintaining “disorderly premises.” Vintage 318 owner Brandon Bond also could not be reached for comment.

The fourth bar was Matador, a hipster dive at 1967 W Burnside St. We wrote about scoring a half-gram of cocaine there within 30 minutes of walking in the door. OLCC records show Matador hasn’t had a violation since 2001, when they paid a $990 fine for having an unlicensed server.

Matador owner Casey Maxwell says the cover story brought him neither more nor less clientele than before, and it led to no apparent scrutiny by the OLCC or police. WW coverage did lead to one change at the bar—after the story was published, Maxwell placed the bar’s “Willamette Week Pick 2007” stickers on the target area of the men’s-room urinals. James Pitkin.

July 18, 2007: “Grapes of Trash”

By the end of January 2008, one of the longest-running environmental battles in the metro area will reach at least a partial conclusion.

On Jan. 15, the comment period regarding a new operating permit for Lakeside Reclamation Landfill closes. By Jan. 30, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality hopes to decide on the permit—a major source of dispute between the dump and its neighbors.

Much has happened since last summer, when WW chronicled the neighbors’ battle to close the 50-year-old dump located next to the prominent Ponzi Winery and on the banks of the Tualatin River. The landfill is just upstream from the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge.

The first big event came in August, when the Metro Council denied Lakeside’s request for an exemption from new recycling rules that require a higher percentage of dry construction waste to be recycled. Although the dump is outside the urban growth boundary and Metro’s jurisdiction, it gets the majority of its 90,000 tons of annual waste from inside Metro boundaries.

Metro allows that waste to flow into Lakeside under a contract worth about $4.2 million annually, which it can terminate if the agency determines Lakeside isn’t complying with Metro’s recycling policies.

Metro’s denial of a recycling exemption has a potentially large impact on Lakeside’s pending DEQ permit. The loss of Metro’s waste threatened the landfill’s financial viability, leading the DEQ to propose closure in July 2009. (Lakeside would prefer a July 2012 closure date. Lakeside spokesman Larry Harvey says the dump’s recycling rates are far higher than Metro claims because it runs a large composting operation).

“The big issue is when the facility will close,” says Harvey. Lakeside has been in trouble with the DEQ for years. DEQ’s Nov. 26, 2007, permit review report notes, “during the term of the current permit, DEQ compliance inspectors cited Lakeside several times for accepting prohibited waste materials.”

Some of those materials contain toxic substances, which previous DEQ reports say may have leached into groundwater. Lakeside’s neighbors argue that because the dump is unlined and has no leachate collection system, the landfill endangers them, as well as the Tualatin River.

Harvey says those fears are unfounded. He says two new reports Lakeside will soon turn over to the DEQ will “show that everything that Lakeside took in was permitted…and we’ll show that there’s no evidence of contamination beyond the landfill’s footprint.”

But Lakeside continues to run afoul of the DEQ. Most recently, on Dec. 12, the agency cited Lakeside for three violations from earlier in the fall. DEQ fined Lakeside $17,000 for accepting industrial waste in violation of its permit; having too large an uncovered “active face” of the landfill; and perhaps most importantly, being more than $1 million in arrears in a “post-closure fund” designed to cover maintenance and clean-up costs for 30 years after closure.

Harvey says Lakeside did nothing wrong and adds that the dispute over post-closure funding is simply a disagreement over the future rate of inflation.

Art Kamp, a retired chemical engineer who lives near the dump, says he and other neighbors—including one whose backyard was buried in mud from Lakeside runoff after the heavy December rains—are tired of such excuses.

“We want Lakeside closed as soon as possible, capped properly and adequately funded,” Kamp says. “We hope DEQ will do the right thing.” Nigel Jaquiss.

Aug. 22, 2007: “Blue Light Special”

Brian Scibetta, the Lake Oswego boy who says he receives messages from God, turned 16 the day “Blue Light Special” hit newsstands.

For a teenager, life since then hasn’t been entirely typical. “I was sort of like a celebrity when I first got back to school,” says Brian, an 11th grader at Portland Waldorf School.

Then again, his life has rarely been normal.

At age 7, doctors diagnosed Brian with attention deficit disorder and gave him medication that improved his concentration but took away his personality, he says. At 12, he realized he had what he calls “spiritual gifts,” including psychic powers and the ability to communicate with God.

Brian now says adults misidentified his gifts and confused them with symptoms of the medical disorder, even though a second psychologist reaffirmed the diagnosis when Brian was 15.

This is not uncommon, say believers in the New Age phenomena of “indigo children.” Psychic powers, they say, are often confused with ADD and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But children who have these “gifts” can sometimes be identified by their blue auras. (Needless to say, mainstream physicians reject these ideas.)

Since “Blue Light Special,” interest in his year-old psychic-reading business, Amore e Luce, has increased sixfold. He’s created a website, projectaskgod.com, to answer readers’ questions about life, death, sex, relationships and religion. And his mother, Carley Scibetta, has started writing a book about her family’s life, because a literary agent in California expressed interest in their story.

In November, Brian was a featured guest in the classroom of Portland State University psychology instructor John Olmsted. He also performed readings at the Body, Mind, Spirit Expo at the Oregon Convention Center, where another vendor revealed that Brian’s aura may actually be gold instead of blue.

And in February, Brian’s story will air on Seattle’s KING-TV Evening Magazine with reporter Saint Bryan, whose unique name did not escape the notice of Brian or his mother.

Brian hopes to turn his website into a book, and he’s encouraged by the interest the site has gotten so far. He wants to model the literary endeavor after PostSecret, a community art project that asks people to mail their secrets on a homemade postcard to a single person who compiles them online and into books.

The questions Brian receives are both profound and straightforward. “Will mankind ever colonize Mars?” one reader asks. “Is there a hell?” another one wants to know. “Is there anything we can do about the earth’s global climate changes spiritually?” a third reader asks.

Other questions are less serious. The hosts of the Marconi radio show on KUFO 101-FM invited Brian to their show in October and wanted to know if God sounded like the voice announcing programs on NBC. Brian didn’t disagree. He says God’s voice is powerful. But his mother compares it to James Earl Jones announcing, “This is CNN.” Beth Slovic.