This is one of the gates of Lacamas Laboratories on Industrial Way, a new Albany industry I found only by chance on Friday.
An item in City Manager Peter Troedsson’s Friday report to the Albany City Council prompted me to take an evening bike ride to Industrial Way, where I discovered something I did not know.
Troedsson told the council the city’s street maintenance team had used its paving machine to put two patches on a section of Industrial Way between Queen and 13th avenues.
The asphalt there had failed completely, and this was a temporary fix. Troedsson explained:
“While this patch will not address the underlying failed conditions of the street structure, it will hopefully provide a better driving surface and hold together some of the remaining street until it can be rebuilt. The Street Maintenance team performs this type of interim maintenance on several small areas of local streets each summer. The complaint list is long and well exceeds what we have funding for, but we prioritize some of the worst sections to provide some minor improvement every year.”
I’ve reported on similar fixes before, and I wanted to look at this one.
The section of street in question lies between the Republic Services recycling depot on one side and the old W.R. Grace chemical plant, the former Synthetek, on the other.
W.R. Grace shut down its Albany plant in December 2023, with the loss of 95 jobs. I had not been in this industrial section of town for a while, and I was surprised that that there was a new name on the plant: Lacamas Laboratories Inc.
Turns out that this Portland company bought the Albany plant in December. An industry publication reported the sale, and you can read the story here.
As for Lacamas Laboratories, it has a website that explains what it does, though to a non-chemist like me the descriptions might as well be in Greek.
The sales price of the plant was not reported. But the Linn County assessor shows the market value of the main plant to be more than $14 million.
Among the things you learn from the Lacamas website is that in 2023 the company was awarded an $86 million Defense Department contract to develop a domestic production capability for certain chemicals needed by defense industries.
I went to Industrial Way to look at an asphalt patch. Turns out there was something even more interesting to see. (hh)
The driving lanes of a section of Industrial Way now are smooth, the side lanes not so much.
Was only the traveled portion repaved? A half job well done is a waste of time labor and dollars. Why wasn’t the entire width done?
Re-read paragraph 4 of story. Lays it out in spades…
I note their website indicates rail connections in Portland for product shipping. If they haven’t already done so, possibly an opportunity for the county inter-modal hub to contact them…
I didn’t know Coach K had started up inter-modal hub.
Isn’t it W.R. Grace? At least it was in the 80s when I worked in the grass seed industry.
Yes, thanks for the correction. I fixed it in the text.
I think when companies have a lot of trucks going in and out of the road close to the entry of their business they should pay a large percentage of the cost for upkeep of it.
Looking at the 2023-2025 budget it appears that $18 million rolled over from the previous biennial budget. Am I reading this correctly? If Albany needs $9-11 million to fix all of our streets that would cover it and then some. With about 240 miles of paved roads and $500k per mile to repave, on the high side, our current street budget would just about repave all streets every 10-12 years. But the City is raising “fees” and still considering a gas tax to cover these costs? With a biennial budget of around $400 million dollars, you would think enough money has been taken out of Albany citizens pockets to maintain our infrastructure.