Scott Swanson
If you’ve read our front page today, you’ll know that Sweet Home is one of eight area communities selected to get a free assessment of our downtown revitalization efforts.
This isn’t the first revitalization assessment Sweet Home has had. The last was a rather in-depth study done in 2003, before I arrived at The New Era, which included suggestions for improving the visual appeal of buildings in the downtown area and ways to deal with traffic and parking issues. The study was done by the Oregon Downtown Development Association, and it was paid for by SHEDG, but it never was fully implemented because of a lack of dollars and people power.
So now we get another opportunity now. On the table is a chance to qualify for a one-year pilot program in which experts in this kind of thing, from the ODDA and Cascades West Council of Governments, will provide technical assistance and support to four communities that are trying to get things turned around.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I believe there’s a lot of potential here in Sweet Home. I believe that the right choices, plus effort and investment on the part of people who already are here, will draw others who can add to what our town has to offer along Main and Long streets. I’ve seen it done before.
I look down the street and visualize what would draw me, as a visitor, to a town like Sweet Home. If I lived in a larger community, such as where many of the tourism crowd are from, what would make me want to stop if I were driving through on my way to the mountains or to the lake? I wonder what would make me change my route if I were driving to Bend from Eugene, the coast, Salem or Portland.
People are already traveling through. The challenge now is to see businesses established that offer the kinds of goods and services that will make them pull over on their way into the mountains or on their way home.
There aren’t as many empty storefronts now as there were even a month and a half ago when I wrote about how some of us were going to go to a revitalization meeting in Albany, hosted by ODDA and CACG, to see what could be done to get ourselves going. One restaurant, Mr. Lucky’s Deli, opened Monday on Long Street and I believe we’re going to soon see some other empty buildings develop into businesses that will meet the needs of not only tourists but us locals as well.
The good news is that leaders of both the Chamber of Commerce and the Sweet Home Economic Development Group are taking an active role in the discussions on what can be done. I know these discussions were going on long before I got here, but they seem to have gained some momentum lately and that’s encouraging – because the chamber and SHEDG are the organizations that need to be leading this effort.
City officials, business people who aren’t leaders in those organizations, and private citizens who simply have an interest in seeing the downtown spiffed up – there’s a need for contributions from all of us. But the real institutional muscle, expertise and connections needed to make this work should come from those sources.
The key thing here is that wework together.
Now we have the experts coming – on Jan. 17 or 29 – and we’re going to hear from people who have done this before and have seen it done. They’ll probably tell us some things we’d rather not hear, but we need to listen. Sweet Home has a lot of great qualities, but it can be better. What it will take to get there, to have a thriving downtown – even if it caters to tourists more than it did 25 years ago – is what this is all about.