Report: Baker should grow, but slow

Baker City leaders hope to lay the groundwork for a future that brings higher-paying jobs, more shopping variety, a more vibrant cultural night life and well-maintained neighborhoods without wrecking the city’s small town appeal and authentic character.

However, getting there will take a cooperative effort and a socially valid vision for the future, according to a community visioning report titled “Inventing the Future.”

They considered three hypothetical scenarios: one in which the city essentially stays as is, one in which the city grows rapidly on the model of Bend, and one in which the city grows, but at a modest pace.

The vast majority of participants preferred the slower-growth scenario.

The Baker City planning staff and participants in the Ford Family Foundation leadership program coordinated the Baker City Community Vision Project, which culminated with “Inventing the Future.”

(The report, written by Don Chance, the city’s contract planning director, is available on the city’s Web site, www.bakercity.com.)

The community visioning project was undertaken in preparation for the first periodic review of Baker City’s comprehensive plan in nearly 30 years, Chance said.

“The outcome of this planning process, if the community can reach a strongly shared vision, will be reflected in the city’s Comprehensive Plan, economic development programs, housing objectives, codes, ordinances and a variety of other community adopted public policies and initiatives,” according to the report.

“Visioning is simply a process by which a community envisions the future it wants with broad guidelines of how to achieve it.”

In most cities, Chance said the standard approach has been for city planning staff, city councilors and planning commission members to come up with a community vision, sometimes with the help of a task force they appoint.

However, Chance said Baker City is one of the first towns in Oregon to reach out to seek community involvement in developing a community vision on the front end of the period review process.

“We took the risk of designing a different kind of approach because, in all honesty, if a general consensus doesn’t exist or can’t be developed, there is little to be gained in entering a comprehensive community planning effort,” Chance wrote in  the “Inventing the Future” report.

It takes broad community support for a community vision to be socially valid, and without a socially valid shared vision, community planning is most likely doomed to fail, according to the report.

Chance said residents who participated in the Ford Family Foundation leadership program locally were invited to lead the community visioning project.

Those participants invited other members of the community to contribute, and as a result 133 people spent 332 hours discussing a variety of topics during meetings this spring and summer.

Participants were divided into 14 focus groups based on the following categories:

• Natural resource interests, largely county-based

• Senior citizens and retirees, both long-term and recent residents

• High school students

• Young working adults ages 20 to 35, many with children

• People on fixed incomes

• Community college students, young adult to older adults

• The arts community

• Development and construction interests

• Service and retail businesses

• Residents of 20 years or more

• Residents of five years or less

• Healthy lifestyles — various sporting and medical interests

• Ford Family members (two separate groups)

Each focus group was organized by a different member of the Ford Family Foundation team, with members of the city planning staff present at each focus group meeting as observers and recorders.

Chance said reports submitted by independent observers were compared to city staff reports as a double check to weed out any bias.

Most of the focus groups had eight to 10 members, although the “Residents of five years or less” group had two members.

All the groups started with two “warm up” questions:

• What do you like most about Baker City?

• What don’t you like about Baker City?

In answering the first question — What do you like most about Baker City? — focus group participants cited the small town atmosphere, friendliness, openness, familiarity of people, ease of getting around, ability to do business on a handshake, lack of traffic, natural beauty and surrounding recreational opportunities, historic downtown authenticity, the city’s walkability, city parks and lack of big box stores.

Participants also talked about the relatively low cost of living, including housing, civic engagement and volunteerism, personal touch in dealing with local government, and the sense that this is a safe community with little crime where people feel comfortable letting their children walk to school.

As for the second question — What don’t you like about Baker City? — the dominant theme was the lack of family wage jobs, poor prospects for professional positions with good pay, a poor and declining economic climate overall for the community, little opportunity to retain the community’s educated youth, declining school enrollments, and an aging population.

Other things focus group participants said they don’t like about Baker City is the lack of shopping basics, limited operating hours of businesses and a lack of shopping variety, lack of retail vigor and business opportunities, lack of cultural amenities and active civic nightlife, too many old buildings, not enough new buildings, and too many empty, deteriorating buildings downtown in need of renovation.

Others cited excessive resistance to change, lack of pride in ownership in residential neighborhoods, stagnation and resistance to growth, entrenched agendas and divisiveness and “community agenda driven by downtown merchants,” and the notion that “old school and old boy interests still try to control the city.”

The focus group comprising retirees and senior citizens cited the short supply lucrative jobs as a major concern, because it forces their children and grandchildren to move away. The resulting lack of time spend with their children and grandchildren reduces the quality of life after retirement, the focus group members said.

Chance said the concern about declining economic vitality and community stagnation was a consistent sentiment among all focus groups, with the exception of the art community group.

Chance said the fundamental question that emerged from the focus groups is, “Can we be a healthy and authentic small town reflecting largely a former era, but do it in today’s America?”

The focus groups were give three future scenarios to choose from:

• Scenario 1 — current trends future, which assumes, according to the report, “no significant community development or planning intervention strategies occurred.”

“The projected result was an aging population base, continued youth outmigration, struggling economy, stagnant or declining population, and major institutions such as schools and health care delivery under increasing stress.”

• Scenario 2 — Redmond /Bend Aggressive Growth

• Scenario 3 — An Authentic and Sustainable Community, which according to the report “suggests a general vision of a stable and economically healthy town that preserves the best of Baker City while simultaneously correcting problems that threaten future sustainability.”

The scenario envisions, among other things, the city retaining its “essential character” while its population grows “at a rate of 2%-3% per year to a target population of 20,000 to 25,000 over the next 20 to 25 years.”

“People came to describe (Scenario 3) as ‘a little bigger and a lot better,’ ” Chance wrote in the report.

Scenario 3, according to the report, “was the strongly preferred vision in every focus group, except for the Artists group.”

“The result mimics a community survey in 2008 that indicated that 89.6 percent of people say that in order for Baker City to be a sustainable community in 20 years, the city must proactively plan to attract new residents and business into town,” Chance wrote in the report.

“In the same survey, 91.1 strongly agreed that promoting and supporting economic development in the city should be a top priority.”

While encouraging more retail shopping, a wider variety of basics and other merchandise and longer business hours, Scenario 3 supports local retail and continuing to target business development to the downtown core and other existing business districts.

In terms of what types of business development should be encouraged, the focus groups generally agreed on destination tourism and micro manufacturing, according to the report.

Chance said the situation in Baker City is common throughout America.

Some communities are enduring a “slow death” as institutions such as schools, medical services, manufacturing and retail sectors decline.

On the positive side for Baker City, Chance said the focus groups discussions showed that a majority of people in Baker City share the same pride of place, and the same concerns about the city’s future.

“Baker City is facing a Herculean challenge to defy the forces of economic globalization and consolidation that are hammering rural America,” Chance wrote in the visioning report. “The community is capable of doing it through creativity, flexible thinking and sheer determination, but only by truly working together.”