Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
A few years ago, the tiny city of Lafayette in Yamhill County ran into government interference when it wanted to install a roadside sign on Highway 18 advertising a local antique mall.
Turned out, a state rule didn’t allow signs with arrows that pointed straight ahead.
That’s when Erik Andersson of the governor’s Economic Revitalization Team got involved. Today there’s a sign, with an arrow pointing straight ahead up the road, to lead travelers to the mall.
“I’m proud of that sign,” Andersson told a group of Sweet Home residents and businesspeople at Sweet Home Economic Development Group’s monthly Breakfast Club Thursday, Jan. 26.
Andersson said a big part of his job is to help businesses negotiate the maze of government agencies to further economic development in a seven-county area in Western Oregon — Linn, Marion, Benton, Polk, Yamhill, Lane and Lincoln.
“My biggest role is to be an ombudsman if a community or business are having issues with the state,” he said.
ERT’s five field representatives have responsibility for various sections of the state and are responsible for making the state more business-friendly.
They do this by helping to expedite state permitting processes, coordinating and leveraging state technical and financial assistance for businesses, and improving local access to state resources.
Andersson said his office is trying to reach out to communities such as Sweet Home “that don’t have large planning staffs” to help them move forward with property that is ready to be developed into business uses. He cited the Lowe’s distribution center project in Lebanon as an example of how Oregon is trying to attract businesses by making it easier for them to locate within the state.
He said Lowe’s representatives told him said the state’s certification process, which facilitates the planning processes for “project-ready” industrial land, cut six months to a year off the planning process for the company. Oregon, he said, is “the first state west of the Mississippi to have a certification program.”
ERT also is working to facilitate the clean-up of “brown fields,” sites zoned industrial that cannot be used due to contamination. The team is also working to make it easier for communities like Sweet Home to redevelop downtown areas, he said.