Four women with a shared passion are a tough force to stop — or slow down.

The quartet is Kathleen Chaves, Kaylin Chaves, Mary Tomlinson (all of Baker City) and Dr. Karen Harris (an obstetrician/gynecologist from Ashland).

They are coming together to offer a weekend conference called ChoiceShops — “Harvesting the Garden of Our Spirit.”

The workshop is three days: 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sept. 10; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 11 (lunch included); and 9 a.m. to noon Sept. 12.

The event will take place at Lazy JW Ranch in North Powder (accommodations are up to the participants).

Enrollment is $200. Register by e-mailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or calling 541-523-1029.

The ChoiceShops brochure is imprinted with this message: “Gift yourself the time to pause and restore your healthy, playful and creative energies.”

“There are people who tell us every day they would have no place to live if it wasn’t for rural development,” Walker said during a stop Tuesday at Elkhorn Village senior apartments in Baker City.

She said the apartments rent for around $510 a month, but for some seniors citizens, that would take their entire Social Security check, which in some cases is their only source of income.

For housing projects subsidized by rural development, the rent is on a sliding scale designed to limit rent to no more than 30 percent of a resident’s income, said Mark Green, project manager for Chrisman Development, which owns the Elkhorn Village apartments.

That formula reduces rents to around $200 per month for some of the senior citizens living in Elkhorn Village, Green said.

Billy Hermann, an employee at Kicks Sports Wear, said it was a thrill unpacking the first 60 boxes of Nike women’s running shoes that arrived shortly before noon Monday.

Ryan Chaves, who owns Kicks Sports Wear with his wife, Kaylin, said it took almost two years of negotiations to convince Nike officials to approve a retail outlet in Baker City’s downtown historic district.

Typically, Nike requires a company to show it can sell a minimum of $1 million a  year in Nike shoes, apparel and other items as a prerequisite for being awarded a retail sales agreement with the company.

Enough talking, already — it’s time to take action to create profitable markets for logs and value-added wood products from private forests in Baker County and across Northeastern Oregon.

That message resonated among members of the Forest Industry Roundtable meeting July 23 in Baker City.

Currently there’s little demand for saw logs and prices are at or below the cost of producing and harvesting timber, and roundtable members agreed that situation is likely to continue for some time, with the state, national and world economies struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Baker-area woodland owners Lyle Defrees and Kerry Borgen, and other members of the roundtable, said the housing and construction industries are not likely to rebound until late 2011 or 2012, and it could be a while after that before wholesale log prices rise enough for woodland owners to make a profit.

LaVonne Yeoumans, who owns Kona Kolors indoor tanning salon in Baker City, said she’s concerned that the tanning tax, which took effect on July 1, will affect her  business.

“It bothers me as a small business owner,” she said. “I can’t afford to just absorb the cost and have to raise prices.”

The 10-percent tax on indoor tanning is part of the federal healthcare reform law.

Yeoumans said her clients understand that she didn’t raise the cost of their tanning sessions on her own volition.

“My clients have been very good at understanding that the government is raising the price, not me,” she said.

To compensate for the extra cost, she said she has been offering an extra tan for people purchasing larger packages, and a free sample of lotion for those purchasing smaller packages.

Portland director Brett Eichenberger has used Baker City in several of his films. The most recent was a production called “What It Means To Be A Cowboy” and featured local carriage driver Ron Colton.

Another of Eichenberger’s films, called “Leeward Tide,” was filmed at the Leo Adler House on Main Street.

“Leeward Tide” is a turn-of-the-century set independent film which played at several film festivals and won several awards around the world.

“One reason we come to the area is that the people have been very welcoming. This has been our home-away-from-home,” Eichenberger said.

Which is why he chose to film his next production, “Light of Mine,” in Baker City and utilize many local stores as a backdrop.

The story is about a photographer who, after he begins to lose his sight, decides to take one last trip to Yellowstone National Forest.

Jill Remensnyder, also of Portland and the film’s producer and writer, said the story is about a race against time for the photographer and was inspired by thousands of jobs lost during the recession.

After looking at motels along the Oregon Coast, in Seattle and Boise, the Singh family of Omak, Wash., chose to buy the Eldorado and Rodeway Inn motels in Baker City.

“I like the potential of the ones in Baker City the best,” said Rajbir Singh, who bought the two motels along with his brother, Sukhvinder Singh, and another relative, Majit Singh, for $1.8 million on June 21.

The lodging businesses were previously owned by the Bootsma family of Baker City.

Singh said Baker City’s location, along Interstate 84 between the Elkhorn and Wallowa mountains, along with the town’s authentic western ambience, appeals to him. The Western heritage was also one of the things that attracted the Singh family to invest in Omak, a Northern Washington town that’s home of the Omak Stampede Rodeo and World Famous Suicide Race.

“I like small towns. It is more comfortable to be in small towns,” Rajbir Singh said.

Singh said he and his Seattle Realtor were acquainted with the Bootsma family, who sought to sell the motels after the death of John Bootsma in January.

It took a crew of nine and a 35-ton crane to lift an 8,200-pound generator into place to provide backup power for a third-floor data center under construction at the 10-story Baker Tower building in downtown Baker City.

Getting the generator in place Tuesday  was no easy task, said Mike Jenson, who owns Michael E. Jenson Construction of Baker City and is foreman for the data center project.

To support the generator, workers welded a frame of steel I-beams.

The low-boy truck from Redmond Trucking used to haul the generator to Baker City was too wide to fit in the alley behind Baker Tower, where electrical wires had been moved to accommodate the crane.

So the generator was lifted first off the low-boy and onto a smaller truck that fit in the alley.

Even after all that, more electrical wires crossing the alley had to be moved to clear a safe path for the crane.

Richard Chaves and his partners are investing $1 million to launch Synergy Data Center and Services in the historic Baker Tower building, with hopes of eventually bringing 100 high-tech jobs to Baker City.

Chaves said three Oregon companies, including his own, Chaves Consulting of Baker City, along with Arikkan Inc. of Salem, and Sace Inc. of Bend, are forming Synergy Data Center and Services (Synergy DCS).

Through Synergy DCS, the partners will be investing about $1 million in Phase I of the project, which involves installing 42 racks, each with 36 computer servers, and related equipment needed to get the data center up and running on the third floor of the Baker Tower.

The 10-story structure, built in 1929 at the corner of Main and Auburn and known originally as the Hotel Baker, is the tallest building east of the Cascades.

By ED MERRIMAN

Baker City Herald

In small towns across America, changes in the global political climate and economy are spurring demand for all manner of local products, according to “angel investors” who spoke at the June Pubtalk earlier this month in Baker City.

“We’ve had the worst recession since the 1980s, and there’s been a structured shift in the economy,” said Wayne Embree, one of three investors who participated in the panel discussion at Quail Ridge Golf Course.

“Large companies laid off a lot of people who will never go back, but a lot of jobs sent overseas are coming back. It has to do with changing ideas about buying local, national pride and things like that. This is the perfect time to be an entrepreneur,” Embree said.

Joining Embree, who’s the founder and managing partner in Reference Capital and Cascadia partners, were: Jim Noonan, managing director of R4 Funding LLC and president of Pivot Point Capital Corp.; and Linda Weston, who started the Portland Power women’s professional basketball team in 1996 and has been president and executive director of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network since 1999.

“You can build world-class companies anywhere,” Embree said. “The key is understanding what customers want and how to get it to them. We work with people who have an idea, but don’t have the money, experience or know-how to run a successful company.”