With some of this year’s Oregon Jamboree line-up signed, if not delivered, it’s time to start getting ready for summer and visitors.
But it’s also time to think long-term and we have a chance to do that next Tuesday, Jan. 29.
That’s when representatives of Cascade West Council of Governments and Oregon Downtown Development Association will conduct an assessment of Sweet Home’s downtown. Their job is to identify our business district’s strengths and weaknesses and lay out what kind of potential they see there.
After they spend the day touring the town and meeting with local officials and business people, they will meet with you – or any local resident who wants to hear what they have to say or weigh in on the situation – at a community meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Sweet Home Police Conference Room.
Five years ago, almost to the month, the ODDA did a detailed report on how Sweet Home could turn things around. It included a lot of discussion of how to make drab downtown buildings more attractive, how to create a downtown experience that people would want to stop for, how to help businesses become more viable and to complement one another and what to do about parking.
These people were not dreamers. They were experts who had helped make it happen in other, similar communities and who had nuts-and-bolts suggestions to make Sweet Home better. For a variety of reasons, the progress made since that report has been, well, marginal.
The team had some big ideas, which included pocket parks to give people a chance to gather and interact in a less sterile setting than a sidewalk or parking lot, street trees in key locations, benches and bike racks and other amenities to make the downtown area more people-friendly, a walking path along Ames Creek between Long and Main streets – stuff like that. They talked about what kinds of businesses would attract tourists and meet local needs in a way that would be profitable. They talked about marketing. They talked about specific strategies to get local folks and tourists involved in activities within the business district.
They delivered their report and left town.
Changes did occur. Some indominable souls planted a median, created a façade improvement program, got benches installed (one right next to The New Era), and implemented other relatively minor suggestions made by the ODDA team.
But Sweet Home still has as many or more empty storefronts as it did in 2003. The tourists still whiz by, one after another, on summer days, heading for the lakes or the mountains.
The Oregon Jamboree visitors still wander the sidewalks, ducking into the few downtown businesses that are open, and looking for a chance to spend some of their vacation dollars.
The question for us all now is are we ready to take this to another level? Are we interested in making changes that, while not necessarily restoring Sweet Home’s business district to what it was in 1975, might make the town more attractive and give us a chance to get our share of the tourist dollars that are racing by now to places like Sisters and the seashore?
If you care about the future of Sweet Home, if you have ideas for what it could or should become, or if you want a say in what changes might come about, participate in that assessment Tuesday. Show up to the community meeting at the Police Station, 1950 Main St., at 6:30 p.m. (or at least before 8:30 p.m.) and listen to what the experts have to say about us. Ask questions. Brainstorm. Argue. Complain.
Participate.
Sweet Home will never get beyond what it is now – a cozy, small town where most people hop on the highway each morning to drive to work somewhere else, rumbling past the empty storefronts on Main Street between 10th and 18th avenues – unless people make it happen.
Those people are us.