Pieces of the future
A tenacious tribe of volunteers plays a vital role in
Reedsport’s success
By Christina
Williams
The stretch of Highway 101 between Florence and Coos Bay skims
behind the dunes into the trees, limiting the breathtaking
views that characterize the coastal road. At Gardiner, 101
snakes down a hill and the view opens up to the right,
dominated by the abandoned International Paper mill and the
swollen Umpqua River flowing into Winchester Bay.
The highway winds along, crossing the Smith River and then the
Umpqua and then passes quickly through the town of Reedsport,
anchored at one end by the Harbor Light restaurant and at the
other by Reedsport High School. It’s a town whose natural
beauty belies the scars of a declining job base and a school
system whose population has halved over the past 20 years.
Tucked in across the street from the 7-Eleven behind a chain
link fence at the southern edge of Lions Park, the
15,000-square-foot skate park is easily missed in a Reedsport
drive-by. But on a chilly winter afternoon in the waning
daylight, its cement bowls and loop-able pipe are buzzing with
young men on skateboards.
Twinkie Goorhuis, a petite blond mom in jeans and a warm rain
jacket, watches. “It’s a microcosm of
society,” she says. “There are all these unwritten
rules and etiquette. There’s a lot of mentorship that
happens here between the older kids and the
beginners.”
Inspired by her eighth-grade son (he’s now 16) who was
trying to hone his skateboarding skills without incurring the
wrath of neighbors, Goorhuis raised the money for the skate
park, just over $250,000. A dentist’s wife who has lived
in Reedsport for 23 years, she also got it built in spite of a
city government that wasn’t sure they wanted to take on
responsibility for such a thing in one of their parks.
Goorhuis, though, was unwavering in her crusade. The park
opened in 2003 and was expanded last summer. She’s
written a 75-page manual, titled How to Get a Skate Park in
Your Town, that she’ll give away to anyone who asks. For
her next project, she’d love to rally other volunteers
and finish an overhaul of the tired town park, add a fountain
and colorful walkways, along with an artistic wrought iron
fence to replace the grimy chain links.
Twinkie Goorhuis is a member of an important, tenacious tribe
of 20 or so Reedsport volunteers that is diligently working on
the town’s biggest issues. The volunteers’ brand of
leadership is a messy one. It comes with rolled up sleeves and
a willingness to wrangle over priorities and it thrives on the
input of a variety of citizens who work with each other, the
city and on their own to make improvements to their community.
Some find themselves in the trenches, others up front at
meetings. They wish there were more of them. If all goes as
planned, there will be.
A FEW YEARS AGO, there were just a handful of community
volunteers and they were getting tired. They kept bumping into
each other at various meetings and started to feel like they
were in an echo chamber, with only each other to talk to. They
wrote a letter to the Ford Family Foundation in Roseburg,
asking for help with leadership training.
As it happened, Ford was launching a program on leadership in
rural areas. In spring 2004, the program made its debut in
Reedsport with a class of 30 people — some new to town,
some longtime citizens, some students, some retirees. Through a
succession of weekend classes, they completed 60 hours of
leadership training — personality assessments, conflict
resolution strategies, project management and the like.
The class was a breath of fresh air for Sheri Aasen,
administrator of the Dunes Family Medical Clinic in Reedsport.
“We’re in a depressed community and I run a rural
clinic. That’s a tough job. Everyone was just depressed.
Then came the training,” Aasen says. “That class
was so much fun. You walked away thinking you might be able to
do something to make a difference.”
It was also good practice for the roles they were asked to
take on in the community when the initial training wrapped up
later that year. As a class, they had to pick a project to work
on, something that would benefit Reedsport. They all had
different ideas and strong opinions about what was needed most.
After deliberation, some of which took the form of arguments,
they picked the renovation of Pacific Auditorium at Reedsport
High School.
WRESTLING OVER PRIORITIES is an important aspect of
collaborative leadership. It goes on at pretty much every
meeting of the Coastal Douglas Arts and Business Alliance, a
nonprofit group that continues the work the class started on
the auditorium, along with support for other arts-related
causes. With a board populated by graduates of the leadership
class, the group recently debated whether or not to host a
concert at the auditorium as part of the Oregon Coast Music
Festival. One question: Is it worth it to rally the volunteers
if we only get a small turnout? One response: That’s why
we overhauled the auditorium in the first place; to bring more
events and, over time, raise interest.
Josh Savey, a 17-year-old junior at Reedsport High, chairs the
committee in charge of finishing the auditorium overhaul. While
the first phase is done and the auditorium is up and running,
completing the balconies will require more fundraising and more
volunteer work.
A graduate of the leadership training class, Savey was
surprised to find out from his personality inventory that
he’s an extrovert. “I’m not one of those kids
who’s always talking,” he says. But he’s
comfortable hanging with the adults at CDABA
(“cah-DA-ba”) meetings, soliciting bids from
contractors and making financial reports back to the group. And
he believes in the importance of the auditorium as a worthy
cause — “I’m really into the
auditorium,” is how he puts it — to the extent that
he’ll stick with the project, even if it stretches on
after he leaves for college (University of Oregon and the
University of Portland are both in the running) in a year and a
half.
Savey is a favorite among group members who say that the fact
that his name resembles the word savvy suits his skill level
and drive. The teenager signed up to be a trainer and will help
teach the next Ford leadership class to be held in town this
spring. But his dedication to Reedsport only goes so far. After
college, he doesn’t anticipate a place for himself in the
small coastal community. “I don’t see working
here,” he says. “There are no jobs.”
EVERY VOLUNTEER IN REEDSPORT has a slightly different take on
what the priorities of the region should be, but jobs are near
the top of everyone’s list.
Many in the Reedsport/Winchester Bay Chamber of Commerce
(membership: 172) are focused on attracting more year-round
tourists by beefing up an already busy roster of events and
festivals. Residents wince when they mention Reedsport’s
downtown, a less-than-lively strip of storefronts along Highway
38 just before it joins up with 101, and the riverfront
property beside it, both of which are ripe for an overhaul. The
Lower Umpqua Economic Development Forum is focused on
recruiting employers to fill the void left in the community
from when the International Paper mill shut down in 1999,
taking 300 jobs with it. Others say that the first step should
be developing housing to make way for new jobs, the current
housing stock having been discovered by retirees drifting up
the coast from Bandon or down from Florence.
Ike Launstein, chairman of the Lower Umpqua Economic
Development Forum, is one of the longtime community volunteers
who asked for help in training others. Is he happy with the
early results of the leadership training? His answer is
measured. “It’s a piece, and we need all the pieces
we can get,” he says. “It’s not going to be
the salvation.”
It takes time, Launstein explains, for new leaders to grow
into their role. And in the meantime there’s plenty to
do. What worries Launstein, who technically is retired, is the
thought that Reedsport might become a true retirement
community.
“We’re trying to strike a balance,” says the
former schools superintendent who’s uneasy at the
town’s dwindling school population. Launstein aspires to
the “Bend model” of economic development, where the
main attraction is the physical beauty (and, in
Reedsport’s case, fantastic fishing) and business
follows.
For Launstein and others, the site of the IP mill in Gardiner
represents hope as a future home for new employers. The plant
is being dismantled and should be down to concrete slabs by
this summer. The 200-acre plot sports water rights, a rail
connection and an effluent pipe stretching out into the water.
Community volunteers are working to get the land designated by
the state as a shovelready industrial site.
A New Jersey company, Ocean Power Technologies, has been
looking at the site in conjunction with Oregon State
University’s wave power generation project, and plans are
in the works to use some of the land for a pilot site that
would place buoys out in the ocean to generate electricity.
Launstein would like to see several new employers share the
site and provide family wage jobs such as those being created
by American Bridge. Recruited with the help of the
region’s volunteer army and a coup for Reedsport, the
Pennsylvania engineering and construction firm opened its
facility in 2004 and has staffed up to 62 employees over the
past 12 months.
Such family wage jobs are welcome addition to the mix, says
Jeff Vander Kley, harbor manager at the Salmon Harbor Marina
south of downtown Reedsport in Winchester Bay. Under Vander
Kley’s watch, the harbor has transformed itself from a
fishing marina to a tourist destination complete with an RV
resort that opened five years ago and stays full June through
September, playing host to big luxury RVs that cruise the
coast.
Vander Kley is working on securing funding to expand the
resort and add a recreation facility and welcome center. The
harbor supports its $2 million annual budget with the proceeds
from its operations. Vander Kley sees his role as sustaining
the region’s tourism draw. But as a member of the
economic development forum, he’s also concerned about the
direction the rest of the economy is heading. “We need
more than people flipping hamburgers,” he says.
“This community needs to coalesce around a set of
priorities,” Vander Kley says. “This area is
formidable when we all get together. But we tend to deal with
the priority that comes up and get led down a path that may not
benefit everyone.”
Even if priorities are still disparate, there’s a real
sense in Reedsport that change is welcome. Even at Reedsport
City Hall, there’s a new face in the city manager’s
office —Rick Hohnbaum, who started the job in
October.
“There’s a desire to change our economic base here,
to make things better,” Hohnbaum says.
“There’s a lot of consensus building in the
community.”
Hohnbaum, who has registered for the second leadership training
class being offered by Ford this spring, is under no illusion
that the city could be effective without the volunteers who are
putting in effort on various projects around town. He sees the
city’s role as one of convener, bringing together the
various volunteer groups to the table to plot a plan for the
city. “It’s going to take all of them,” he
says.
Reedsport’s volunteer corps travels with diverse ideas
about what the town needs and putting them into action is what
leadership is about.
Twinkie Goorhuis sought support from her neighbors but drove
the skate park initiative almost on her own, from collecting
cans to soliciting grants. Still, while her initial motive may
have been selfish — building a place where her son could
skate — the project took on more of a community mission
as it progressed, from making the park a usable place to
grooming the next generation.
She greets a sweatshirted, baggy-jeaned boy as he arrives at
the park, skateboard under his arm. “If you get to know
these kids, their creativity is amazing,” she says.
“They’re not the ones who are going to play team
sports. But if you channel these kids in the right direction,
they’re the ones who are going to invent things and start
companies.”
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