Benny Westcott
Putting on a three-day country music festival might never be easy, but organizing the 2021 Oregon Jamboree has been more difficult than usual.
“It’s hard to even explain what we’ve been through,” Jamboree Director Robert Shamek told the City Council at its June 22 meeting. “We had almost 4,000 of our patrons roll their tickets over from 2019 to 2021, and so we knew we had to move forward.”
“There were a lot of festivals and fairs that just straight out said they weren’t going to do it,” he continued. “A lot of them went bankrupt, and a lot of them will go bankrupt.
“But with us, we’ve been doing it for 28 years. We knew we had to push through to our 29th year. The reality was, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have another Jamboree. We just couldn’t sustain for another full year of sitting around doing nothing, not selling tickets.”
“It’s definitely been challenging, trying to put a plan together,” he continued. “Everything we plan on changes. At some point, you almost want to give up and just wait, but you can’t. So we just have to keep pushing forward with our COVID plan. Every week we switch it up, we have to dig deeper into it, make sure that we’re compliant. Even though our festival isn’t tomorrow, we have to plan for our festival being tomorrow.”
Booking artists has also been more of a hassle.
“It’s been really interesting this year, especially with artist contracts,” Shamek said. “Some of the verbiage in the artist contracts, I never thought I would see in my lifetime. They far exceed any COVID restrictions that have been in place in Linn County.
“It’s pretty incredible what we’re having to jump through in some of these contracts that I sign. My attorney says, ‘Well, what else are you going to do? You’ve got to sign it; you’ve got to abide by it.'”
“It will be an interesting year,” he concluded. “I can’t wait for it to happen, and I can’t wait for it to be over at the same time.”
The number of tickets the Jamboree will sell remains unclear.
“As it sits right now, we could get to 50% capacity,” Shamek said. “That would put us at about 10,000. I would love to shoot for 75% if it opens up a little further. That would be pretty much our max for this year, about 13,000 tickets. Which is still somewhat below what we typically have.”
Councilor Dave Trask asked about vendors.
“We are getting a decent number of vendors,” Shamek responded. “Unfortunately, the work force right now is no good. So a lot of our repeat vendors, like Oregon Barbeque – they’ve been a vendor of ours forever – they just can’t get any employees to man the Jamboree. They’re really struggling.”
Shamek said that at this point, the Jamboree has 16 food vendors, which he noted “is down a little bit” from past years.
But, he said, “It will be great for the food vendors that are there. They’ll definitely be busy.”
Shamek said a couple of merchandise vendors backed out as well.
“It’s just been a tough year for those vendors,” he said. “All they do is festivals and fairs. I personally know quite a few of them that just completely went bankrupt and had to find different jobs. That’s always tough, because they’re really great people, and some of them have been coming to the Jamboree for 29 years. And so to not have them at the Jamboree is kind of like missing a part of your family.”
But on the bright side, Shamek concluded, “we do have some really good food vendors for sure. If you’re hungry for some fair food, here it comes.”
Council members unanimously approved the Oregon Jamboree’s application to put on the event this summer.
18th Avenue from Long Street to Mountain View will be closed and blocked off to through traffic from 7 a.m. Thursday, July 29, through 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 1.
The portion of 18th Avenue immediately adjacent to the concert grounds and serving no residential properties will be completely blocked off to all vehicles from 11 a.m. Thursday, Jul. 29, to 10 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 1.
14th Avenue from Kalmia Street to Grape Street will also be closed.
All residents of 18th Avenue and Kalmia Street will receive passes allowing them to proceed to and from their homes.
Sankey Park and Weddle Bridge will be closed to the public from 6 a.m. Monday, July 26, through 10 a.m. Monday, Aug. 2.
Upper Sankey Park and the City Hall location will be used for RV/tent campsites. Northside Park will be used for tent-only campsites. The sites will be sold for $120-$140 each for the entire weekend.
City-owned property to the south and west of the concert site and a portion of the Sankey Park area will be used for Beer Gardens.
Talking Trash
In other news, Sweet Home Sanitation gave its annual update to the council.
“Our transfer station is a little undersized, and we’ve been growing,” said site manager Michael Grove.
Grove said that in 2016 the transfer station was receiving “40 cars a day per average, and now in 2021, we’re sitting anywhere from 90 to 100 cars per day. So we are pretty much literally out of room.”
Brian White, who also works for Sweet Home Sanitation, elaborated on the reasons for the upsurge in trash drop-offs.
“A lot of the folks that are coming into town now are coming from the Lebanon area,” he said.
The reason for this, he explained, is that Republic Services, which operated a transfer station in Lebanon, closed that station about a year and a half ago. At the same time, Republic Services substantially increased the rates at its Coffin Butte landfill in Corvallis.
“So what we’re seeing, just chatting with folks on the street as they’re waiting, is that most of these people are from out of town, and they are frustrated with the rates that they’re paying in Coffin Butte and/or the fact that the transfer station in Lebanon has closed,” White said.
However, Grove said that Sweet Home Sanitation broke ground on a second scale in May.
“The idea was to have an inbound and outbound scale,” he said. “It’s going to get the flow moving a lot quicker. And it will hopefully lead to a few less calls about cars being out there on 18th [Ave.]. That’s always a tough one.”
Grove expects to have the second scale running by the end of July or the beginning of August.
White talked about recycling, saying that a lot of the issues people have with recycling stem from confusion over recyclables.
“In Lane County, a certain type of plastic is accepted, whereas in Linn County it is not accepted, and so on and so forth throughout the state,” White said. “There is an attempt by the Legislature to put everybody on the same playing field, which we are very excited about.”
White also mentioned another idea going through the state Legislature that he termed “extended producer responsibility.”
“That would require a little bit of accountability from the folks that create the plastics that are getting to the market, and force those folks to pay some of the costs of recycling,” White said.
“So instead of addressing it on the back end, the goal is to address it on the front end before the material is made,” he said.
He said that the legislation to make that happen is moving through the Oregon House of Representatives. .
“The earliest there would be any kind of implementation at this point looks to be 2024, but there is progress,” he said.
Paving Streets
Council members approved a $656,000 project to conduct paving of streets throughout the city, but not before removing some from the proposed list in order to stay within their fiscal year 2022 budget.
“We hear often that people want their streets fixed. Paved, potholes resurfaced, overlay, whatever the case may be,” said City Manager Ray Towry. “That’s not a new issue for staff to hear. And it comes from all over the city, whether they are aware of the history of a neighborhood or not. It’s a consistent theme that we get from the community, of their displeasure of the condition of their streets and roads.
“In my tenure here, I think we as a team have accomplished a lot of good things,” he continued. “Unfortunately, a lot of it is not real visible to the public, except for Sankey Park. A lot of it’s been underground, it’s been sewer plant, water treatment plant work, planning, preparation, staffing.
“But if I have a regret as the city manager, it’s that we haven’t done enough paving. I think the condition of roads in our community is probably in the top three of complaints that we get.”
On March 23, the council approved street overlays in two phases. With Phase 1 construction complete, city staff is ready to execute Phase 2. But the lessons learned from Phase 1 and more consideration have led to a drastic increase in Phase 2’s projected cost.
The engineer’s original estimate for Phase 2 was $362,844. However, the engineer’s updated estimate presented to council was $884,115. In addition, this sum is actually higher, as staff recommends allowing $1.05 million in total to provide an 18% construction contingency. Thus, the project as initially proposed, would total out well above the $600,000 allocation for overlays in the city’s fiscal year 2022 budget.
Phase 2 originally planned overlays for 16 Sweet Home streets. Trask moved to have staff prepare a new budget to fund the entire project, and present it to the council at its July 13 meeting.
According to the request for council action submitted by Engineering Technician Trish Rice and Public Works Director Greg Springman, “this option makes the best use of the time-value of the city’s funds, due to inflation. Construction materials continue to get more expensive, so it’s advantageous to pave as much as you can, while you can.”
The motion failed 4-2. Diane Gerson and Trask voted yes, while four councilors voted no. Lisa Gourley chose to abstain out of concern over a conflict of interest, because she lives on Juniper Street, one of the roads on which an overlay was proposed.
After being asked to give city staff some direction on how to proceed after the proposal was shot down, council asked Rice to calculate how much it would cost to do certain oil mat and paved roads while leaving other roads off the list. She calculated that cost would come to about $656,000, for which Finance Director Brandon Neish said the city would have current authorized budgeted funds.
Following this, the council voted unanimously to approve the amended list, which removed proposed overlays of Juniper Street, 32nd Court, portions of Poplar and Osage streets, 52nd Avenue, and 13th Avenue. The list still included Kalmia Street, 45th to 47th avenues, 42nd Avenue south of Long Street, Locust Street, 54th Avenue, Larch Street, Vine Street off of 18th Avenue, Poplar Street west of 9th Avenue, and Nandina Street between 54th and 56th avenues.
Towry said: “I personally feel very comfortable if people come and complain about not getting their roads paved, explaining to them that we are doing everything that we can as fast as we can, while trying to look at the big picture of ‘Is there water line or sewer line work that needs to be done first? So we’re not cutting into a brand-new street.’ And, that we have budgetary restraints, especially when it comes to streets, and especially with COVID over the last year cutting into gas taxes and the trickle down revenue we receive from the state.”
In other action:
– The council voted unanimously to execute a contract for The Automation Group (TAG) to provide integrator of record service to the city, to support the city’s wastewater and water treatment plants and distribution system.
“The integrator is sort of the conductor to the orchestra that makes sure everything plays together, all of the computers are talking to each other, and all the equipment is set up correctly in the computer system, so you push a button and it does the thing that it should,” Rice told the council.
The city received four proposals before ultimately choosing TAG.
The city does not currently have an integrator of record. According to a staff proposal presented to the council, “instrument integration has been individually procured on a project-by-project basis. This piecemeal history has complicated/contributed to many operational issues in the water treatment plant and the distribution system, which results in a great deal of staff time being spent on tasks that should be automated.”
– The council voted unanimously to adopt the budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year that was previously approved by the Budget Committee. The fiscal year runs from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022, and the adopted budget is for $25,105,512.
– The council voted 5-2 to authorize the mayor to sign a grant application to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) for planning assistance to begin implementation of House Bill 2003 by conducting a housing needs analysis. The dissenting votes came from Dylan Richards and Angelita Sanchez.
In 2019, the Oregon Legislature passed House Bill 2003, which mandated that cities with a population over 10,000 develop and adopt a housing needs analysis and housing production strategy. The population of Sweet Home was estimated to be 9,415 in 2020, and is expected to exceed 10,000 in the near future.
The census will be released in September with a population update.
“Based on the numbers I’ve seen this past year and everything with our housing, I will be absolutely shocked if we are under 10,000 when that census comes out,” said Mayor Greg Mahler. “Because we’ve had a lot of housing development in Sweet Home, and a lot of people moved to Sweet Home in this last year.”
The DLCD is offering grants to cities with populations under 10,000 to pay for a housing needs analysis in order to ensure that cities have an available land supply to accommodate housing needs over the next 20 years.
Explaining her dissenting opinion, Sanchez said “I’m of the opinion that free money isn’t always free. The strings that came attached with that free money, I think it’s premature to tie the hands of working families and small businesses prior to getting the census data.”
“I’m not really into accepting Salem’s money for government over-regulation,” she added.
Sweet Home receives the grant so long as it satisfies the housing production strategy laid out in House Bill 3155, which requires that the city:
– Conduct a housing-needs analysis to estimate housing needs for the next 20 years;
– Inventory the supply of buildable lands available within the urban growth boundary to accommodate the estimated housing needs;
– Adopt measures necessary to accommodate the estimated housing needs; and
– Update the housing-needs analysis on a schedule not to exceed once every eight years.
“We have not had a housing-needs analysis done since 2001. So the information that we have is significantly out of date,” said Community and Economic Development Director Blair Larsen.