Mobile Army

[May 23rd, 2007] Wanted: a 7- to 12-acre plot of land in the Portland area for a drug treatment facility that could help as many as 125 men.

Reply to Salvation Army, which wants the space as part of a major set of moves it's planning in the Portland area.

The Army's current area rehab center is above its 6,650-square-foot Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard store and serves 78 men. (The rehab center, which has been at its current site since 1952, is for men only. There is a regional rehab center for women in Seattle.)

Major Michael Dossey at the Army's headquarters in Long Beach, Calif., says the Christian organization wants more rehab space in Portland but can't expand at MLK or move to other facilities because they're all too run-down for repair.

The Army's Beaverton store, for example, has had stopped and overflowing toilets. And the bathroom in the Army's MLK site overflowed late last year and sewage spilled onto the showroom floor, requiring a major cleanup and new carpet.

"There's potential for it to leak into the store," says Major Michael Zielinski, the Army's Portland-area manager. (Zielinski is the subject of complaints from several ex-store managers that he was an abusive boss. See "An Army of Complaints," WW, May 2, 2007.)

If the Army can overcome the challenges of finding a neighborhood with that big a plot of land—and one that won't object to a drug treatment facility—then officials say they could help 125 men versus the 78 they help now.

The current rehab center above the MLK site is the Army's only rehab site in the Portland area, which includes Albany and Salem.

"Portland is one of the three cities on our priority list in the next five years that will be moving to a new facility," Dossey said. The other two cities are San Francisco and San Diego.

Dossey says the Army's dream replacement would have a 60,000-square-foot warehouse with an adjacent 20,000-square-foot store. He says other changes are planned for Portland-area buildings, given that several have ongoing maintenance problems with elevators and stairs.

The Beaverton store will relocate to a new space that will specialize in antiques and higher-quality merchandise.

And the Army also plans to lease an old Albertson's store at 2450 NE Hogan Road in Gresham as a replacement for its current store on Southeast Powell Boulevard.