EDITOR’S NOTE: Three local officials accompanied Knox Pages reporters to Sherwood, Oregon, to learn how Intel affected that community over the years. We asked them to comment briefly on their thoughts about the trip. Elaine Robinson, director of the Knox County Career Center, shared her thoughts last week. Below is the opinion of Jeff Gottke, president of the Knox County Area Development Foundation.
MOUNT VERNON — I think the big takeaway from the week visiting Sherwood, Oregon, and Washington County is “Growth can happen to us, or it can happen with us.”
In Knox County, we have many advantages and can optimize those to be the masters of our destiny — or watch the world go by and complain.
As a former colleague said, quoting The Simpsons, “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”
Here are three separate thoughts connected by that idea.
Collaboration & proper planning are key to addressing growth challenges
Sherwood purposely chose to grow after it realized that being a bedroom community was economically and financially unsustainable.
The city administration committed to becoming a more balanced city, but knew it would take planning and public input to create public buy-in and bring the growth it wanted to see.
In nearly every meeting we had with a planning or government official, the importance of community planning driven by public input and followed by clear messaging was emphasized. From balancing rural character with urban growth to attracting business and housing, public input was vital to creating legitimacy for a project.
A government cannot just do whatever it wants. Its citizens are smarter than that.
If they can’t understand the vision or feel like they aren’t part of it, then at best, they won’t support it. At worst, they will fight against it.
People want to be on a team; they just have to be shown how.
Big towns can feel like small towns
Again, this shows the importance of proper planning. Hillsboro, home of Intel in Oregon, has a population of 110,000 and has undergone tremendous growth over the past 30 years. However, walking in its downtown area still feels like a small town.
Small, two-story buildings line the streets, with shops that harken back to a bygone time and aren’t found in many places anymore. Shops selling toys, high school spirit wear, shoes, books, antiques, and hobby items make the visitors feel like they have returned to the 1950s.
Neighborhoods and civic buildings are immediately adjacent and connected with easily walkable sidewalks.
Points of interest, like the historic giant sequoia grove, are marked with plaques to create identity and connect the reader to the past.
Sure, the largest employer in Oregon, shopping malls, commercial corridors, and suburban-style developments are nearby.
Still, they are kept at arms-length to maintain the city’s small-town feel and historic charm. Through proper land use, design, traffic control, placemaking, and storytelling, a big town can still feel like a small town.
Losing rural charm is as important in Oregon as it is in Ohio
The march of time threatens our understanding of who we are. Places grow or shrink, people come and go, and our lifestyles and tastes change due to technology. This can undermine who we think we are as a community, particularly if we view it through the gauzy veil of nostalgia.
However, a concerted effort can help us retain the best of our past while harnessing the efficiencies of the future. We have talked a lot about losing our “rural character and small-town charm.” The same is true in Oregon; the advancing sprawl of the Portland area threatens the farmland and open spaces of the countryside.
The Portland area has doubled down on its effort to create a growth boundary outside of which large-scale development cannot occur. In a sense, this protects rural land, but does it also protect rural lifestyle? Not necessarily.
While we should concentrate on keeping our spaces open, we should equally concentrate on protecting the social and civic institutions that make rural life possible.
We should be neighborly and polite to each other, help out when needed, know our history, maintain personal responsibility, and cheer for the home team on Friday night.