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 Keizertimes Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303 phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com NEWS EDITOR Craig Murphy editor@keizertimes.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Eric A. Howald news@keizertimes.com ADVERTISING Paula Moseley advertising@keizertimes.com Lyndon Zaitz publisher@keizertimes.com One year: $25 in Marion County, $33 outside Marion County, $45 outside Oregon PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY Publication No: USPS 679-430 POSTMASTER PRODUCTION MANAGER Send address changes to: BUSINESS MANAGER Keizertimes Circulation 142 Chemawa Road N. Keizer, OR 97303 Andrew Jackson graphics@keizertimes.com EDITOR & PUBLISHER SUBSCRIPTIONS Laurie Painter billing@keizertimes.com OFFICE INTERN Periodical postage paid at Salem, Oregon Allie Kehret LEGAL NOTICES legals@keizertimes.com facebook.com/keizertimes twitter.com/keizertimes 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.)