Baker City officials look at slow-growth option

Over the past three months, 14 focus groups comprising 133 community volunteers spent hundreds of hours studying and debating the pros and cons of three planning options for Baker City’s future, including a no-growth do nothing strategy, a slow-growth strategy designed to see Baker City expand over 25 years to a population somewhere between 15,000 to 30,000, and a fast-growth model that helped the Bend-Redmond area soar from a population of around 30,000 to more than 80,000 during the last 25 years.

 “What we wound up with was almost unanimous consensus for the slow-growth model, favored by 13 of the 14 focus groups,” said Don Chance, Baker City planning director.

Chance said he and other city officials, including Mayor Dennis Dorrah, wanted to maximize community involvement in the focal groups and to accomplish that goal the planning department invited local graduates of the Ford Family Foundation leadership program to help recruit volunteers and act as facilitators for the focus groups.

Results of the focus groups are included in a draft report and analysis released Tuesday called “Inventing the Future,” which Chance said is one of the first steps in The Baker City Community Vision Project initiated by the planning department as part of the first thorough review of the city’s comprehensive plan in nearly 30 years.

“The report is a summary of conversations that occurred in the 14 focus groups,” Chance said, adding that two people were on hand to record most of the focus group meetings.

Chance said periodic reviews are required periodically under state laws passed originally by the 1973 Oregon Legislature, and other land-use laws and regulations subsequently passed by lawmakers and administered by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, under the guidance of the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC).

 “Visioning is the first part of the periodic review process,” Chance said.

From the focus groups, Chance said most participants made it very clear that they don’t want the things they love about Baker City to change for the worse, such as the friendly, hometown atmosphere where neighbors and people around town know each other, wave and say hello, and where parents feel safe letting their children walk to school and play outside.

“People like the scale of Baker City. They like the medical services. They like the authenticity — it is a real community, not a contrived resort town,” Chance said. “They like the 1950s feel of Baker, which is kind of a throwback to what America was like in the 1950s.

“Since the 1960s, most cities have changed dramatically, but Baker hasn’t changed that much. People like that,” Chance said.

On the other hand, Chance said 13 of the 14 focus groups recognized that with school enrollment dropping by 240 students in the past three years alone due to the lack of family wage jobs and career opportunities needed to keep people in their 20s and 30s from leaving, the no-growth, do-nothing option is not acceptable.

“Most people recognize the future is bleak under the do-nothing scenario,” Chance said.

All but one of the focus group concluded that under the current circumstances, it’s too hard for people to find living-wage jobs and to prosper and support their families here, Chance said.

“Families are very important to people here, but it’s hard on family unity when children and grandchildren have to leave and move to the big cities to find jobs,” Chance said.

Among the younger folks in their 20s and 30s heard from during the focus group meetings, most said all of their friends who they grew up with in Baker City left town when they got university degrees or technical training. Chance said those who are still here confided that they were planning to leave too, due to the lack of good job opportunities here.

 “That was the most overwhelming thing we heard in almost all of the focus groups,” Chance said, adding that the only people who didn’t share that concern about the lack of living-wage job opportunities and the huge drop in student enrollment, were those who are already retired or who receive government disability checks.

On the other hand, all 14 of the focus groups concluded that they don’t want to see Baker City follow in the fast-growth path that led to soaring population growth and loss of small-town atmosphere in the Bend/Redmond area of Central Oregon, Chance said.

While members of the focus groups made it abundantly clear they don’t want Baker City to turn into another Bend, they were nearly as adamant that they don’t want to sit idly by as the town’s population grows older and older.

“As the population gets more and more elderly, it affects retail businesses, it affects school enrollment, it affects health care services and city services,” Chance said.

Probably the most important thing that Chance said came out of the focus groups was a “very strong support for a slow-growth vision that retains the things people love about the community.”

“People  said, ‘We know we have to grow in the long run to sustain the community, but we don’t want to lose the attributes we love,’” Chance said.

This week, he is sending the draft report to the local Ford Family Foundation leadership program folks who participated in the focus groups to get their feedback, and to members of the City Council, prior to developing a final report.

The next challenge for the planning staff and other city officials is to foster a grassroots effort to identify a strategy for creating a future that retains the things people love about Baker City, while generating the kind of slow growth needed to reverse the town’s aging and economic decline by creating job opportunities that attract and retain younger workers and families.

“I don’t think Baker City will ever become a ghost town, but we could really be hurting a decade from now if we don’t all start pulling on the rope in the same direction,” Chance said. “If there is any chance for this to be successful, the entire community has to be behind it.”

During the next few weeks a final report on the visioning process will be produced and made available for public review prior to development of proposed amendments to the comprehensive plan. And, as is required by law, Chance said any proposed amendments to the comprehensive plan would be subject to review and multiple public hearings before the planning commission and the Baker City Council, prior to adoption.