As many as 14 employees of Hambleton Lumber Co., LLC in Washougal could be out of work as a result of the failure to agree on a purchase and lease deal for 10.5 acres owned by the family-owned firm.
According to Mike Reinhart, a consultant negotiating the deal for Hambleton, the Port of Camas-Washougal backed-out of the $2 million purchase only three days before a Dec. 31 deadline imposed by the company’s Texas-based lender, which bought Hambleton’s debt in the wake of last year’s failure of the Bank of Clark County.
As a result, Reinhart said, the company is scrambling to find private investors to keep the lender from seizing the property, putting as many as 16 employees at Hambleton’s kiln operations in Washougal out of work.
Scot Walstra, the Port’s development director, confirmed the lease and purchase deal fell through last month, adding that an agreement was contingent on approval by its elected three-member board of commissioners after a period of public review.
According to Reinhart, the deal began to flounder during a Dec. 21 meeting when Commissioner Bill Ward expressed concerns about possible negative environmental impacts on the property, the site of a kiln for drying wood for use in road and bridge construction.
“Everyone had concerns about the remediation that would be required,” Ward said, referring to outgoing commissioners Alan Hargrave and Jim Carroll, who lost their reelection bids last year.
The property, located in the East Industrial Park in Washougal, has already cleared a Level 1 environmental assessment, which includes a check for underground storage tanks and petroleum contamination, according to Walstra.
Reinhart said Hargrave and Carroll supported the purchase, leaving only Ward ultimately opposing a $2 million transaction with $15,000 in monthly lease payments to the Port from Hambleton for five years. “It really was a good deal for the Port,” Reinhart said.
Hargrave and Carroll did not return calls regarding their role in the Hambleton negotiations.
The Port, emerging from a lengthy arbitration process with Riverwalk on the Columbia LLC over a failed $350 million mixed-use development project, hoped to turn the page on a troubled year with two new board members, Mark Lampton and Bill Macrae-Smith, both sworn-in Monday.
In the end, Walstra conceded that the impending arrival of newly-elected commissioners not directly involved with negotiations and a tight public hearing schedule around last month’s holidays may have ultimately doomed the purchase and lease deal – for now, at least.
“There was a strong feeling among the commission to get more time to close the deal,” Walstra said.
With a few weeks worth of reprieve from their lender, Hambleton has a shrinking window of opportunity to make a deal to save both the property and the livelihoods of more than a dozen workers.
However, a final agreement with the Port was unlikely, according to Reinhart. “It’s a shame because they said they were in it for economic development,” he said of the Port. “And this purchase was an ideal way to get exactly that.”
In a visit this week, business seemed to be picking up at Hambleton’s separate riverfront saw mill property, with the ringing sound of cut lumber echoing through the air at the end of Washougal’s A Street. According to Reinhart, operations there are expected to continue, regardless of the fate of Hambleton’s East Industrial Park property.
Meanwhile, in the saw mill’s small office, workers and staff still filed in and out, each time passing a dry-erase board with this perhaps cruelly-ironic message, given the recent failure of the Port deal:
“He who hesitates is lost,” it read.
