Larry Tokarski leaves the public with a $7.5 million development bill

It took me about two seconds to say "Yes" when the publisher of Salem Weekly, A.P. Walther, asked me via an email if I'd be interested in writing a story about the unbuilt section of Lone Oak Road that the City Council is asking the public to pay for, after the developer, Larry Tokarski, walked away from his obligation to make the road improvements.

The front page story appeared in this week's issue of Salem Weekly. You can read it online. Here's a PDF file of the story as I sent it off to Walther.
Download Salem Weekly Lone Oak story PDF
This shows the importance of Salem having an alternative newspaper. Before I heard from Walther, I toyed with the idea of seeing if the Statesman Journal, our daily newspaper, would be interested in doing a story on this subject.

But since Tokarski's real estate company, Coldwell Banker Mountain West, is a major advertiser in the Statesman Journal, I figured that the chances of the newspaper running a story that put Tokarski in a bad light were slim to none.

So it was great that Salem Weekly gave me 1,500 words for a story about Tokarski leaving Salem citizens with his $7.5 million unpaid development bill.

Here's some comments that were left on Facebook posts about the story, along with my response to two comments.

 

 

 

Comments

[Zachary coulter]

You’re dumb, don’t put something slanderous on someone’s name who’s done so much great throughout this city. This town is a trash heap and needs improvements to infrastructure everywhere. I’m glad he’s doing something to improve this town! LETS GO LARRY!

[Clutch]

Please, if any of you would like to try to build apartments next to a river, next to a bridge, and have to essentially build your own internal power plant (PGE?) be my guest. Next, try to predict the cost of avant-garde adaptive reuse and work with the City of Salem to maintain compliance and exacting interpretation of the current code. The risks taken by this team would have bankrupted smaller businesses. From my perspective, we now have an amazing project with extra parking (who does this!) and a great venue to support our downtown business, waterfront, and Salem as a City. No one would have bailed this project out and any money we spent (our taxes) in urban renewal has already been deployed by the tenants in our downtown core. I personally know the risks of development, (anyone remember The Meridian or The Rivers). Change is constant, let's look at the responsible capitalists in our towns and appreciate the risks they take. If they are not treating their employees, contractors, and customers right, ask them why and vote with your dollars. Reward the good ones with your patronage and ignore the others with your economic silence.