Sean C. Morgan
Local Master Gardeners who have recently completed their training want to beautify Sweet Home in an effort that would start downtown and eventually ripple out to the residential areas.
The group, including Bill Carroll, Barbara Taylor and Bud Liberatore, met with representatives of various groups and businesses Thursday night to discuss how to get it done.
The new Master Gardeners want to plant the median strip in Main Street downtown and put the hanging flower baskets that were up on Main Street in the early 1990s back up.
Based on neighborhood conversations between residents and the City of Sweet Home, many think that Sweet Home is a “dirty” community, Carroll told the group. “There has been some work done, but there’s more to be done.”
Moving beyond the downtown business area, Carroll would like to see beautification efforts continue in the City Hall parking lot and on into the residential areas. His question for those at the meeting was what to do to improve the look of the community.
To make the improvements, the group would need to sell itself and its goals, building community spirit and pride, Carroll said. His goal in meeting with various groups stems from the realization that “if we’re going to achieve anything as a city, we’ve got to work together.”
“I wish you all the luck in the world,” Marie Bradley, owner of The Grey Goose and Sweet Home Business Association, said. “It sounds wonderful, but if you can get anybody in this town to do it more than two or three weeks, it would be wonderful.”
Taylor said she had talked with many business owners about the hanging baskets and understood there were mixed feelings about their effectiveness in beautifying the town and drawing business to local stores.
“I do believe that businesses in Sweet Home aren’t exactly thriving,” Taylor said. It is a bedroom community where a lot of dollars travel out of town. From the business viewpoint, these projects take money, and the Master Gardeners are looking at how they can take the burden of the beautification projects from business owners.
“It can’t be just a flash in the pan just before the Jamboree,” she said. Some business owners are negative because of the failure of past efforts to catch on long term, and rightfully so, but business owners can see there are non-monetary rewards, “but that’s hard to see when those rewards don’t pay the bills.”
The solution is if this group can get “a lot of people to do a little bit consistently,” Taylor said. A large number of persons told her that what they felt fell through was long-term consistency.
Having had their on-street parking reduced by last year’s Highway 20 project, Lorena and Howard Ruby were concerned that plans for the planters and downtown businesses may detract from businesses, that trees potentially planted in the median strip would prevent drivers from seeing businesses on the opposite side of the road and divert attention to the center of the road away from businesses.
The City of Sweet Home has hired landscape architect Ed Hilliard to develop a planting schedule for the median strip. Hilliard plans to hold a meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 21 with the group that met Thursday and any interested persons at the Senior Center in the Jim Riggs Community Center to discuss concerns and preferences so he can develop a planting schedule for the median strip. At the same time, the plants would need to be low-maintenance.
Sweet Home Economic Development Group President Jean McKinney said that the group would need to show some work before it would get people excited about it.
Given the skepticism of some business owners, Carroll said he was hoping their efforts would “build pride, build faith as it goes.”
This effort needs to go beyond the business community into the rest of the community as well.
For information about the upcoming meeting, persons may contact City Manager Craig Martin, who has been working with the Master Gardeners, at 367-8969 or Carroll at 367-1534.