Spring Break
Tony's completes retail expansion
Hookah lounge addition meets city regulations, welcomes customers with entertainment
Jeremy Hansen
Issue date: 5/14/08 Section: News
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The retail expansion, which includes an area to smoke hookah and watch TV, opens May 16 - owners intended the expansion to open on Jan. 11.
Regulations and hiccups involving the city of Corvallis became the main obstacle in the way of the opening, said Jesse Freeby, the owner of Tony's Smoke Shop.
"It's their job to protect the people and I respect that," Freeby said. "But why are they making my job harder when they didn't enforce it from the beginning?"
"They classified the new expansion as having a 'B occupancy' - which limits the amount of people the building can contain - which was the first problem," Freeby said. "We said 'no' because the company that was in here before us was in manufacturing so how did they get away with it?"
Freeby felt the shop itself was being treated unfairly.
"I personally felt that they were picking on us, because the company here before us didn't have the correct occupancy and now we are jumping though five months of city issues," Freeby said.
While changing the occupancy permit, Tony's ran into another issue with how the city classified them.
"They wanted to change us to an assembly occupancy, which comes with horrible restrictions," Freeby said, "There were things we couldn't do with that kind of permit, and we would have to change our mercantile space to assembly as well."
Assumptions about what the retail expansion would be like may have hindered the process also.
"We didn't go for assembly because we aren't a bar or night club ... one of the city planners may not have understood what we are going for," Freeby said.
After hiring an architect to handle the occupancy discrepancy, the next hurdle was getting newer blueprints approved.
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