Andrea Klaas Has Steered the Port of The Dalles for a Quarter-Century
By Rodger Nichols
In the 1980s, Hood River experienced a new wave of immigration, as the fabled Columbia Gorge winds lured windsurfers from around the world. Some arrived only for the season but found themselves staying.
That’s just what happened to Andrea Klaas. Raised on the East Coast, she became a fan of the sport, but there was a problem.
“I was living on Lake Champlain in Vermont, and it’s not very windy there,” she says. “I was determined to learn the new hot thing, which seemed really fun.
I was either going to go to Hood River— the windsurfing capital of the world— or I was going to go to Hawaii. It’s pretty hard to drive to Hawaii, so I ended up in Hood River in 1993. I quit my job, came out for the summer, and have been here ever since.”
Andrea was a licensed real estate agent in Vermont, working for a construction and real estate development company.
“We would buy undervalued apartment buildings, renovate them, put together a prospectus, and get a couple of investors to partner with us,” she says. “I was the listing agent when we sold the property, and we would get some money back for the company.”
When Andrea arrived in Hood River, she found a job as an early morning baker at Andrew’s Pizza.
“The schedule was perfect,” she says. Her day began around 4 a.m. and ended by 1 p.m.
“That gave me the rest of the day to mountain bike and windsurf,” she says.
Andrea’s next step took her to the Hood River Chamber of Commerce.
“I was in charge of marketing Hood River for a number of years,” she says. “My focus was on making the town a year-round tourist destination. That involved a lot of partnerships with Mount Hood Meadows ski area and other businesses.”
Andrea also got a taste of local government by serving on the Hood River City Council.
“It was an interesting time to help guide some of the changes,” she says. “There was a lot of citizen interaction and big discussions about what to do with the waterfront.”
It was 1999 when Andrea saw an ad for a position at Port of The Dalles. With her real estate development background, her promotional work with the chamber, and her city council experience, she decided to apply. She interviewed and was hired.
In considering whether to take the job, which involved commuting from Hood River, Andrea consulted her husband. He asked how secure she thought the position would be.
“The strategic plan at the time said we had a 100-year supply of land for business, based on our historical absorption rate, which meant we had 100 years for a marketing person to market the land,” she says.
Things were indeed sedate in her early days. She remembers that Klindt Drive— the site of the Port office—hadn’t yet been paved. The town was still reeling after the closure of the Martin Marietta aluminum plant in 1986. Though it reopened on a reduced scale as Northwest Aluminum, the company closed for good in 2000.
Fortunately, after the earlier plant closure, local citizens bonded for funds to develop property on the Port.
“When the bond was passed, the Port promised their constituents to use the money to develop industrial land and diversify the region’s economy,” Andrea says. “That’s still really a strong focus of ours today. We’ve been able to attract more than 70 businesses employing 2,000 plus people in the Port area, and there are a wide variety of businesses. There are service businesses, banks, accountants, attorneys, plus all the manufacturing businesses and data centers.”
Andrea gives a lot of credit to Scott Hege, who was executive director when she joined as a marketer.
“Scott was a great mentor,” she says. “He would give me projects to work on. He would let me help him put the budget together and make presentations. And when he was getting ready to move on to his next job, he asked if I wanted to step into this role. I said, ‘Yes.’ I had a great mentor to follow.”
When the big break came, things started moving more quickly. In 2005, Google announced it would build a data center in The Dalles. That happened during Scott’s watch, but it wasn’t the last data center to be built. During Andrea’s tenure as director, Google added plants in 2015 and 2018. 2 more are under construction.
In summing up her 25 years at the Port and 15 as its director, Andrea says, “I compare my knowledge base to the Mississippi River. It’s about 3 miles wide but only about a foot deep. No 2 days of the Port are like. Sometimes, it’s chaotic because of emergencies; sometimes, it’s chaotic because we have businesses wanting to talk to us about putting up a new facility. Sometimes, it’s chaotic because suddenly we’re getting inquiries from senators or the legislature to comment on certain legislation.”
Andrea says she always comes to work with a plan in mind of what her day is going to be like.
“If there’s a day that I’ve actually accomplished that plan, it gets marked on the calendar because it just never happens that way,” she says. “But I am a lifelong learner, and all the new information makes this job enjoyable because it’s constantly in flux. That makes every day an interesting day.”