Commentary by Jack Wolcott

On behalf of the Corvallis Independent Business Alliance, I would like to express our thanks and appreciation for your support this past year and wish everyone a healthy and prosperous new year.

As we embark on another season, I would like to encourage you to reflect on the events of last year, the opportunities for change, how you felt about the outcome and if you felt your concerns were adequately considered. I think for many of us, 2004 was a bit of a rude awakening in the subtle complexities of land-use laws and how best to make our opinions understood to the appropriate organizations that govern them.

We discovered that it is a very slow, lengthy process that often depends on decisions made quite awhile ago, when circumstances may have been different. We learned that the best time to make a difference is not when the problem is discovered; it is much better to take a proactive stance and identify our community's interests and needs. This helps ensure that we grow together as a coherent neighborhood with mutually dependent interests and goals.

It would be a fundamental mistake to assume that it is too late for one person or a small group to speak up about the quality of the community in which they want to raise their family or enjoy their retirement years. That is one of the most appealing things about Corvallis: We don't have to be like any other city. We have many unique circumstances that we should utilize to our mutual advantage.

Instead of looking at our distance from the I-5 freeway as a discouragement for development, we can use it to develop a unique identity. We do not need to duplicate what is already reasonably available to us when we can create a distinctive destination that not only draws a higher quality of visitor to Corvallis, but also encourages the type of local ownership that is committed to supporting local needs, schools and charities.

I believe we can develop a relatively simple plan to identify the type of businesses that fit our needs and then either look for individuals to open them or recruit successful independent businesses to move here. We need to break our dependence on thinking of the national brand name as being the significant detail and realize that we are really talking about the quality of the merchandise.

All I am really saying is that we need to give the "local option" at least an equal opportunity to fill the local needs. If you look downtown, you will notice that most of the development in recent years has come from local owners. Why wait for national developers to try to sneak into town and then go through the divisive and expensive process of appeals when a local group sincerely feels it is not in our community's best interest for them to locate here?

This is a great opportunity to talk with our new City Council and let them know what you would like their priorities to be for the next two years. We have a good balance of experience and new energy, and they all need our support and considered input as they develop their goals.
lars, 1:30 PM [link]