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Back before the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission made Pappy Van Winkle bourbon a household name and got enmeshed in the tangled relationship between Secretary of State Shemia Fagan and the troubled cannabis firm La Mota, there was the issue of the agency’s 2022 purchase of some very expensive land in Canby for a new warehouse and headquarters building.
Right now, virtually all of the liquor sold in Oregon passes through the OLCC’s ancient warehouse in Milwaukie. It’s far from interstate highways and outmoded. Agency officials, led by then-distilled spirits manager Chris Mayton, made the case that the current warehouse would hamstring future growth.
But between the commission greenlighting a new home and the agency’s purchase of a building site, prices skyrocketed—and the OLCC paid multiples of what it had originally budgeted and about twice the appraised value for 33 acres in Canby.
Mayton told WW in December (prior to the Pappy scandal) that the benefits of a larger, better located and more sophisticated warehouse would more than compensate for the high price.
“Looking at the land vacancy rate, the total project, and what it means to the state of Oregon, it was absolutely a good business decision,” he said then.
Mayton is a long gone, part of the unresolved Pappy scandal in which he and other senior OLCC employees admitted in an internal investigation that they’d diverted hard-to-find, high-end whiskey for their own purchase or for purchase by agency favorites. (An Oregon Department of Justice investigation is pending.)
But questions linger over the purchase of the new headquarters. After reviewing the transaction, members of the Public Lands Advisory Committee, including chairman John Brown, a Eugene commercial realtor, and state Sen. Mark Meek (D-Gladstone), a residential realtor, both used the same word: “egregious.”
Buried deep in a proposed 124-page amendment to an end-of-session appropriations bill, Senate Bill 5506, is a sign that lawmakers want to know more about the Canby purchase. It allocates $300,000 for a fresh look at the numbers via “an independent audit of land purchases by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission from fiscal years 2019 through 2023.”
The Canby transaction was by far the agency’s biggest in that time frame.
SB 5506 gets a hearing today in front of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, which will also consider as part of the same amendment a far larger investment—$16.5 million—in upgrading the agency’s ancient technology systems.