November 2025

The other day I received an email from the Portland Expo Center in Portland, Ore. announcing three upcoming events: A Ski Show, an RV Show and the Holiday Market event. In other words, contrary to popular rumors, the Portland Expo Center is not dead, nor is it turned into a homeless campground, nor is it now a giant marijuana store. It’s still an expo center, and it’s where the Timber Processing & Energy Expo (TP&EE) will be held in 2026 from September 23-25.

Trade shows are easy to take pot shots at, no pun intended, especially during soft markets. It needs to be moved. It needs to be moved closer to an Italian restaurant. It needs to be moved to Las Vegas. Just move it, anywhere. Of course during good markets, it’s simply that was a great show, we sold a machine, can’t wait to come back.

Owning and producing TP&EE, our company hears all kinds of comments. Why don’t you move it downtown to the Oregon Convention Center? Of course this is a comment made by somebody who doesn’t remember when the Portland sawmill show was held at the Oregon Convention Center, under a different ownership, who was practically run out of town because the show was going downhill, because it was too expensive, the logistics were bad, and what sawmill guy wanted to go to downtown Portland and trip over all the bums in the streets.

I remember those days, because we exhibited our magazines at every one of those shows at the Oregon Convention Center., and before that at the Portland Coliseum. The demise of the show at the Oregon Convention Center is exactly what led our company to take over the show in 2012, at the request of the exhibitor community, and move it to the Portland Expo Center, again at the request of the exhibitor community.

I’m not taking a shot at the Oregon Convention Center. It’s a great venue, and hosts a great International Mass Timber Conference every year, among other events.

But I will say this for the Portland Expo Center; that it’s truck staging and move-in move-out capacities are about the best I’ve seen, even if the concession food is mediocre and there’s no Italian restaurant nearby.

And really the bigger issue is that the Northwest timber industry—thanks to environmental groups clawing away at the timber cut on national forests—is only 20% of what it once was. So many great independent sawmill operations have fallen through the years.

But there are still a good number out there, larger ones—like Sierra Pacific Industries and Roseburg—and smaller ones, like Swanson Group, Freres, Vaagen Brothers and WKO. And that’s really why we continue to do this trade show in the Northwest. Because the life and times of the Northwest timber industry is a crucial piece of history, and as long as there’s a solid piece of it still standing, we think it deserves a trade show where its generational survivors can congregate and continue to improve their sawmill technologies and give their workers some time off to come and comb the exhibitor aisles.

We prefer not to abandon it, nor give up the city to protesters and looters (whose actions are actually in downtown Portland, a ways off from the Portland Expo Center, which is north of the riots).

That’s why, as you may have seen, the theme of next year’s TP&EE is “The Tradition Continues.”