By Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Sweet Home’s new community and economic development director says he chose to work in small towns because he can make a difference in them.
Blair Larsen brings experience as city manager of Stanfield, population about 2,075, located in the area of Hermiston in Central Oregon.
He started work in Sweet Home on June 17.
City Manager Ray Towry said Larsen is intelligent and has a master’s degree in public administration and a doctor of jurisprudence degree.
“He gives us a whole different perspective on things,” Towry said. “He also brings us experience as a city manager with economic development. He was the economic development director and planner. With his experience, he’s seen it all from the highest level.”
Larsen, 41, grew up in Washington, D.C. He left the area when he went to college. His family moved to Arizona in the meantime, so he never returned.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in Russian and media arts studies from Brigham Young University in Utah in 2003 and then worked as a contract linguist for the FBI and a logistics company with government contracts.
“By the time, I graduated I already knew I wanted to go to graduate school,” Larsen said. He enrolled in law school at the University of Utah. He realized he didn’t want to pursue a legal career, transferred back to BYU and doubled his major again to earn a master’s in public administration, graduating in 2009.
“I really wanted to (be) a part of an organization that you can see results,” Larsen said. State and federal governments were too large for that.
That was a lousy time to try to find a job anywhere, Larsen said, but he found a job as budget officer in Broward County, Fla., in early 2010.
“It just wasn’t the place we wanted to raise a family,” Larsen said, and it was a large organization, where he had about as much impact as working for a state government. He and his wife, Katrina Larsen, wanted to move closer to her family in Idaho.
“I saw the listing for Stanfield,” Larsen said. He worked there as city manager from 2013 until Towry hired him to head Sweet Home’s Community and Economic Development Department.
“It was a challenge because it was such a small organization,” Larsen said. “But we got some things going.”
As he departed Stanfield, the city was just finishing the first leg of a new city trail, Larsen said. It was also working on water utility improvements, with a master plan in process and a rate study coming up.
Some of the job was about moving crisis to crisis and keeping the city on track, he said.
“I had already been looking at getting over to this side of the state,” Larsen said. Attending conferences, he got to know other city managers, and “I’d been impressed by Ray.”
They had talked, and the discussion intrigued Larsen, he said. “It’s not just the location. It’s the beauty of the area and the team in place here.”
His focus in Sweet Home will be narrower, he said. In Stanfield, with a small staff, he had numerous roles that kept him busy.
“I’m interested in making long-term impacts,” Larsen said.
He was happy to relocate to Sweet Home with its “natural beauty.”
“Just driving the road through town, why wouldn’t anybody want to live here?” Larsen said. “I saw a lot of good.”
Larsen and his wife have three children, Ella, 11; Henry, 6; and Grace, 4.
They didn’t want to be anywhere too large, Larsen said, but Sweet Home has close proximity to numerous amenities.
“It’s got the whole package,” Larsen said. His family just jumped into it and they’re under contract on a new house in Sweet Home.
“We’re excited about it. We wanted to get in and get the kids in school.”
On a professional level, “my job is to basically fulfill the goals of the people through their elected officials,” Larsen said, initially, to find out what the council wants, what kinds of businesses the community wants and learn about existing businesses to help support business retention.
“The biggest part of economic development is retaining the businesses you already have,” Larsen said. Another initial job will be fact finding. He’ll need to find out what challenges they face, what other businesses would complement theirs and what business owners want to see.
He also heads the city’s planning functions although compared to past department heads, much of the work will be handled under contract with the Cascades West Council of Government along with a planning associate.
Larsen will staff the Planning Commission’s meetings, he said, and the city has a lot of projects coming up, with revisions to development codes.
“The things I want to do first is to get to know everybody,” he said, adding that he understands Sweet Home has a large number of volunteers dedicated to the community. “It’s really building relationships and making sure people can find what they’re looking for.”
A community may think it wants Amazon’s HQ2, but that kind of thing is not really a silver bullet in economic development, Larsen said. Developments like that come with a lot of consequences.
So he will look at what “people are actually looking for,” Larsen said. “There are a lot of things to find out first.”
His door, email and phone are open, Larsen said. Anyone who has ideas is welcome to reach him and tell him about them. Lightheartedly he asks for “the benefit of the doubt, as I start, before everything becomes my fault.”
He isn’t here to change anything in particular, he said.
“It should be what the community wants (through elected officials).”
“I’m just excited to be here,” Larsen said. “I want to hear from people.”