The news, on page 1 of today’s paper, that the Sweet Home Economic Development Group is making visible progress toward getting a home of its own for the Oregon Jamboree is a great blast of holiday spirit for our community.
It’s the latest in a series of encouraging developments that, if local residents step up to press forward with ideas and energy, could see Sweet Home indeed realize the potential many of us see here.
We’ve learned that the representatives of the Oregon Downtown Development Association and the Cascades West Council of Governments will be here for an all-day assessment of the downtown area on Jan. 29 as a follow-up to a downtown revitalization workshop that more than a dozen local representatives attended a couple of months ago.
We’re eager to hear what they have to say, because they have experience in the field of fixing towns that are down. Whatever they tell us will simply be directions on where Sweet Home can go from here.
And it’s not like we haven’t come quite a ways already. As the holidays close in and the weather gets colder and danker, think about what’s changed here since the last time we woke up to foggy ice in the morning.
We have a new motorcycle shop, a new full-service auto body shop, two new restaurants, a couple of new second-hand and gift shops, a new gas station, and assorted other businesses and shops springing up – with more on the way. If you drive around town, you’ll notice that residents have painted their houses. Just in the avenues alone, around Oak Heights School, quite a number of homes have gotten beautification treatment. A couple of them, rentals, have gotten serious makeovers.
While all of these individual efforts are likely driven by market forces (such as the need to rent vacant homes), they’re still making the town look brighter and more welcoming. And we should appreciate them.
Which brings us back to the Jamboree plans. We’ve talked in these pages about SHEDG’s efforts to get the worn-out high school tennis courts moved, but we all knew that it’s not really a solution to the festival’s space needs. This 66-acre parcel, located on the old Santiam Lumber mill site east of the water tower, seems well-nigh perfect for seeing the Jamboree become what it needs to become – bigger.
Festival officials say that unless the Jamboree can grow, we won’t get the talent we need — The Jamboree won’t be able to afford the kind of talent that people want to come to Sweet Home to see. And moving to its own property will allow the Jamboree to better handle concertgoers’ demand for alcohol and smoking areas, which is difficult on the high school grounds.
Plus, in line with what’s been suggested earlier by those same Jamboree officials, if an amphitheater or some other type of permanent festival venue is built on the Jamboree property, the city can attract more visitors for other types of music or entertainment than just country music.
What we’re seeing here is people – whether they be SHEDG officials, Chamber of Commerce leaders, business owners, city officials or private citizens – taking further steps toward making the vision of a renewed Sweet Home become a reality. The timber industry may come back, but it will always be subject to the whims of government and the ebb and flow of the markets.
The vision is to develop a future for Sweet Home that will give our community something besides timber to bank on. How that plays out will be determined by people in this community – how they step up to participate in the process of seeing these things happen.
It will take time – community transformations can take decades – but it’s happening.