Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Just do it.
That was essentially the message delivered Tuesday evening by two downtown renewal experts who spent the day observing Sweet Home’s commercial district.
Pam Silbernagel of the Oregon Cascade West Council of Governments and Vicki Dugger, executive director of the Oregon Downtown Association, reported at the end of the day on their conclusions to approximately 40 people gathered in the Police Services Conference Room. The audience included all seven City Council members, city planning staff, several Sweet Home Economic Development Group board members, and a variety of business owners and private citizens.
The two-hour meeting included a report from Silbernagel and Dugger on their findings, followed by questions and some give-and-take with audience members.
Earlier in the day, the two met for lunch with local citizens, officials and business owners, they spent time walking the streets and visiting downtown businesses, and they put on a business recruitment seminar for those interested in that topic.
It wasn’t all happy talk in the end, as Silbernagel and Dugger described some of the problems they see in Sweet Home’s business district, which they described as “worn, blighted and unhealthy.”
But the two emphasized the potential they see in the city, particularly with the natural resources nearby in the lakes and the mountains.
Dugger and Silbernagel were in Sweet Home as a result of a grant that financed visits by the pair to eight area cities and towns that are seeking to improve their downtown areas. The others were Alsea, Philomath, Newport, Toledo, Lebanon, Harrisburg and Scio.
Four cities around the state will get a year of assistance from Dugger and Silbernagel, who made it clear that they were looking for communities ready to move forward to achieve set goals for downtown improvements.
On Friday they announced that they had selected Newport, Toledo, Lebanon and Philomath as the cities that would get the year-long program.
“We’re looking for communities really ready to make that happen,” Silbernagel said Tuesday. “We want you to be thinking tonight that we may not be coming back. But we want you to make things happen.”
“Tonight I’m here to propel you on to the next level.”
The pair listed both strengths and weaknesses they observed in Sweet Home.
Among the strengths they cited in Sweet Home were:
– Its stable and growing population base;
– Its traditional downtown district, which has retained such civic anchors as the Post Office, the library and City Hall;
– SHEDG, whose purpose is to stimulate the growth of business in the community, and which puts on a “world-class” music event;
– Other “good” local events;
– “Big-time” investment in residential and resort-related developments;
– “Excellent” natural resources and “amazing traffic counts” of travelers passing through town.
But then Silbernagel and Dugger delivered a much longer list of weaknesses, including:
– A downtown appearance that is “worn, blighted, cheap and tacky” and an “unhealthy” business district.
Dugger, who is based in Portland, focused on the visual impact of the downtown, describing it through the eyes of a hypothetical retiree looking for a place to settle down and maybe start a business.
“Do you think I’m going to stop and pay a lot of attention in this downtown?” she asked. “I need to see a community that values and treasures its downtown. I want to see a downtown that’s energized, where, unless something crazy happens, I’m going to be successful. Does your downtown say that to me? It doesn’t.”
– A commercial district with the “Energizer Bunny syndrome – it keeps going and going – for three miles!”
“Three miles is too long for a town of 9,000 people,” Duggers said. “I see stuff out on that strip, out of town, that I say ‘Wait a minute, that’d be a perfect fit in the downtown.'”
Though the city has business clusters, they are not readily apparent because they are scattered, she said.
What Sweet Home needs to develop is a downtown that encourages pedestrian activity and has gathering places where people feel drawn to stop and visit and enter surrounding businesses.
– The “dead battery syndrome” – the city lacks momentum, leadership, vision, focus and the capacity to do what is needed downtown. Dugger and Silbernagel emphasized that they weren’t talking about city government, but rather the city as a community when they used the word “city.”
– The city appears to have given up on having a jobs base.
“It seems like you’ve given up and said, ‘Oh well, we’ll just be a bedroom community,'” Dugger said. She said little commercial investment is apparent, though the two said the new Subway “looks good,” though they complained that it is set too far back from Main Street for a downtown business.
– A lack of cross-promotion or marketing.
– A lack of healthy, interesting businesses “to make me stop,” Dugger said. “This is not a browsing downtown,” though, she added, “I think you have a lot of opportunity.”
– A lack of resources or staff to focus or propel redevelopment efforts. SHEDG, they noted, has “moved away from comprehensive economic development and has cut staff” – referring to the departure nearly two years ago of Karen Owen, whose responsibility was to promote economic development in the city.
– A lack of “bootstrap, get-out-of-our-way mentality,” tenacity, and a “just-do-it” attitude.
Both Silbernagel and Dugger noted that a 2003 downtown revitalization plan, prepared by ODA staff for Sweet Home, has largely gone unused.
They offered seven recommendations:
– Make downtown a priority.
– Put dollars and policy where the priorities are – staff to coordinate redevelopment, tools to assist redevelopment and some form of organization or association to drive redevelopment.
– Establish nodes and vision for each of the commercial areas. The “nodes” are centers of business activity – groups of businesses that are easily accessed from street and parking areas. The nodes also have specific, planned focuses.
– Scale back (even more) commercial zoning along the highway and create distinct nodes using developmental regulations and design guidelines for each district.
– Consider wholesale redevelopment of the downtown.
“Just looking at some areas of the downtown, I see buildings that need to go bye-bye,” Dugger said. “Tin buildings, T-111 is very inappropriate for a downtown.”
Silbernagel echoed that point: “I’m a raging preservationist in Albany,” she said. “I’m telling you, you can let those buildings go. They look cheap and tawdry because they used methods that don’t belong in a downtown. They belong on a barn.”
She said rents in the downtown are about a quarter of the going rate in other, similar downtowns.
“You’ve got a lot of nonprofits and service-based stores in prime locations that could go somewhere else that’s cheaper,” she said.
– Revisit urban renewal with an expert in that area.
“You can turn the whole beast by using large-scale redevelopment,” Silbernagel said. “This is the right time to do that right now.”
– Just do business development. Get a team in play, offer business assistance, practice cross promotion and marketing, start a “buy local” campaign, offer mentoring, etc.
During their presentation and the question-and-answer period, the two said that what really needs to happen is for a core of determined citizens to force the issue of making progress on developing the downtown.
“Not everybody’s going to be on the same page on this,” Silbernagel said. “You have to decide if you can speak with a strong enough voice for downtown redevelopment.”
She explained the 20-60-20 rule, which says that on a typical public issue, 20 percent of the people will be strongly for a solution, 10 or 20 percent will be naysayers, and often will be loud in their opposition. The remainder of the population will be pliable.
“Don’t allow yourself to be bullied,” Silbernagle said.
The two said that what the community needs is for someone to step up and make the type of changes they recommend, variously referring to that person as “a catalyst” and “a hero.”
When Dugger asked how many audience members supported having design standards for the downtown, the raise of hands was nearly unanimous.
But City Manager Craig Martin and others pointed out that efforts to enforce existing standards have been met with hostility.
“We haven’t gotten support in the past,” Martin said. “We’ve gotten criticism. People got ticked off because we tried to make them do things according to standards.”
SHEDG President Ron Wood said efforts by Owen to reach out to local businesses were not successful.
“We still didn’t have the buy-in from them,” he said. “They didn’t want to participate or share.”
Silbernagel and Dugger acknowledge that they were prescribing radical change for Sweet Home.
“We are suggesting a very big change for the downtown, that takes place strategically,” Silbernagel said. “You know it’s going to be a process that’s not going to happen overnight.”