News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters area residents from many walks of life and with a wide range of ideas and beliefs have gathered to try to hammer out a vision of Sisters' future.
A 22-member "Community Action Team" has formed under the auspices of a Forest Service grant to set a course to guide the greater Sisters community over the next 15-20 years.
CAT members are hopeful that the team can help bring consensus to an often fragmented community, where there is tension between "insiders" and "outsiders," between town residents and the business community, between developers and anti-growth activists.
"I came home from the (February 4) meeting so pumped I couldn't sleep," said team-member Bonnie Malone. "There's a distinct possibility of really having a unity in our community about the future."
Mike Hernandez of the Sisters Ranger District is the team's technical advisor, assisting professional facilitator Peter Dobert.
Hernandez said the team's job is to establish a vision, identifying the community's strengths and weaknesses. Then the team will set goals and determine what actions need to be taken to achieve them.
Hernandez said the group was deliberately selected to be broadly representative of different interests in the Sisters community. But, he insisted, personal agendas are to be set aside and the interests of the whole community emphasized.
"You're doing this for the community, not yourself," Hernandez said.
The team's goal is to come up with a plan of action that the whole community can get behind.
In fact, team members encourage people in the Sisters community to stop by at meetings, which are held every three weeks at Sisters High School. The next meeting is set for Wednesday, February 25, at 6 p.m.
John Allen, of Sisters, said it has been interesting working with a range of people.
"So far we've worked together pretty well," Allen said. "There's some divergent ideas, I think. What I'm hearing is there's some concern that the community stay ambient with the environment."
In the February 4 meeting, Allen said, the group split in two; one group tried to picture Sisters' future if no plans were made, the other looked to a planned future. The groups addressed issues such as traffic, sanitation and schools.
Team member Ted Eady, no stranger to controversial issues in Sisters, believes that hammering at the questions of growth, local economy and environment could have a positive effect.
"The more discussion you have on that kind of thing, the more consensus will come out of it," Eady said.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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