After Matriarch’s Death, Chambers Heirs Sort Out What’s Next

Published 5:00 pm Friday, March 21, 2014

In the 2 1/2 years since prominent Eugene businesswoman Carolyn Chambers died, her children have been sorting through her complex network of businesses, from broadcast stations to wineries, deciding what to keep and what to sell.

The assessment was happening quietly, until the recent announcement that the family plans to sell its 53-year-old Eugene television station KEZI and two Oregon sister stations to a Georgia-based partnership for $30 million in cash.

That highly publicized decision has raised questions about what will happen to Chambers’ other businesses, what role the next generation of Chamberses will play, and whether the Chambers family will continue to be a significant force in Oregon business and philanthropy.

Chambers died Aug. 8, 2011, at age 79, after a lengthy battle with cancer.

She had three children, Bill, Scott and Liz, with her first husband Donald McDonald, who died in 1962. She had a son, Clark, and daughter, Silva, with her second husband, Dick Chambers, founder of Chambers Construction, who adopted Bill, Scott and Liz.

Bill, 56, and his wife, Karla, have branched out into their own family business. They own and operate Stahlbush Island Farms, a Corvallis farm and food processor that ships products throughout the United States and to about 15 other countries.

Scott, 54, is the chief executive officer of Chambers Communications Corp., the media company Carolyn Chambers founded in 1983.

Liz, 53, owns Silvan Ridge Winery, known as Hinman Vineyard when Carolyn Chambers bought it in 1991. Liz also recently launched her own label, Elizabeth Chambers Cellar.

Clark, 49, invests and lives in Salem.

Silva, 45, directs the family’s real estate company, CDC Management. She also owns and operates her own property management business, Silva Management Co., in partnership with local commercial brokers Alan Evans, Jeff Elder and John Brown.

“It’s kind of the Chambers of commerce,” Scott Chambers joked about his family’s diverse business interests.

Carolyn Chambers became a broadcast entrepreneur in the late 1950s and was still making real estate deals while receiving hospice care in her home in the last year of her life.

She was just four years out of college when she borrowed $100,000 in 1957 from her auto-dealer father to launch Liberty Communications with her first husband, Donald McDonald, and other investors, including her parents, Julio and Elizabeth Silva. Three years later, Liberty’s KEZI-TV station hit the airwaves.

Liberty expanded into cable television over the years. In 1983 — when her partners, despite her objections, decided to sell KEZI along with Liberty’s other assets to a Denver company — Carolyn Chambers bought back KEZI and founded Chambers Communications Corp.

Chambers Communications grew over the years and had added several Oregon TV stations, a video/film production unit, and cable systems in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California by 1998, when it moved into a new $11 million, 90,000-square-foot media center in Eugene.

A year later, Chambers sold the cable systems to AT&T Corp. She set up the charitable Chambers Family Foundation with part of the proceeds.

Chambers had numerous other business interests, including buying Hinman Vineyards and development projects, such as the U.S. Bank tower in downtown Eugene, the Levi-Strauss offices on Chad Drive and Pioneer Pacific College in Springfield’s Gateway area.

Exiting the KEZI stage

Since Carolyn Chambers’ death, her children have been taking a hard look at all of her business interests and deciding what to do with them. That led to the recent decision to sell KEZI, the flagship of Chambers Communications Corp.

“We’ve been basically looking at all assets over the last several years, and you’re either growing or you’re not,” Scott Chambers said. “In TV, we didn’t feel like we could grow the way the business needed to, given our other holdings.”

The company quietly told trusted brokers that it wanted to buy more Oregon stations or to sell KEZI, Chambers said.

“We were as much looking to buy stations as we were sell stations,” he said. “We made an attempt to (build the business) through acquisition here locally, and we were outbid for KMTR.

“We had exhausted all opportunities with existing owners in Eugene, Medford and Bend. We decided if we can’t grow it, we should probably get out.”

So the family agreed to sell KEZI and its sister stations in Medford and Klamath Falls to Heartland Media LLC and MSouth Equity Partners, a private equity fund, for $30 million. The deal came together just in the past four months, Chambers said.

Scott Chambers said that Carolyn left some direction about the businesses, but she didn’t indicate that the family should either grow the broadcast TV business or get out.

“With the facts that we have today,” he said, “I think she would agree with our decision.”

Finding new directions

Scott Chambers, as well as Bill and Silva Chambers, who are directors of Chambers Communications Corp., said they can’t say what the family will do with the sale proceeds from KEZI.

“It hasn’t been determined yet whether we’ll use the proceeds in communications,” Scott Chambers said, adding, “We’re not going to pursue broadcast TV.”

The family is looking at other opportunities with a good return on investment. “That’s basically our criteria,” he said.

The Chambers family will lease to the new owners KEZI’s 18,000 square feet of the media center’s 60,000-square-foot main building, he said. The rest of the main building is for lease.

Essig Entertainment, a Eugene audiovisual staging and event company, already is leasing the two 15,000-square-foot sound stages behind the main building.

The decision to lease out the entire media center brings an official end to the dream that created it.

“The whole vision we had for this media center was to create jobs for (film and video) production in Oregon,” Scott Chambers said. “The reality is production ended up (being based) in Portland, and we struggled to migrate it south.

“We invested a lot of money and did 2,000 hours of TV and about eight feature films (over 15 years). In the end, we decided that for the family we weren’t going to continue doing that investment.”

Deciding to sell the station that their family founded and that their mother fought so hard to buy back wasn’t easy for the siblings.

“It’s always hard to go out when things are going well,” Scott Chambers said. “If they weren’t, it might be easy to step away. “The people I’ve worked with here at the station (are) just outstanding, and they stay.”

Follow Sherri on Twitter @sburimcdonald . You can email her at sherri@registerguard.com .