Little Adair Village could offer Corvallis some outsized housing relief in the future. An infrastructure bill that just cleared committee in the Oregon House could mean adding another thousand homes to the small town that’s about twenty minutes from downtown Corvallis.
HB 3939A passed out of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness on Wednesday. If ultimately approved, it would spur workforce housing in small cities.
Adair Village, just north of Corvallis, was built by the War Department in 1941 and viewed by State Rep, Sarah Finger McDonald as an ideal candidate for the workforce housing envisioned.
But the current wastewater infrastructure – left by the military nearly 70 years ago – has been the only barrier to building what could a new 1,000 homes there.
The proposed legislation is a funding request that originally came from Finger McDonald as a standalone bill, before being incorporated into a broader bipartisan workforce housing package by Rep. Lucetta Elmer, R-McMinnville.
“All of Oregon needs more housing and these homes are in my district. They feed into the Corvallis School District and will give OSU and Good Samaritan another tool to help recruit employees. The homes will be in the workforce housing price range, allowing access to affordable options for community members. It’s a win for everyone,” said Rep. Finger McDonald.
“I am thrilled to be bringing this commonsense legislation forward which directly funds desperately needed, shovel-ready infrastructure projects to house our workforce. This legislation is modeled after House Bill 4134 which successfully passed and was signed into law during the 2024 Legislative Session,” said Elmer. “I am a firm believer that our publicly invested dollars go much further when attached to a commitment from private investment.”
Attention Wheeled Angels of Culinary Variety
Food trucks are expanding in Corvallis, or that’s the hope anyhow. Prior ordinances kept them downtown, but the City Council has changed those, and now some city staffer has issued a press release on the whole thing.
We suspect they, like us, would like to see new food in new places.
The City Council’s action came on January 21, 2025, following an extensive update process led by the Corvallis-Benton County Economic Development Office in partnership with the Corvallis Fire Department, City of Corvallis Community Development Department, Benton County Health Department, staff and small business operators.
Like we said, the new regulations expand the area where food trucks can operate. Formerly, these businesses were confined to the downtown area. Now, food trucks will be eligible to operate in several different commercial mixed-use zones, as well as on OSU’s. The new regulations also pave the way for food truck pods – defined as 5 or more food trucks operating in close proximity and sharing some infrastructure resources – to be located in different areas of Corvallis.
The complete application form is available on the City website: https://www.corvallisoregon.gov/ds/page/mfu-mobile-food-unit
For more information about the Mobile Food Unit program, contact Christopher Jacobs at 541-766-6339 or economic.development@corvallisoregon.gov.
Gazette-Times’ Takeover Talk
Corvallis Gazette-Times’ parent company, Lee Enterprises, has had an eventful few months. A possible takeover bid has appeared on its horizon, they were hit with a cyberattack, and just last month they settled a data privacy lawsuit.
Mostly everyone already knows about the cyberattack. Subscribers went without copies and the company has said the attack will impact their financial expectations. There has been some amount of reporting that Lee was hit with ransomware – so maybe not just an attack. In any event, the company has mostly recovered, and operations appear to be back to usual.
Fewer folks, however, were aware that Lee was being sued for violating their subscriber’s privacy. The company had been accused of selling subscriber data to Facebook in an ad targeting scheme. Lee settled the class action suit for $9.5 million about three weeks ago.
But more interesting is another prospective takeover bid.
In the last six months, billionaire David Hoffmann has bought enough Lee stock to become the company’s biggest shareholder, and he’s been putting out press releases saying he’d like to acquire the Iowa based company. He’s already scooped up fourteen other news brands – and he has been seeking to position himself as the latest savior of the local newspaper industry.
Stock Titan reports that, “Lee Enterprises (NASDAQ: LEE) has announced a one-year extension of its shareholder rights plan until March 27, 2026. This decision comes in response to The Hoffmann Family of Companies’ recent unsolicited expression of interest to acquire Lee, made public on March 20, 2025.” Hoffmann owns a little less than 10% of Lee’s stock at present.
“Local news and journalism is important to me,” Hoffmann told the Lee-owned Buffalo News in an interview. “To me, it’s part of the fabric of America. I’ve had some success in my life, so it’s something that I’d like to invest in and try to preserve, and at the same time, I think we’ll be successful from an investment point of view.”
In other interviews Hoffmann said he empowers each local newspaper group to make their own decisions, and in turn holds them responsible for their business performance. He has also said that reinvesting in newsrooms, and specifically sports coverage, is part of his business strategy.
In an Editor & Publisher piece, Bob Sillick writes, “When reports started circulating that another entrepreneur/billionaire was actively purchasing local newspapers and investing in others, many in the news industry were concerned that more newsrooms would be gutted, all in pursuit of profits over quality news coverage. There’s no need to worry. David Hoffmann, a Naples, Florida businessman and philanthropist, fully supports local news because he believes residents of those communities deserve better news coverage — especially local sports.”
Our take: Industry insiders are accustomed to the press that covers the press – yes, that’s a thing – being overly hopeful over new entrants. We think Sillick’s piece is worth a read, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Jeff Bezos once hailed as a hero to The Washington Post comes to mind. Hoffmann may mean well, we don’t really know. But the battlefield is littered with good intentions and bad outcomes.
Lee will likely take on some sort of defensive posture, their shareholders rights plan has that aspect to it. But Lee won’t be able to make the same case to stockholders as they did when Alden sought to gobble them up a few years back.
Conversely, other chains could compete with Hoffmann to acquire Lee. Nobody wants a newsroom gutting Carpenter to takeover, but they or someone else could go to war with Hoffmann.
But then, thinking back to Alden’s attempt – they walked away because of newly emerging factors in the general economy at the time. Fast forward, and one could argue the present moment seems even less certain. History could repeat itself.
By Mike Suarez
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