Extreme makeover
Amy Saberiyan admits she is entrepreneurial, doggedly persistent and driven by professional challenges. These traits, coupled with many successful experiences as an environmental engineer, have resulted in Saberiyan being the proud owner of the ugliest property on the block: Saberiyan is converting an abandoned gas station to an upscale coffee shop.
A few miles west of Portland on a major boulevard in Beaverton sits a classic brownfield where a Texaco station was abandoned 5 years ago. Saberiyan is confident that her big vision for a small business benefits everyone.
Yet, a 15-year veteran of cleanup projects, Saberiyan admits turning her vision into reality hasn’t been easy. She had to search out the owner of the property, secure cleanup funding, write a prospectus for a bank loan, and facilitate a lot of individuals and groups with clashing interests to work together as a team. And she’s not done yet.
No stranger to brownfields
As owner of NEEK Engineering, Inc., Saberiyan has many brownfield successes to her credit, including a gas station converted to condominiums and fueling facility converted to seaside resort. Both are in Oregon and involved millions of dollars. Yet this smaller project is still a tough one.
“The first step—getting a clean title—was definitely the biggest challenge” she says. The owner turned out to be every buyer’s nightmare: a family trust of several owners living in different places with different agendas, making for time-consuming and frustrating negotiations.
Estimating the costs and doing the cleanup wasn’t nearly as hard, says Saberiyan. That’s because petroleum cleanups are known entities. Petroleum products float on top of the groundwater table making it easier to capture and treat them. Still, the fact that the purchase price rivaled cleanup costs would have put off less-determined developers.
State government is a hero
Saberiyan sings the praises of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) staff who supplied technical support and loaned money to do the cleanup.
Having DEQ as a partner helped when the engineer-developer applied for a business start-up loan at Sterling Bank. “My track record as an environmentalist and my good working relationship with DEQ put their minds to rest regarding the cleanup stage,” says Saberiyan.
But planning codes are a problem
After getting approval from the bank and help from the state, who would guess the city of Beaverton would present the next hurdle?
A city of 60,000, Beaverton is busy with aggressive beautification plans and Saberiyan says they love her project. Yet although Beaverton will gain the most from the project, the planning codes are full of mind-boggling catch 22s that have put it at risk. That’s the struggle she currently faces.
If anyone can find a way through this latest formidable obstacle, Saberiyan has what it takes and other developers will be able to learn from her experiences in the future.
And for the price of a cup of coffee, Saberiyan’s future customers can contribute to the extreme makeover from useless lot to java spot.
