Read about the progress of remodeling of the Copeland Building for Stumptown Coffee’s new headquarters on the Central Eastside Industrial Council’s website.

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Art DeMuro, Venerable’s president, has donated $2.8 million to the University of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Program. Please click here to read more about the donation that will expand this program.

By Molly Young

Stumptown Coffee Roasters will move its business operations to inner Southeast Portland, capping a year filled with questions about whether the local fixture would have a local future.

Company officials signed a 10-year lease Monday for the former MacForce space and an adjacent building near Southeast Second Avenue and Salmon Street.

Also this week, Stumptown leased a spot for its second Manhattan cafe, fueling its growth with an investment that sparked questions about its local future. Now it is eyeing other locations in Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago.

But it will anchor its business in Portland, operations director Matt Lounsbury said. Stumptown expects to move into the 37,000-square-foot space next summer. It will house its roasting, production, wholesale, training, quality control, administration and finance operations under one roof.

“A lot of people expected things to change for the worse for Stumptown, or things to take a dramatic turn,” he said. “Hopefully people will notice that we’re still here, and there’s a lot of things we’re doing.”

Stumptown will move in this summer, bringing 75 employees, about 50 of whom will work full time. It will leave behind a string of buildings on Division Street but plans to keep its Division Street cafe open for now, Lounsbury said.

Signing the lease ends a two-year search for a space big enough to fit all of Stumptown’s operations but its retail storefronts.

They found a different building a year ago, Lounsbury said, but an environmental study revealed problems that would have been too costly to fix.

Then, rumors surfaced in June that founder Dwayne Sorenson sold at least part of Stumptown to an outside investment firm investment firm. The company has remained quiet about the stake it relinquished to TSG Consumer Partners.

Amid the buzz, officials kept looking for a new Portland operations base.

“Some might call it a crazy year for us on a lot of different levels,” Lounsbury said.

When MacForce moved out of its Apple showroom in July, the property landlords targeted Stumptown, said Craig Kelly, vice president of Venerable Properties, which owns the site.

“This building had some good bones to fit their needs,” Kelly said. “We chose to work with Stumptown first before we broke up that big piece.”

Its plans to move to the central eastside arrives six weeks after another iconic Portland brand, Tazo Tea, announced it would shutter its longtime headquarters there.

The deal came together this fall, and construction crews will start retrofitting the building in the spring, said Benco Commercial Real Estate broker Kathleen Healey, who represented Stumptown.

“It’s still very much a locally focused and locally based company,” she said.

Old Town | The sign will soon read “Portland, Oregon” under a deal just okayed

By Tom Hallman, Jr.

The city of Portland took ownership of the iconic “Made in Oregon” sign Wednesday after city commissioners declared an emergency allowing them to approve a complicated deal among the city, the sign’s owner and the owner of the Old Town building under the sign.

The emergency? Starting work immediately so the lettering can be changed to read “Portland, Oregon” in time to light the sign at a ceremony the day after Thanksgiving.

Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has spent nearly a year on the project, asked fellow commissioners to declare the matter an emergency. Otherwise, he said, the City Council couldn’t vote until a Sept. 29 meeting — too late to get the sign ready for the celebration.

“It hasn’t been as easy as people would think,” Leonard said. “It wasn’t a matter of just giving the sign away and the city taking it.”

The neon sign, built by Ramsay Signs in 1941 to advertise White Satin Sugar, was changed over the years, becoming “Made in Oregon” in 1997. After the University of Oregon leased and renovated the building under the sign for a satellite campus, it sought in 2008 to change the sign to carry a big “O.” That idea died last year when Leonard and the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission objected.

Leonard began rounds of negotiations, at one point driving to Anacortes, Wash., to talk face to face with the sign owner Darryl Paulsen of Ramsay Signs.

Leonard said sticking points were maintenance agreements, easement issues to give the city access to the sign — and finding a way to pull off a deal without taxpayers footing the bill.

The final document — 104 pages and filled with plenty uses of “whereas” and “therefore”" — was so long that a City Hall copier broke down making copies for all involved, said Amy Ruiz, the planning and sustainability adviser for Mayor Sam Adams.

Under the agreement, Ramsay Signs will donate the sign to the city and be paid, $2,000 a month for 10 years to maintain it. Art DeMuro, who owns the building under the sign, will give the city the $200,000 needed to change the lettering. Money to maintain the sign will come from a parking lot and commercial space under the Burnside Bridge that DeMuro will lease from the city.

Before the vote, Adams said residents have asked him why it’s taken so long for the city to make a deal. DeMuro told the commissioners that people continually ask him about the sign’s future, and that his kids even get questions from classmates.

“It’s nice to have it resolved,” he said.

The vote was 4-0, with Commissioner Dan Saltzman absent.

Commissioner Amanda Fritz said she hadn’t expected to support the plan given a tight city budget. But she did, noting the deal doesn’t burden taxpayers, takes no money from the city’s budget and protects a sign the city didn’t have the money to buy outright.

After the vote, Leonard said he’d let Fritz flip the switch the day after Thanksgiving. But Fritz, acknowledging Leonard’s efforts, said they would do it together.

And, yes, Rudolph’s nose will be red.