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Who’s recruiting business to Keizer?
States, counties and cities across the nation have processes in which to recruit businesses. Some of those governments have a specific office to identify and solicit businesses to locate to their jurisdiction. Using tax incentives or property deals, those governments actively seek tax-paying, job-creating companies to build.
Where is Keizer’s active business recruiting effort? Several years ago, the city created an Economic Development Committee to do just that. That committee was dissolved within a few years and not much has been publicly seen to reach out to the types of businesses Keizer would benefit from.
At a time when government budgets are stretched it makes sense to prioritize recruiting businesses to locate in Keizer.
There is land in the city. Keizer Station’s Areas B and C remain open and ready for development.
To paraphrase a popular 1990s film, “If you build it, they will come.” The city has created the River Road-Cherry Avenue Overlay District to lay the groundwork for development of commercial and mixed-use purposes. There is not much available land in that district; development would require razing of existing structures to open land for new construction. That leaves Keizer’s open land.
Area D at Keizer Station sat empty for years until the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz came to an agreement to make the vision come to fruition. That area is now under construction for a variety of businesses that will add to the city’s coffers and provide for needed jobs.
Now it is the City of Keizer’s turn to be the driver for economic development. Thirty years ago recruitment was not needed; business recognized that our area was a good source of customers, not just here but also within a 10-mile radius. Access from the freeway and northeast Salem funnel consumer traffic directly into our commercial hubs.
Some point to SEDCOR, the Strategic Economic Development Corporation, as the organization to recruit business. That group works throughout the mid-Willamette Valley including Polk and Yamhill counties. Keizer needs to look out for itself.
Over the past decade or so, most of the region’s commercial development has been in south Salem or in the Lancaster Drive corridor. Success begets success—if a large retailer opens in one area it is certain it will be followed by others.
Keizer needs an economic development officer who would oversee the development of a marketing plan to present to businesses both near and far. The retail landscape has radically changed, enclosed malls and small businesses are faltering as the American consumer finds it easier and more convenient to shop online.
The city has a working relationship with the Keizer Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has asked the city for public funds to augment its budget. Before any money is approved city leaders can demand that the Chamber be a partner in recruiting business to the city. Together, the city and the Chamber should develop a professional website extolling the benefits of locating here.
Keizer has always been a business-friendly city. There are no business license fees; the city’s departments work well with business to build and operate here.
A city friendly to business should welcome it with open arms.
— LAZ
Keizer gets an art fair
Lovers and casual admirers of art can celebrate when the first Keizer Riverwalk Art Fair is held KeizerFEST weekend in August at Keizer Rapids Park.
The art fair is a long time coming, as it has been discussed by leaders of the Keizer Art Association for years. The fair will be an alternative to the Salem Art Association’s fair held each summer.
Dedicated to Oregon artists only, the Riverwalk Art Fair will be affordable for art vendors and be a wonderful event for attendees to browse and buy.
It will be staged along the shaded pathway at the park, just steps away from the hoopla of KeizerFEST’s main tent, car show and carnival.
Unlike the Salem fair, there will be no admission fee. The Keizer Art Association is confident the fair will grow in the coming years. It will offer Oregon artists to show and sell their wares in an unjuried show.
It is likely the Riverwalk Art Fair will be a success right out of the gate. Regardless of how a person feels about art, there will be something for everyone to look at. It doesn’t cost anything to look at and that is a good price. Scheduled the same weekend as KeizerFEST, it will guarantee a healthy crowd.
We are glad the long desired fair and alternative to Salem’s art fair is coming to reality.
—LAZ
The nation deserves better than that debate. Or does it?
By GEORGE F. WILL
Jaundiced voters have defined adequacy so far down that they surely were not expecting last week’s debate to feature witty badinage, or even a few stray facts about the nation’s condition or policies for improving it. Rather, such voters wondered: Would Donald Trump temper his loutishness? Could President Biden sustain semi-acuity for 90 minutes? Their questions were answered: no, and no.
Trump, who is never as jolly as Father Christmas, was as constantly cranky as usual. His fleeting moments of semisobriety perhaps only seemed to be such because they contrasted with his adversary’s struggles. Biden mostly resembled someone who has forgotten not where the car keys are but what they are for.
Perhaps the nation is by now in a torpor, resigned to the spectacle of, as the phrase goes, two bald men fighting over a comb. Perhaps, however, last week—the campaign’s nadir (so far)—was for the best. The Democratic Party might yet give a thought to the national interest. Persisting with Biden’s candidacy, which is as sad as it is scary, rather than nominating a plausible four-year president, would rank as the most reckless, and cruel, act ever by a U.S. party.
Trump, who is at most a one-trick pony, adopted the prudent strategy of ignoring the moderator’s questions, lest he need to know something. What did he think about Jan. 6, 2021? “On Jan. 6, we had a great border.” Perhaps he remembered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s axiom: When skating on thin ice, safety comes from speed.
Biden reached into the almost empty shelves of progressivism’s pantry of ideas for his solution to all domestic problems. Social Security’s impending insolvency —a $23 trillion cash shortfall over three decades? Tax the rich. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl says: Abolishing the cap on income taxed for Social Security ($168,600) would supply only about half the shortfall. And this would divert “nearly all available upper-income tax increases to pay for benefits for baby boomers.”
Biden, who has at most a one-track mind, yet again insinuated that the political and judicial institutions of America’s democracy would crumble like papier-mâché constructs under the onslaught of a reelected Trump. But three days before the debate, Biden was yet again found to have shredded a constitutional norm.
Two Obama-appointed federal judges on two courts said another of Biden’s student debt-forgiveness plans exceeds statutory authority. Since 2023, Biden has been giving Trump a tutorial on anti-constitutional grandiosity in the presidency: Ignoring the Constitution’s appropriations clause (Congress controls spending), Biden has tried to unilaterally shower $400 billion in loan forgiveness on the debt-owing minority of the minority of Americans who are college graduates.
Biden has bragged that the Supreme Court’s attempt to thwart his executive highhandedness “didn’t stop me.” Yet he will not stop pretending that his insouciant disregard of legality, unlike Trump’s, is virtuous.
Biden and Trump also are two peas in a pod—Trump is perhaps the marginally worse pea—in embracing the nation’s bipartisan consensus that favors permanent fiscal incontinence. The invaluable Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (wouldn’t it be fun if Congress had such a committee?) says Trump approved $4.8 trillion in new 10-year federal borrowing (excluding pandemic relief spending), whereas Biden in his first three years and five months approved $2.2 trillion (excluding pandemic relief).
The slender reed on which Biden’s reelection hopes now lean is that 129 post-debate days of continuing good economic news will percolate into the consciousness of voters whose minds snapped shut against him in 2022, when inflation peaked at 9.1%. And Trump might pick a reassuring running mate, improving the odds that occasionally there will be an adult in or near the Oval Office.
Debate evening passed without a trace of the ameliorative spirit for which an exhausted American majority surely yearns. Such a spirit appeared in a semi-presidential 1858 debate (both participants were to be presidential candidates two years later). In Ottawa, Ill., in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate — the nation-fracturing issue was slavery—Abraham Lincoln, with nine spare words, showed how to at least try to ease social frictions by forgoing the pleasure of self-congratulation.
He said of Southerners: “They are just what we would be in their situation.” Debate night gave today’s embarrassed nation no comparable balm of magnanimity about anything. The nation deserves better.
Or does it? The most depressing of many gloomy thoughts is that for 90 excruciating minutes we saw what, today, a truly representative American government looks like.
(Washington Post)
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