WINNERS 1. The Friends of Columbia Gorge got a huge boost last week when the Columbia River Gorge Commission halted construction of a house on a bluff across the river from Multnomah Falls. The land-use watchdog group notified Skamania County officials more than a year ago that plans for the house seemed to violate rules regulating scenic obstructions. 2. About to lose a key tenant from his 1000 Broadway Building, developer Tom Moyer found a way to make Paine Webber happy and boost his latest project in the process. Moyer last week told The Business Journal that he signed the stock brokerage firm as the first tenant of Fox Tower, his new office high-rise under construction just down the road. 3. The Washington Nurses Association won big last week when 62 percent of the nurses at the Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver voted to unionize.

LOSERS 1. It looks as if the "Boys Next Door" got some help from a girl. Celia Nive Reynolds, 18, was arrested and charged with driving the getaway car in one of the robberies allegedly committed by her fellow Grant High School chums Tom Curtis and Ethan Thrower. 2. U.S. District Judge Malcolm Marsh delivered bad news to Oregon union trusts last week, dismissing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeking compensation from tobacco companies. Lawyers for the trusts wanted cigarette makers to cover the cost of treating union members' smoking-related injuries. Marsh, however, said such legal claims had to come from the workers themselves. 3. The British thought they'd pulled a fast one on us when they dumped the Geri-less Spice Girls on our shores for a tour that stopped in Portland Sunday. But the Rose City countered this week by sending the Dandy Warhols and their tired sexual chicanery to the U.K.; the Brits even put our scantily clad band on the cover of their major music weekly, Melody Maker.

 

originally published August 12, 1998