Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Longtime Sweet Home resident and new Planning Commissioner Greg Stephens wants to see Sweet Home grow, but in an orderly way.
The Sweet Home City Council appointed Stephens to serve on the Planning Commission at the May 22 council meeting.
He is an ultrasound operator at Wah Chang. He tests metal using sound to find flaws and inclusions before selling metal parts to customers.
Stephens was born and raised in Idaho. He has lived in Oregon for 40 years.
“We’ve lived mostly in the Crawfordsville area for roughly 30 years,” he said. There he and his wife of 43 years, Linda, used to raise registered polled Hereford cattle.
Getting closer to retirement, they sold the ranch and moved closer to town, outside the city limits, he said.
The Planning Commission can include up to two members who live in the area but not inside the city limits.
“I’ve never been able to be involved in Sweet Home like I’d like to have been,” Stephens said, although he did coach youth baseball when his two boys, now grown with five children of their own, were at that age.
Now close to retirement and the ranch sold, he felt like he had the time.
“There was a vacancy came available,” Stephens said, and “I guess I’ve always been interested in the process of how planning evolved.”
“Obviously, there’s things that happen that you don’t agree with,” he said, but if someone isn’t willing to join up and get involved, he shouldn’t be whining about it.
Because he lives outside the city limits, there are few city committees he can participate in, he said. The Planning Commission is one on which he can.
That also may give him a more non-biased approach, he said.
“It looks to me like Sweet Home is ready to explode in the most growth it’s ever had right now,” he said. “I look forward to making the decisions that will make that growth orderly.
“I’m pro-property rights, but on the other hand, you have to be sensitive to the balance of community and property.”
Balancing private property rights with the needs of the community “becomes a tough, tough deal,” he said.
Sweet Home has changed over the decades and become a bedroom community, Stephens said. With Wal-Mart in Lebanon and Fred Meyer in Albany, that same kind of development is unlikely in Sweet Home.
He believes Sweet Home’s growth will mostly be residential, which will bring its own can of worms, requiring growth in schools and city services.
He would like to see a little more business growth rather than residential, he said, but he’s not sure how to get there.
The efforts of the community to improve itself have been outstanding, he said. “I think Sweet Home has done a great job on the median strip and flowers. The Jamboree has brought a lot of people to Sweet Home, and they’ve seen how nice it is,” and people have come to live in Sweet Home as a result.
He attended his first Planning Commission meeting on June 4.
He was selected from a field of four candidates, including William Nyara, Nancy Patton and Dominic Burns.