On 2026-01-21 14:00:00+00:00 (the system date; the printed agenda and minutes list Tuesday, January 20, 2026), the Astoria City Council held a work session from 6:00 p.m. to 6:59 p.m. Mayor Sean Fitzpatrick presided, with Councilors Andy Davis, Andrea Mazzarella, Elisabeth Adams, and Joshua Conklin present. City Manager Scott Spence, City Attorney Blair Henningsgaard, and other department heads also attended. The session centered on a presentation by Friends of the Astoria Column President Jordan Schnitzer about preservation work, operations, the partnership with the Clatsop County Historical Society, plans for the column's 100th anniversary, and a proposed increase in the annual parking fee. No formal action was taken.
All right. Well, good evening. And welcome to the Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 work session of the Australia City Council. For the record, the time is 6 p.m. Mr. Spence, if we could have a roll call, please. Counselor Adams. Here. Counselor Davis. Here, Counselor Conklin. Here. Council Mozzarella. Here. Mayor Fitzpatrick. Here. So on our agenda this evening, we have 3A, which is a presentation from the friends of the Australia Column president, Jordan Schnitzer. And the um he's going to provide us with an update on the activities going on at the Australia Column and plans for the upcoming 100th anniversary celebration. So Mr. Schnitzer, welcome. Thank you for joining us this evening. And behalf of all the friends, the members who are here, uh, we appreciate the time and the continued partnership. As I've suggested before, I think uh with the uh complicated dynamics going on in this country right now. This is a role model of a public-private partnership where everyone's benefited, and it's been a wonderful relationship. So with that, uh appreciate you being here. So uh you have these in front of you, it's on the screen also. But if we turn to um the first page, um, you know, this started 35 years ago in 1988 when then Mayor Elizabeth Hemingsgard Miller. Um I went to the University of Oregon, and my next door neighbor was a family Dwayne Otson from the Odson family and Duane Odson's sister, married a man named Patton. So I grew up with a young man, you're younger, Philip Patton and the University of Oregon on campus there. I run into Philip and he has this fellow with him, where care but Blair, Blair. Anyway, so that's my first met Blair, right? It was years later when for our house in Gearhart that the uh the Hillings Guard would rent a house across the street. And uh I saw Edith and I said, you know, my mother's had an art gallery for years, and I have some experience with conservation of paintings and things, and I always take our guests into Astoria and show off the Flavelle House, the Maritime Museum, and we end up with the column, and right now the column is in such bad shape, it's all black on one side, you can't even see the glorious artwork. And boy, you know, I'd love to help. She called back about two weeks later and said the city council had met and wasn't sure what to do, and they'd welcome the help. And to make this part a little quicker, I then called um my next door neighbor, Mr. Vaughn, who headed up the Oregon Historical Society and found an architect professor at University of Oregon that worked on outdoor structures and we then put together a board of Michael Foster, other people, a joint board of Portland Astoria people, and we brought in some experts and we found a woman named Myrna Sachs that's in here, uh, lived in LA. She was a nationally recognized conservator, and she uh came up and real simply we spent 65,000 dollars putting up the scaffolding and then canvas and because in the 60s we were talking before the meeting, uh the city had thought that a process of putting tongue oil that you put on boats so they won't leak that would help preserve the column, which in the end was the worst thing to do, but they didn't know then. So she spent the first summer with some graduate students with uh soap that you'd use in your dishes and toothbrushes going through the column every square foot, sort of like brushing your teeth, um, getting the tongue oil off, and then it needed to sit for a year with the weather and the rain so that more of the tongue oil would sort of naturally come out. So we were excited about using her, but then uh mayor Willis Van Susan here called up and said, you know, she may be good with what she does. Oh, there you are. But uh but there were some personality issues in community, and we really don't want her back. So I called the Getty Museum, and I didn't know anyone there and asked for the head of antiquities, and I explained this whole column and uh he said we have the right man for you, Frank Freizick, who had just finished up being the deputy director of one of the Getty wings, the Conservation Institute. The Getty 12 billion dollar endowment has a museum, a conservation institute, and a research institute. And uh so he came and for the next 15 years was a wonderful professor teaching us the ethics and technically how to preserve a column like this. And the last point here that was important is when I got his resume, he'd grown up in Munich and had 25 pages of reports he'd done, and he'd worked on the Sphinx, Anchor Watts, Notre Dame. I mean, giant things. And I was intimidated. And I called him up and I said, you know, sort of sheepishly, you know. This column is, you know, about at that time, like 60, 70 years, 70, about 75 years, so 75 years, about seven years old. And you've worked on these things.