PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, JULY 10, 2015
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Attracting business
Economic development in Keizer
too often focuses on tourists and visi-
tors. The large playground at Keizer
Rapids Park is supposed to, in part, at-
tract visitors to Keizer from through-
out the region. Stuffi ng soccer and
softball fi elds in that same park is
supposed to appeal to tourneys that
would bring people into our city,
spending money at our local busi-
nesses.
A discussion with some of the
attendees of the recent week-long
conference of a Marshall Island reli-
gious group showed that few of the
800-plus visitors spent time out in
our community. They fed themselves
at the civic center; they slept in some
hotels but most slept in the homes of
local church members. One did not
see many of the attendees in their
bright-colored garb outside the civic
center.
Having a large crowd rent the civic
center for a week was good for the
conference center’s bottom line, but it
didn’t put much of a dent in our local
economy.
The conference center hosts hun-
dreds of people each week for meet-
ings and social events; other meeting
spaces also welcome people to their
respective sites. The city’s businesses
should be able to tap into this tran-
sient market. Keizer businesses have
their own part to play to attract these
visitors into their doors. But, business-
es cannot invite visitors if they don’t
know they are here. Of course busi-
nesses should want to know who’s in
town and seek out that information.
The city’s conference center should
establish an e-mail contact list—in a
partnership with the Keizer Cham-
ber of Commerce—to blast out alerts
a week or two in advance of coming
large groups. That would give eateries,
stores, hotels and others time to plan
how to grab their share of the visitors
spending. That could include gift bags,
certifi cates, or coupons to inform visi-
tors what is available.
Economic development is more
then selling to visitors, of course. It
is increasing spending by local resi-
dents (rather than buying outside the
city limits what is also available here
in Keizer). A key to increasing sales
to local residents is for stores to of-
fer what cannot be bought elsewhere,
or offer better quality, or offer better
service; that goes hand in hand with
attracting new retailers to Keizer, es-
pecially along River Road from the
south end all the way to Wheatland
Road.
This is where the ‘business friendly’
city can have a powerful impact. The
former mayor used to say that people
like to be part of a success. If we make
Keizer, in general, and River Road,
in particular, successful, logic says that
developers and businesess would want
to locate in our city.
There are ordinances that can be
put in place regarding appearance of
commercial buildings and landscap-
ing. The Comprehensive Code dic-
tates how new construction should
look, but what about existing proper-
ties? The code should dictate how the
exterior of a building is maintained:
the building facades should be clean
and in good repair, landscaping should
be free of weeds and overgrowth.
Now that the city has a full-time code
enforcement offi cer, adherence to the
sign code should be enforce regularly,
and not complaint driven only.
The River Road Renaissance
project of the Urban Renewal Dis-
trict installed meandering sidewalks
and natural landscaping on River
Road, but only in parts. The beauti-
fi cation of our main thoroughfare is a
hopscotch design: one block updated,
the next not. Some property owners
maintain the exterior of their build-
ings and landscaping, others not so
much.
Most Keizerites love their city and
prize its quality of life. Their neigh-
borhoods are serene and generally
maintained well. Keizer should have
its main commercial strip match the
vision of how the residents see their
city.
Utility wires along River Road
and Cherry Avenue were put under-
ground as one of the fi rst projects of
the Urban Renewal District, but that
was decades ago. An unfi nished Re-
naissance project doesn’t match that
original beautifi cation project.
Though the money to complete
the Renaissance project may not be
available for years the city can contin-
ue the beautifi cation process through
enforcement of existing codes and
enacting new codes. Such codes re-
garding the appearance of commercial
buildings is not anti-business, it is pro-
city. Everyone wins with a well-main-
tained River Road from beginning to
end in Keizer.
The Keizer Economic Develop-
ment Commission meets four times
a year and their agendas are full of
items such as keeping money in town,
incentives and grant writing. A main
duty of the commission should be
devise a plan to recruit the types of
businesses it wants to see in our com-
mercial areas. More importantly, they
should see any plan through to imple-
mentation.
Devising the plan would be assign-
ing people to gather information from
other municipalities—throughout the
country, not just Oregon. What do
similar cities do to recruit businesses
and retailers?
The big question when recruiting
business is to ask them: what would
they need to locate a business in our
city? Any recruiting effort should be
more about listening than talking.
Let’s fi nd out what businesses want
and endeavor to offer it within the
confi nes of our laws.
Any new codes enacted, any re-
cruitment efforts started should be
done with the idea that it is fair for
all. That is one reason the complaint-
driven code enforcement needs to be
scrapped in favor of equal enforce-
ment for all.
Economic development is not one
group’s job, it is up to us all to do our
part to assure quality growth that is so
successful that others will want to be
a part of it.
That should be the Keizer way.
—LAZ
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San Francisco: Whose sanctuary?
By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
Did San Francisco’s sanctuary city
ordinance contribute to the senseless
shooting death of Kathryn Steinle,
32, as she was out for an evening
stroll on Pier 14 last week?
This is a national story, because the
federal government released accused
shooter Francisco Sanchez to a San
Francisco jail in March and the jail
released Sanchez to the streets April
15 after the district attorney dropped
a 20-year-old charge for marijuana
possession. Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi
said he did so in keeping with San
Francisco’s sanctuary city policy.
Sanchez, 45, told San Francisco’s
ABC7 that he did shoot Steinle: it
was an accident. Sanchez had been
convicted of seven felonies, four
drug-related, and deported to his na-
tive Mexico fi ve times. He clearly
believed he could break immigration
and drug laws with impunity, and did.
He said he was aware of San Fran-
cisco’s sanctuary city policy.
When this story broke last week,
one question nagged at me: Why
would the feds release a career crimi-
nal on an old marijuana charge to
San Francisco, instead of deporting
him? If a thinking law enforcement
offi cial spent 30 seconds considering
the notion, he
or she would
have thought
better -- with
28 seconds to
spare.
You could
bet money that
District Attorney George Gascon
would not pursue such a moldy two-
penny case, and that the sheriff would
release him. In a press release last year,
Mirkarimi boasted that a revision he
made to his department’s detainer
policy “reduced the number of indi-
viduals released to ICE authorities by
62 percent. Only one other county
in California had a policy of similar
strength.”
Sunday on a San Francisco talk
radio station, Mirkarimi said that he
would have complied if U.S. Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement
had issued a warrant, not just a de-
tainer. Jessica Vaughan of the Center
for Immigration Studies doesn’t un-
derstand why ICE dropped that ball,
given San Francisco’s well-known
reluctance to cooperate with immi-
gration enforcement. Still, she added,
even if Mirkarimi did not want to
honor a detainer, “his offi cers should
have been allowed to communicate
other
views
with ICE.” The real problem, she
added, is the fact City Hall is “more
worried about a quote-unquote il-
legal alien being deported than they
are about a violent act.”
In a statement, Mayor Ed Lee not-
ed he talked to Steinle’s family and
recalled his threat to veto “any leg-
islation that completely eliminated
the sheriff ’s ability to make a case-
by-case determination about honor-
ing ICE detainers.” (For the record,
Lee sent a letter to the supervisors
in which he stipulated he wanted
the sheriff to have discretion in cases
involving individuals convicted of
serious, violent felonies. Sanchez’s
criminal history of drug and immi-
gration violations would not qualify,
if it had been written into law.) Lee
also faulted Republicans in Congress
for not passing Comprehensive Im-
migration Reform.
The real culprit in this story is
the man who shot Kate Steinle for
no apparent reason. Judging by his
televised interview with ABC7, San-
chez is no criminal mastermind. Still,
he was able to rack up seven felo-
nies, and repeatedly slip back over
the border. And San Francisco has a
policy to make it even easier for guys
like him.
(Creators Syndicate)
Violence calls for better solutions
In a population exceeding 300
million, the number 87 seems small
and insignifi cant. Meanwhile, NBC’s
news research department reports
that, every day, an average of 289
Americans are shot with 87 shot
dead. On the receiving end of bullets,
it happens to 100,000 Americans per
year on average. Consequently, one
cannot help but wonder: “When is
my number up?” “Will it happen in
a super market, shopping mall, movie
theater, music festival or just walking
or driving down the street?”
Meanwhile, U.S. national security
offi cials and the nation’s politicians
keep repeating the message that the
“greatest threat” to us is that bloody
bunch of brutal jihadists, thousands
of miles away, on another conti-
nent, will do us in. This week it’s
like “Whew! We made it through
4th of July weekend with out a jihad
catastrophe.” However, pause and
take a long, hard look at the dangers
of our population—armed to the
teeth with a death grip on the Con-
stitution’s second amendment—by
which they apparently believe it per-
mits them do “whatever’s neces-
sary” with those fi rearms because the
Founding Fathers gave them carte
blanche permission to that right.
If you follow the news, you’ll most
likely recognize that there’s a virtual
epidemic here of what we are led
to believe we should fear from the
bad guys in the Middle East. Cases
abound: There’s the Colorado killer
who shot at people in cars, out bik-
ing and walking at night. There’s the
apparent serial killer in New Britain,
Conn. who dumped several bodies
near a strip mall. There’s the ongo-
ing trial of James Holmes who shot
to death 12 moviegoers and wound-
ed 70 others in an Aurora, Colorado
movie house. There was the killing
of seven people in February by Jo-
seph Aldridge, an armed recluse who
then killed himself, in Tyrone, Mo.
There’s already a plethora of cases
this year in Oregon where death
by fi rearms has been the weapon of
choice. And there’s the most recent
of atrocities by Dylann Roof whose
hate of African-Americans ended the
lives of nine innocents in Charleston,
South Carolina. Oregon offers its
share to the totals every month with-
out fail.
Examples of
suicide killers in
2015 is almost
endless. These
folks, who are
so often in me-
dia broadcasts
memorialized after their heinous acts
by friends and neighbors as the “nic-
est of people” after the perpetra-
tion of their evil deeds. They lack a
political or religious ideology like the
suicide bombers of the Middle East
but are bent on missions for which
killing yourself and others is some-
thing deserved by one and all. They
are informal American jihadists not
in touch with ISIS or al-Queda but
deeply disturbed and heavily armed.
Moving on, there are the much-
in-the news police shootings. The
Washington Post recently began put-
ting together a database of every fatal
shooting by police this year. Their
fi gure for the fi rst half of 2015 is at
least 385, or approximately one of
every 13 non-suicide gun deaths
this year to date. A recent Depart-
ment of Justice report disclosed that
over the last eight years an average of
928 Americans died annually by po-
lice guns. Australia, used for compar-
ison in one study, found that that na-
tion had 94 deaths by police between
1992 and 2011. California police
shot 72 this year alone while Can-
ada’s number counts at 25 in all of
gene h.
mcintyre
2014.
Case after case of violence in
America can be cited. The D.C.
mansion murders comes to mind
at the top of the list this year. Then
there’s 21-year-old man in Staten Is-
land New York, who, with a kitchen
knife, attacked an FBI agent. There’s
the man in Des Moines, Iowa who
stabbed a policeman trying to arrest
him for a traffi c infraction. Three
young men in Brooklyn, New York
were shot in a housing project play-
ground complex while the shooter
remains on the loose.
It would make so much more
sense if we as a nation of people—
who love peace and security—could
direct our resources to addressing
violence of all forms at home. We
would be best advised to invest in
counselors and appropriately training
police; instead, our national leaders
(and some locals, too) are owned by
corporate interests wanting the gov-
ernment to keep buying arms and
using them against a foe that wants
us out of their backyard.
We no longer need the oil and
gas from the Middle East but the
warring profi ts keep us there with
mindless perseverance to accomplish
nothing except making money for
the nation’s one percent while the
rest of us wonder, “Am I next?”
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap-
pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)