become Mount Halo

BARGAINS

Gin and Loophole

LEAH NASH

Last year, Oregon instituted floor pricing for cheap booze. One producer found a way around it.

An advocate for reducing substance abuse says a major liquor producer is gaming minimum pricing standards that the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission established last year.

Mike Marshall, executive director of Oregon Recovers, says Sazerac, the Kentucky-based distiller of Fleischmann’s Gin, among many other brands, has figured out a simple way to offer its products more cheaply than the OLCC says it can: rebate coupons.

In 2021, when the OLCC rolled out the policy, it used vodka rather than gin as the example, but the pricing was similar. At that time, floor pricing raised the lowest price of a 1.75 liter bottle from $12.75 to $17.95, a 41% increase. The OLCC believed, based on research in other markets, raising prices of bottom-shelf liquors would reduce consumption.

Marshall alleges—and OLCC spokesman Bryant Haley confirms—that Sazerac is offering a $4 rebate to purchasers of a 1.75 liter bottle of Fleischmann’s Gin. That circumvents floor pricing as follows:

Price of a 1.75 liter bottle of Fleischmann’s Gin: $18.95 Price floor for a 1.75 liter bottle set by Oregon: $17.95 Net price for Fleischmann’s Gin after $4 rebate: $14.95

Haley says companies have offered rebate coupons before, but not like this. Consumers usually don’t bother to mail in the coupons because the rebates are so paltry, he says. “But this one being $4 is bigger than we’ve seen before.” Marshall says such rebates counteract public health

BOTTOMS UP: OLCC’s price floors have encountered resistance.

efforts to reduce substance abuse. “It’s an intentional effort by Big Alcohol to circumvent the minimum pricing requirement put into place to address Oregon’s sky-high alcohol addiction rates,” he says. “And it’s predatory marketing, targeting low-income folks who have the least access to information about the harms of alcohol consumption.”

In April 2021, the OLCC took an unusual action, dictating minimum pricing for liquor. At the time, the agency said the new minimum pricing would affect less than 2% of its brand offerings but 16.3% of the volume of booze it sold, because the new prices would affect large, lower-shelf bottles.

Sazerac, whose Fleischmann’s, Mr. Boston and Taaka brands were among the most affected, pushed back on minimum pricing.

Company’s CEO Mark Brown told the OLCC in a letter that the new policy was misguided.

“It discriminates against low-income residents and cost-conscious consumers, hurts bars and restaurants struggling to make ends meet, will drive business out of Oregon, and is misguided in its approach towards reducing social harms,” Brown wrote in March 2021 letter to the commission.

Despite those objections, the OLCC instituted price floors on Oct. 1, 2021. The agency expected a dual benefit of responding to the concerns of public health advocates and raising more money for the agency. Haley says the OLCC will evaluate results after the policy’s first year.

Meanwhile, Marshall wants the agency to tell Sazerac and stores that net prices can’t be lower than minimum prices. And while Sazerac spokeswoman Kellie Duhr says coupons have long been part of the company’s business model, Haley says the OLCC will try to figure out how to close the loophole.

“We don’t like it,” he says. “We are definitely going to figure out what to do about it.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

MOUNT HALO

An Oregon board is renaming Swastika Mountain.

Last January, a Lane County woman named Joyce McClain read in the paper that two teenage hikers had been rescued from a snowstorm on Swastika Mountain.

She wondered why Oregon still had a Swastika Mountain.

Soon, it won’t—thanks to McClain’s request to a volunteer board that it find a new moniker for the 4,197-foot butte outside Cottage Grove.

The committee in question is called the Oregon Geographic Names Board. It’s been around since 1908, naming and renaming various rises, dips and water bodies in the Oregon landscape. It still meets no more than twice a year, under the supervision of the Oregon Historical Society, but lately its agendas have been a little more crowded. OHS executive director Kerry Tymchuk says that’s thanks to proposals from citizens to consider substitutions for place names that are outdated or racist.

Swastika Mountain was more the former, McClain discovered. It predated Nazi Germany. “The mountain took its name from the extinct town of Swastika which was nearby,” she wrote to the board this year. “The town was named after a cattle ranch whose owner branded his cattle with the swastika symbol. This happened in 1909.”

Still, like any Great-Uncle Adolf, the name no longer felt suitable. McClain suggested calling it Umpqua Mountain, after the Indigenous tribe that first lived there. A tribal historian had another idea: What about Chief Halito, or Halo, who led the Yoncalla Kalapuya tribe in the 1800s?

That was such a good idea that McClain attended the Aug. 20 meeting of the Names Board to pledge her support. As soon as next year, pending tribal approval, the summit will be called Mount Halo.

Tymchuk says the Names Board doesn’t go looking for offensive labels to remove—it just considers nominations from Oregonians. But the board does try to consider how place names are used to demean the people living there.

Take, for example, the three places with “Negro” in the name that the board examined this month. Tymchuk believes those spots got their names because white people wanted to note that Black people lived there. (“In several instances, the local name before ‘Negro’ was…you can imagine what it was,” he says.) So the Names Board has renamed the geographic features to honor the actual names of those Black residents.

“The renaming is also reclaiming,” Tymchuk says, “reclaiming the honor and the dignity of the individuals who lived there.”

Here are four other name changes the board recommended last

week. AARON MESH.

OLD NAME: NEGRO KNOB

Location: Grant County Renamed: Columbus Sewell Knob Namesake: A Black man who worked as a miner and had a freight-hauling business in nearby Canyon City in the 1860s.

OLD NAME: NEGRO CREEK

Location: Douglas County Renamed: Jack Carson Creek Namesake: A Black resident who lived near Canyonville and became locally renowned as a horse trainer. He died in 1922 and is buried near Myrtle Creek.

OLD NAME: NEGRO RIDGE

Location: Douglas County Renamed: Malvin Brown Ridge Namesake: A smoke jumper who died fighting a forest fire near this ridgeline in 1945. The 555th Parachute Infantry Division was an all-Black paratrooper division, the first to jump out of planes to fight fires in Oregon.

OLD NAME: NEGRO CREEK

Location: Douglas County (yes, there are two in Douglas County) Renamed: Triple Nickle Creek Namesake: The 555th was also known as the Triple Nickles.