Sean C. Morgan
City staff members are preparing to take their proposed vision statement, goals and objectives, along with revisions to the community Strategic Plan to the community during the coming months, with a public meeting sometime in October.
The staff and about a dozen community members, now working as a steering committee, finished hammering out the proposal earlier this month, meeting on June 3 and June 17 to plan their next steps, including disseminating information about the vision and Strategic Plan and then updating the Strategic Plan with the information from the visioning process. Those meetings followed three initial visioning sessions, in which a group of more than a dozen residents and city staff members met in May with consultant Chris Maser to put together a wish list of elements to be addressed in the plan.
The Strategic Plan was created in 1989, with the Sweet Home Economic Development Group among the results of the initial planning. The plan was updated in 1993, 1997 and 2001.
The final preliminary vision statement states: “Sweet Home is a community where we live in harmony with the surrounding environment supporting a clean, safe and economically viable small-town lifestyle for the benefit of present and future generations.”
“We’ve got the vision, goals and a set of objectives,” said Carol Lewis, Community Development Department director. The vision provides a direction for the goals. In turn objectives, single projects, are aimed at fulfilling the goals. The objectives will change all the time as projects are complete and should be updated annually.
The five goals supporting the vision statement, developed by the forum participants in May, include the following:
n Goal 1: Sweet Home is a community where well-being is based on a culture of social inclusivity.
n Goal 2: Sweet Home provides the skills and experiences for children to have a viable future in our town economically and socially so they would stay or return because of the childhood memories that they want to share with their own children.
n Goal 3: Sweet Home protects and cares for its open space and natural environment as the foundation of its sustainable small-town atmosphere and livability.
n Goal 4: Sweet Home is a community that supports a sustainable business that provides diverse employment opportunities for residents of all skill levels.
n Goal 5: Sweet Home makes decisions that keep the population within a boundary of a sustainable built environment that protects the beauty and function of the natural environment.
The committee has developed a contact list and is getting word out to different groups, such as the Sweet Home Economic Development Group, Sweet Home Emergency Ministries and the Chamber of Commerce, that it believes have an interest in different goals.
The committee members want to try to go out and meet with all of the different groups and provide a 10-minute presentation, Lewis said. In late October, they’ll hold a larger meeting and get their input and projects into the Strategic Plan and objectives and then develop the final draft.
Having projects included in the Strategic Plan can help organizations when they’re looking for grant funds, Lewis said. It shows community support for the projects.
“Then we want to get objectives done and make new ones,” Lewis said. Among the first objectives will be the creation of a management plan for Hobart Park, the home of the endangered Bradshaw’s lomatium. The visioning and strategic plan update was driven by the Hobart objective, which leveraged the grant funds to complete the vision.
“That’s something we know we can accomplish because we’ve got the grant to do it,” Lewis said.
The draft identifies two objectives to meet Goal 1. The first is to determine the average number of homeless in Sweet Home on a seasonal basis and residents by 2015. The second is to identify the needs of the Sweet Home homeless population.
For Goal 2, there is a single objective so far, to provide a program that teaches basic life skills for Sweet Home youth by 2015.
Goal 3 includes four objectives:
n Identify and quantify parks within the urban growth boundary as part of a parks master plan by June 2014.
n Identify and quantify open space within the UGB by 2015.
n Provide opportunities for people to access and enjoy picnic amenities in Hobart Park by fall 2015.
n Complete by fall 2014 the Hobart Natural Area Stewardship Plan that effectively addresses the care of indigenous sensitive species and their habitat as well as enhances the public’s experience of this valued open space.
Under Goal 4, objectives include developing a list of questions to ask existing and potential businesses to determine if it fits the vision and developing a profile that identifies the desirable attributes of sustainable business by the end of the year.
Under Goal 5, proposed objectives are to define the characteristics of cultural capacity and to determine the population level that sustains the cultural capacity.
For more information or to view draft documents, contact the Community Development Department at (541) 367-8113 or stop by the office at City Hall, 1140 12th Ave.