Think Out Loud

Why a restaurant owner in The Dalles thinks revitalizing downtown will boost business and help struggling workers

By Sheraz Sadiq (OPB)
Dec. 12, 2022 6:26 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, Dec. 13

Todd Carpenter is the owner of Last Stop Saloon, a restaurant in the downtown business district of The Dalles. He is also working with the city to redevelop three properties, including a former bowling alley which is being converted into a 12,000 square-foot outdoor space for live music and other events.

Todd Carpenter is the owner of Last Stop Saloon, a restaurant in the downtown business district of The Dalles. He is also working with the city to redevelop three properties, including a former bowling alley which is being converted into a 12,000 square-foot outdoor space for live music and other events.

Sheraz Sadiq / OPB

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Todd Carpenter is the owner of The Last Stop Saloon, a bar and restaurant in The Dalles that dates back to the 1880s. He also owns two other taverns in Beaverton and Portland. He and his partner were drawn to The Dalles nearly six years ago by its “300 days of sunshine,” a community that rallies together and the proximity to myriad outdoor recreational opportunities. But one thing he doesn’t care for is the low pay service sector workers make, along with a lack of affordable housing, affordable daycare and medical services such as vision and dental care. So Carpenter now offers his staff a minimum salary of $17.25 an hour and provides paid time off. He also entered into an agreement with The Dalles to redevelop three downtown properties, including an outdoor event space scheduled to open in the spring. He also plans to refurbish two floors above the dining space in The Last Stop Saloon to convert them into rental units for service sector workers.

But Carpenter’s business decisions have not been without controversy. Last June, Oregon OSHA issued Carpenter a nearly $9,000 citation for his decision to allow indoor dining in violation of a public health order to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Wasco County. Carpenter joins us to share what the experience has taught him and why he thinks businesses in The Dalles need to play a greater role in making it a place where workers can afford to live and raise their families.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: As you may have heard, we are coming to you all this week from The Dalles. We’re going to start today with a conversation about the role that businesses could play in addressing seemingly intractable issues, like a lack of affordable or workforce housing. That’s part of what we talked about yesterday in a wide ranging interview with Todd Carpenter. He owns the Last Stop Saloon, a bar and restaurant in The Dalles that dates back to the 1880′s, but before we got to housing or covid shutdowns or his plans for the future, we started in the basement with some history. Todd was eager to show us some photographs in his office.

Todd Carpenter: So this was the original Prints & Niche Undertaking, Carpet, and Furniture Store.

Miller: Undertaking … is that what it sounds like?

Carpenter: Yeah. Undertaking, carpets, and furniture. [laughter]

Miller: So all your needs … [chuckles]

Carpenter: All your needs, right there.

Miller: From flooring to furniture to death?

Carpenter: Correct. And that was it.

Miller: So that’s where we are right now?

Carpenter: No, that’s what I’m going to show you next door. In the fifties, it was redeveloped into the recreation center, which was the bowling alley. They basically took all the street frontage down here and created a bowling alley. That’s the last building we’re doing right now, for the indoor outdoor music area.

Miller: So there used to be a hotel above where we are right now?

Carpenter: Yep.

Miller: What else have you been able to learn about the history of this building?

Carpenter: It was a brothel up until the mid to late fifties.

Miller: That’s pretty late. I think of brothels as 19th century times. In the 1960′s, there was a brothel above us?

Carpenter: Yeah, 1950′s.

Miller: 1950′s, okay.

Carpenter: There’s an article written in town about a local D.A. who came from Portland and basically wiped out 40 brothels in town in the mid fifties. They basically rounded them all up, kicked them all out. They moved over across the bridge to Dallesport and operated there for a few years. Then they closed them down there, too. But yeah, this place had the most bars back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and the most brothels, apparently, in the northwest.

Miller: After showing us those historical photographs in the basement, Todd took us upstairs to see his restaurant. It used to be called The Vault, a reference to its original life as a bank. When Todd and his partner bought it in 2018, it was in rough shape.

Carpenter: It had 8ft ceilings, it was the worst bar in town. It had a reputation for having fights and everything pretty much every weekend. When I took it over as The Vault, we had five incidents in six weeks.

Miller: What were you thinking?

Carpenter: ‘We’re gonna tear it down, We’re gonna just redo everything.’ We had this idea of doing a hotel in a restaurant, restaurant downstairs, hotel above. So anyways, we gutted it, cleaned it all up, did plumbing, electric, redid the kitchen, did everything. Bigger project than I’d probably ever taken on. We shut it down in late September of 2018, did all the work. It took us about four months. We opened it in January of 2019, and then operated until COVID happened.

Miller: You got, like, 14 months.

Carpenter: Yeah, and then shut down obviously, which shocked me. Still, we were talking about doing the hotel upstairs during COVID. During the second shutdown of COVID what we learned, which we didn’t really know was … You know as a business owner, you’re not paying your employees much, right? You’re paying them rural minimum wage, but what we learned is there’s just a lot of low access to healthcare, low access to childcare, especially nights and weekends. There are transportation issues with workers to and from work, especially nights and weekends. Also, housing. Housing prices are going up here, just like they are, or they were, in Portland. When we shut down the second time, we had all these single moms, single dads, that were working day jobs, and they were working night jobs to make ends meet.

We learned all these things through interviews with them after I saw an employee out on the back porch early in the morning, six o’clock in the morning, just hanging out. I was like, ‘what’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘well you guys have been so good trying to keep us employed with short hours, but I got kicked out of my room.’ They don’t have a contract, they’re living with somebody, renting a room, and things got dicey. They got kicked out, and he was living on the streets.

Carla and I said, ‘hey, we need to interview all our employees across the businesses and see what’s going on.’ What we found out is all those access issues up here were compounded by the lack of jobs. We didn’t have Uber up here, we didn’t have DoorDash, we didn’t have anything they could go do.

Miller: You have places in Beaverton and Southwest Portland as well, other venues or bars or restaurants; you’re saying the experience for your employees in the Portland metro area was really different than the experience of employees here.

Carpenter: Totally different, 100% different, yeah. It was heartbreaking. It was just heartbreaking, and it was hard to learn that stuff and hear that stuff, so we changed. We made some decisions to focus on the community up here and figure out how to work with other businesses on developing some of those things. We raised wages here. At Last Stop, we worked with the community on a Little Music City shuttle service; we started with a route and then we added door to door service, which gave us transportation to and from workers’ homes, because it operated on nights.

Miller: Wait, you banded together with other venues to actually pay for transportation for employees?

Carpenter: Yeah, so we first operated as a hotel to hotel, to venue to venue system that was free to customers.

Miller: So people could drink, eat, and go back to their hotel for free and safely, because there isn’t Uber here, or there is but it’s too expensive?

Carpenter: Yeah, safely. There wasn’t Uber here when we first started this.

Miller: Was it hard for you to convince other business owners to take on another expense?

Carpenter: No, not really. I mean, the community has a heart for people, it really does. It’s crazy how they just show up. You have an idea and you go, ‘hey, this is affecting abc’ and honestly, as you think about the low access for service industry workers, and you talk about that to businesses, other businesses, and hotels and stuff like that, they want to pitch in, and they want to help. So the cost at first was just to develop a system and kind of prove that it works, and then add on the door-to-door service so that our employees could benefit from that as well.

Miller: So it wasn’t just a way to boost business or help customers, but it also could help the people making your businesses possible?

Carpenter: Yeah, but easier to sell to other businesses and hotels as a customer service.

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Miller: And that’s how it started.

Carpenter: That’s how it started, but the idea in our heads was always to make it a door-to-door service not only for customers but for our employees, too.

Miller: How many of your employees in general even live within sort of an Uber distance? By which I mean, live in town?

Carpenter: Yeah, so that’s the other issue, right? As they move out, as the housing prices go up, they look for out of town places to live, and then their access to those services becomes worse, right? So then they start going ‘well, why am I moving to Dufur or Wishram or Golden Dale Oregon when I could move to a Portland metro area, or another metro area that gives me better access to services, takes care of my kids, I got reliable Trimet transportation services, all that kind of stuff. I should be looking outside the gorge!’

Our pitch, the business’ pitch, to whoever would listen, was, ‘look, if we can take care of our employees, take care of them from a wage standpoint, from transportation, from childcare, and if we can meet these needs, and we can talk to the city about helping us meet these needs, then we can not only retain the workers here in town, because have a great outdoor livability area, sports everything. The river’s two blocks, the Columbia River, the Deschutes is 20 minutes that way. You’ve got backpacking, hiking, camping, motorcycles, everything. It’s a great place to live and stay here. If we can solve all these issues, we can maybe also attract new workers into town; a rising tide lifts all boats, right? Lifts all businesses.

Miller: That’s the hope, because sometimes the rising tide kicks people out.

Carpenter: It could sink us. My pitch since I got here is I don’t want to just be hyper-focused on my business, and what our business is, and what we’re going to do for ourselves and our profitability. We want to help the community grow, because if we can help, if everybody can get on and have events together and do things together and take care of these needs, then it’s gonna be better for the community as a whole.

Miller: I want to hear more about these plans, but I want to go back to that second shutdown from Covid. Some folks listening maybe aware of this, probably many aren’t, that you took a pretty public stance. I think it was partly because of what you heard from your employees, and seeing one of your employees who didn’t have a home and was outside on your stoop at six in the morning, but you basically went against the governor’s second shutdown order. It wasn’t like you were secretive about this; you wrote an op ed in the local paper. For people who didn’t see that, what was your argument? And what did you do?

Carpenter: Just that we were trying to take care of our employees, we were listening. First of all, Carla doesn’t own this business with me. The business is under my name only, but we didn’t do that in Beaverton, and we didn’t do it in our Portland location because, again, they didn’t need it. I was willing to take the risk here, with all the safety measures that we had done in the first shutdown, keep those and even do a better job.

We brought in HEPA filters and we changed the circulation of everything. I worked for the hospital, so I saw what they were doing to see patients. Everybody was masked. We did all those things. We spaced everything out and we made sure that it was an environment where we could open safely, and then I asked them, do they want to do it? It’s a risk. It’s a risk for me. It’s a risk for them.

Miller: Meaning employees, your staff?

Carpenter: Yeah, they could lose their OLCC License. Likely they’re not going to, they’re probably going to come after me, but it could happen.

Miller: What did they say?

Carpenter: They said yes. I mean, you can interview any of them that were here during this, and a lot of them were; they’re appreciative that we opened. Actually, I was down here to clean the snow off, when it actually snowed on Christmas in 2020, on December 25th, and I was down here shoveling snow, and one of my workers stopped by and said ‘can we open today?’ And I was like, ‘if you guys want to, I’m totally fine with that.’

We didn’t make any money during 2020 or 2021, and we’re barely making money in 2022. The easiest option for me would be to close everything up, pay my mortgage, and walk, just say ‘see ya.’ There’s a couple places that did that, and there was a group of businesses that wanted to do it, but my situation was a little different because I have a day job and this isn’t my livelihood, it was their livelihood. We wanted to do it if they wanted to do it, we wanted to do it for them, and we just decided that it was worth it.

Miller: And am I right that you were assessed a fine from OSHA of $9,000?

Carpenter: $9,000. Yeah.

Miller: And that’s still in an appeal limbo?

Carpenter: Yeah, we’re in the appeal process. The thing that I didn’t say is, they’re working a full time job during the day, so they’re making minimum wage, 12 bucks an hour, and they’re working a night job to make ends meet. They’re single moms, single dads, and it’s 12 bucks an hour, 40 hours a week, it’s not much. When they lost the nighttime job, or it got reduced, I think we were doing eight hours a day a week for everybody, basically to give everybody a little bit, they couldn’t make ends meet. They were struggling, couch surfing at best and homeless at worst. They appreciated it, and the community actually rallied around them and took care of them, most of them, and really helped them.

Miller: That was two years ago or something, the years are adding up now. Let’s zoom forward, because you’ve mentioned now that your initial plan, when you took over this place, was to have the bar and restaurant where we are right now, that’s in operation, and above us to have a hotel. My understanding is that the hotel plan has morphed.

Carpenter: Yeah, it’s gone.

Miller: Why?

Carpenter: (choked up) Again, sorry.

Miller: I recognize this is an emotional thing.

Carpenter: Yeah. The whole thing is, you know? I’m sorry.

Miller: It’s alright.

Carpenter: Again, so, those five things called the We Care Program, I can’t think of the acronym right now off the top of my head, but wages, the benefits, all that stuff, part of that’s the housing thing. It was kind of interesting. I worked with the county. So this whole pitch that I just told you about the lack of services, I also talked to whoever would listen about it during that time. I talked to the city council, the mayor, PUD., and out of the blue, I was talking to Carla one morning.

Miller: That’s your wife?

Carpenter: My girlfriend, my partner of a long time. She’s basically my wife. I was talking to her one morning, and we had already decided we’re not going to do the hotel, we’re going to do housing for employees. So service industry housing, meaning anybody in a bar, restaurant, retail space, whoever, can live there, as long as we keep the price down.

For construction, we would try to make it as equitable for those people as we could, and that we would get out of the hotel business and just make it downtown living in this area, because the employees want to be part of the community, they want to be in town. As everything develops, developers are going to get the most bang for their buck, and we want to help the community, so we switched from hotel to apartments. That’s the plan right now.

My architectural guy did nine units upstairs, so it’ll be nine units, and we’re going to do it for whatever price we can do it, and hopefully be as low as we can to make taxes and all that kind of stuff, because as soon as we do that, we were on a new tax roll, right? But then I talked to the county and the city and everybody else, and then the county called me one day and said, ‘Hey Todd, we really like your whole pitch, how can we help?’ He said, ‘we’ve got this grant program that we just got awarded.’ I don’t remember how much, it was $650,000 or something like that. He said it’s an environmental grant, like they’ll take care of hazardous waste. He wasn’t sure what would all fit into it. But he said, ‘how can we help?’ I said, ‘well, what would really help is kick starting the architectural program on this.’ And he talked to the board, came back, and said, ‘we can do that for the hazardous waste identification, and I think we can do the architectural as well. I’m going to have you talk to the grant people and see if we can swing that.’

That was a big deal, and they did it. I was talking to grant guys, and asked ‘how many buildings could you do this for downtown?’ Because we have generational properties downtown, passed down from the 1840′s, passed down to their families, and the owner may own a property and have a use downtown or on the main street, but not have anything developed upstairs, and don’t know how to develop it, never been in the business, don’t understand it. I said, ‘boy, if we could create a blueprint and get the city and the county and everybody involved in this whole process, maybe we could have a bunch of homes downtown that we could do this for.’

I talked to the city about it, and the planning director at that time said, ‘yeah, this is a great idea.’ She actually came up with a grant package for livability downtown, and they’re running that right now. They approved it.

Miller: Are there, as you said, generational building owners downtown or near here who are interested in this?

Carpenter: Oh yeah. They had an overwhelming number of applications, from what I understand. The grant package is really great; depending on how many units you’re going to do upstairs, it’s a $50,000 grant all the way up to, I think, a $750,000 or $800,000 grant package. For instance, if we could qualify for $750,000, then my upstairs, let’s say it’s 1.5 million and I’m only financing $750,000, then that brings my rent price way down, right? So I can afford to rent for a reasonable rate.

Although the city didn’t tie any urban renewal and didn’t tie any restrictions to that money, my hope is that we can talk to generational owners and say, ‘hey, this creates a great opportunity for the community’ because again, the community shows up for things in The Dalles, because of the history and their love of the community and what’s happened in their family. My hope is that they can use the money, have a plan, and have someone to help them then create an environment ...

Miller: Where they’re helping someone else, as opposed to using this grant money for some kind of luxury apartments or condos?

Carpenter: To get ahead, yeah, a second home for them or whatever in Palm Springs.

Miller: Is Hood River an example of something you’d like to avoid? When I say that, I’m thinking about it as a very expensive vacation and second homeland, or tourist land, where it’s hard to imagine the service sector being able to afford a rental, let alone buying a house in Hood River.

Carpenter: Especially with $12.75 an hour minimum wages. I mean, it’s super low. Yeah, my hope is that the city leaders can listen to and work with the business owners to mitigate that problem, and The Dalles could be different from anywhere else. It can not only be 300 days of sunshine, a great destination, but it also can be something great for the community and for our workers that we rely on.

Miller: Todd Carpenter is the owner of The Last Stop Saloon. We talked yesterday afternoon.

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