REEDSPORT — Progress. Progress. Progress.
Over the last number of months, Reedsport Main Street Program volunteers and others have been busy sprucing up Old Town, whether it’s with façade improvements or other work. One of the more recent projects consists of renovating a steam donkey for a new miniature park.
Katie Lockard serves as the Main Street program coordinator as part of the University of Oregon AmeriCorps RARE group.
Lockard, a 1997 graduate of what was once known as Reedsport High School, brings some history of the community to the job.
“I look at it from a different perspective because I was just a kid,” she said.
“I didn’t know we had a local culture,” she said. “I didn’t know we had a sense of place. I didn’t know we had local authors. What I’ve seen in my lifetime is just a gradual, slow decline.”
In addition, Reedsport School District personnel closed the W.F. Jewett Middle School because of declining enrollment. Also, the International Paper mill in Gardiner closed its doors.
“There was kind of a real low period in here where people were proposing having a jail … and they were just looking for anything big. Something big to come save us,” Lockard said.
“How we could employ ourselves rather than finding someone else to employ us?” she said. Another part of this was, “How we could make solutions ourselves?”
Lockard shows extreme interest in entrepreneurial spirit, saying it would “do a world of good.”
“What would it take to open up a business?” she asked. “Could we do a business incubator?”
A business incubator is created when a city, for example, lowers its rent to existing or potential new businesses at a vacant building. The idea is to bring more business to town. In return for lower or no rent for some months, in turn a city asks that the merchant make improvements to the building. Such a system is in place in Coquille at the former Jefferson School.
There’s been a question of filling a vacuum left by the end of mills in the area.
She’s sensed more optimism now with the Umpqua Discovery Center just as one example. The center opened in 1993.
Lockard said the town was on the decline in the 1980s and 1990s. Then in the 2000s, the community began to stabilize.
“I think we’re on the tipping point where we’re going to see the population grow,” she said, with more businesses coming into town.
“It’s just a phase, and it’s a phase that may be ending,” Lockard said.
Originally Published in The Umpqua Post
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Reedsport, Oregon 97467
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