Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Sweet Home’s Dick Meyers is the longest-serving planning commission chairman in the state, and the American Planning Association, Oregon Chapter, recognized Meyers for it last week.
Representatives appeared before the City Council on Oct. 24 to present the Distinguished Leadership and Planning Award locally. Meyers also received recognition last month at a ceremony where Attorney General Hardy Meyers received a different award.
“It was a surprise,” Meyers said. “And it was an honor. They only give one of these out a year for a citizen planner.”
The award is nice, he said, “but that’s not what I’m in the business for.”
“I think it’s great,” Community Development Director Carol Lewis said. “It’s a really great honor in the state of Oregon to get that award.”
It’s also hard for more rural planners because the association is primarily focused on places like Portland, Salem and Eugene, she said. With Meyers’ service, “you can still ask Dick questions about planning history. He’s just a wealth of information.”
Meyers said he doesn’t know why he has stayed on with the Sweet Home Planning Commission so long. It is kind of a break, like a boys’ night out, and “I enjoy it.”
Former Mayor Ed Bunn appointed Meyers to the Planning Commission in 1973. In those days, the mayor made the appointments. Now the council as a whole makes them.
Meyers became vice chairman and then, in 1976, became chairman of the Planning Commission.
“We did not have a professional planner on at the time,” Meyers said. The League of Oregon Cities provided a planner who worked one day a week and staffed Planning Commission meetings.
“We kind of ran by the seat of the pants,” he said. “They told us what we should do, and we ignored them a lot of times.”
He remembers one planner who told the commission it needed to change its fence ordinance. The commission didn’t agree with the reasons he presented, and then the planner told the commission that this was what other cities were starting to use.
Meyers stood up and told the planner never to tell the Sweet Home commission it must do something because everybody else is doing it, he said.
Meyers also was chairman when the state forced Sweet Home to annex Foster and Midway in the early 1980s. Voters in Sweet Home and in the Midway and Foster areas turned the annexation down in an election.
The state stepped in and forced the annexation because the groundwater was contaminated with arsenic.
“Then the city Planning Commission had to zone all of that land, including the Comprehensive Plan,” Meyers said. “We didn’t really have the planning staff to research each parcel.”
On a deadline, the initial zoning in Foster and Midway areas was kind of arbitrary at the time, Meyers said. Along the highway, the Planning Commission drew a line 200 feet from the road on both sides and zoned the land in between highway commercial. This split many properties between commercial and residential.