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After months of delays related to occupancy permits, blueprints and classification issues, Tony's Smoke Shop on Ninth Street is now open for business as the largest hookah retail expansion in Oregon.

Tony's completes retail expansion

Hookah lounge addition meets city regulations, welcomes customers with entertainment

By: Jeremy Hansen

Posted: 5/14/08

Tony's Smoke Shop is a recent, yet popular, Ninth Street retail establishment. The owners, after opening the shop intended to add on to their business.

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.

"We sent in six different blueprints over the entire process, constantly fixing the things they told us to fix," Freeby said. "What bothered me most was that it took them the maximum amount of time - two weeks - to go over the blueprints and send back two-page letters telling us what else we needed to change."

City planners critiqued every aspect of the retail establishment.

"For example, the address of the building should contrast with the background," Freeby said. "The address was white, but we had white construction paper behind the glass to hide the retail expansion from the public as we were building it. So we had to wait another two weeks for them to come in and check again."

At that point, the crew at Tony's had enough of the constant head-butting.

"We called in Red Hot Construction to help us deal with the city, and they have been extremely helpful in getting the issues taken care of," Freeby said.

Losing time and money was the greatest complication to the project.

"The biggest frustration was that the city didn't give us all of the objections at once," Freeby said. "If they had come in and given them to us all at once, we would have been done a long time ago."

"What was most frustrating was the overwhelming lack of information from the city," said Brian Hansen, manager of Tony's. "But it worked out, and we both got what we needed in the end."

After meeting the city's regulations and requirements, Tony's was able to open their expansion.

"We have shisha that you can order for a hookah session, music, big-screen TVs," Freeby said. "Sometimes we will have a DJ or a band playing as well. Hookah is a social thing, and we are trying to bring a comfortable atmosphere into it."

Trevor Wiesner, a security guard at Tony's, loves the new expansion. "It's a good time; I love it. It's huge - the largest hookah retail expansion in Oregon," Wiesner said.

"Come in and see what flavors you like, and go from there," Freeby said. "We sell a lot of hookahs, but not too many people know what it's about."

Tony's Smoke Shop is located at 1318B, N.W. Ninth St.

Jeremy Hansen, staff writer

news@dailybarometer.com, 737-2231