Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
“But Sweet Home didn’t die. The courage and inspiration, and stubborness of people with vision have prevailed, with new ideas and concepts. With the same spirit that energized our ancestors, our town survived. This is a new era.”
That was a paragraph from Rachel Mealey Vogel’s letter to the editor published last week in The New Era, and it epitomizes the local community development effort underway right now, according to consultant John Morgan of Salem.
When the process, started at a community meeting last week, is completed, the community will have that statement to “see if we did OK,” Morgan said.
The meeting, “What’s up with Downtown,” held on March 4, was sponsored by the Sweet Home Economic Development Group and the city of Sweet Home. Some 110 persons were signed up to attend the meeting as of March 3. About 125 showed up, according to city officials.
“The sense (organizers) had is everyone is here because they’re interested in the future of Sweet Home,” Morgan said. Motivated by an assessment of the community in January by representatives of the Cascades West Council of Governments and the Oregon Downtown Development Association, Sweet Home residents are saying, “We can do better.”
Morgan grew up in Lebanon and generally works with small communities, he said. He said he spent his youth on Foster Lake, driving through Sweet Home and visiting its stores.
“I’m nothing but amazed, because I don’t remember the same Sweet Home,” he said.
Sweet Home has an older downtown and was a logging town, he said. “It was a free-standing community. You didn’t have to go anywhere.”
Like all timber communities, it suffered a downturn population and industry, he said. But things have changed since then.
“Look at the number of you who weren’t here 10 years ago,” he said. He said he asked a few people before the meeting why they moved to Sweet Home. The answer was the quality of life here.
Residents want to see investment and improvement, he said. While many small towns have given way to strip developments, their downtowns have deteriorated, a broken window gradually giving way to more with grass growing in the cracks of sidewalks and parking lots.
That hasn’t happened to Sweet Home as much as other communities – even Lebanon to an extent, Morgan said. People have worked hard to protect the community.
The question the meeting and a follow-up meeting on March 20 are expected to answer is “what can the community do to make the downtown a better place?” he said. He particularly noted he is not asking what the city government can do.
He asked participants to think of one word as they talked at the Tuesday meeting, he said, the thing that brought them to the meeting: Prosperity.
“I mean prosperity in a number of ways,” Morgan said. Obviously, one is “ringing cash registers,” with viable and vital businesses providing a positive income and cash flow.
It also includes employment opportunities for those who might want to make a career, as well as service jobs, primarily for youth in the community, and investment in land and buildings that will result in businesses that provide a return on the investment.
In terms of government, it means more tax revenues rather than declining revenues from declining property values, which means important services remain funded.
Other definitions are more nebulous, Morgan said, but among them is “patronage.” That’s the group of concerned business people who are willing to give back, through meetings like the one on Tuesday or putting their names on a Little League jersey, he said.
That comes out of a vibrant downtown, Morgan said. “You won’t get that out of a dying downtown.”
It means the community has stores the residents need, along with some interesting stores that draw consumers, he said. It means community pride.
“Flowerboxes are not economic development,” he said. “They are great. They make downtown pretty. They create an atmosphere.
“(But) solid downtown projects are based on solid business thinking.”
That means the downtown has something to sell, Morgan said. To do this, the community needs to attract three things: investment, professional services and customers. He said he wants to know what causes a business to choose Sweet Home over Lebanon or Burns; what makes a group of professionals, like lawyers or doctors, come to a place like Sweet Home; and where do the customers come from, “what can happen to get those customers to come here and make those cash registers ring?”
Travelers are a big part of the final part of the question, Morgan said, but there’s something else, the people who live here. When residents worked in Sweet Home, they shopped in Sweet Home.
He said he would bet half of those attending the meeting work elsewhere, and people “tend to shop where they work. Competing for customers is an important thing, and often, that’s you.”
To attract customers, he said, he asks “what’s the hook?”
It goes back to the most essential thing, a business plan, he said. “It’s not necessarily putting up flower baskets. It’s probably going to be something more aggressive than that.
“City governments don’t build great downtowns. Downtowns are built by people in the private sector.”
That’s where the process is headed, asking what the community, economic development groups and the chamber do, he said, and what City Hall can do to induce investment.
“Your role as a community is to figure out how to get other people to spend money,” he said. That involves a business plan, identifying short-term and long-term goals and strategies.
“What we hope to do tonight is capture a lot of ideas,” he said. With the information gathered, the group will reconvene in a meeting on March 20 to talk about specific strategies and ways to implement them.
He asked the participants, crowded around 16 tables, to write down ideas and words that define values, characteristics, hooks (reasons why people would visit), changes they’ve seen in the town, ideas for things that could be done to improve Sweet Home, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked and barriers to success.
A woman at one of the tables explained, “When I came to this town, I liked what I saw.” Another replied, “me too,” especially the family-oriented values.
Some listed about the need for parking.
Participants wrote down hundreds of ideas for consideration. The values that define Sweet Home included everything from “supportive” and “volunteer spirit” to “good customer service” and “minimal fog in winter.”
Several comments said the city must enforce its ordinances and mentioned “stubbornness” and “not sophisticated” as barriers to success.
Participants described Sweet Home as community-oriented with natural beauty, stressing its position as the “Gateway to the Cascades.” One mentioned a “tired and tacky” downtown while another said it has no identity. It has friendly people, but it is not friendly to walking and “buildings need to be updated.”