WILSONVILLE – Members of the Oregon Association of Nurseries’ Government Affairs Committee seemed to agree with Metro Chief Operating Officer Michael Jordan’s recommendations on making smarter regional investments at a Sept. 14 meeting.
Jordan was presenting his recommendations for the Community Investment Strategy to the nursery owners, who honed in on the Metro staff chief’s suggestion that a regional task force be formed to target investments.
“How do we be more strategic about a shortage of dollars over the long term?” Jordan asked. “We’ve got enough plans to get us here. We’ve got to figure out how to implement. How do we get it on the ground? It’s a tough transition.”
Nursery owner Dave Adams had a quick answer.
“It’s called confidence in you,” Adams told Jordan. “If you’re going to be asking for money and support, it comes back to confidence that you can do it and do it in a form we can all live with.”
To get that confidence, some nursery owners, like Fisher Farms’ Bob Terry, said the region needs to be better at focusing investment in areas that can bring development.
Cindy Lou Pease, of Evans Farms, questioned whether that was a good strategy.
“Is development driven by money or good planning?” she asked.
“The definition of good planning, is more often than not a decision made in self interest is also in the community’s interest,” Jordan said. “That’s good planning in a market-based economy.”
Adams gave an example of how he thinks good planning could work for businesses reliant on telephone transactions. He’d like to see businesses like that move to Molalla or Sheridan or other outlying towns.
“You don’t have to have everything in Portland,” Adams said.
Jordan, a former Canby city manager, agreed.
“Here’s the big kahuna example of your issue,” the Metro staff boss said. “We, in the metropolitan region, should care as much about job creation in Vancouver as we do on the Oregon side. We could eliminate or at least reduce potentially significant infrastructure investments, if there were more jobs there.
“We should be thinking about how to create jobs in lots of places, not just Portland,” Jordan said.