Vote and support your local representatives

Volunteering your time to serve your community is a thankless job. You are never going to be able to do anything right and someone is always going to armchair quarterback you. There will always be someone who wants to stir the pot and will never step up and sit in the fire. They will complain, file lawsuits, write letters, and post to blogs but never seem to want to put themselves "out there" to make the tough decisions, or risk their own livelihoods or friends for their community.

Good for them, they make boards and councils work harder, except for when it ends up creating division amongst the players.

Boards and councils should be ALL about diversity; we elect these folks to represent us, but let's remember that we don't all hold the same opinions, we're all different and every member of the Sisters City Council represents all factions of this community.

There will always be times when there appears to be "bloc" voting; I believe that's called consensus. Isn't a five-all vote a "bloc" vote? There will be times when the vote is 4-1, or 3-2, that's called representing an opinion and then standing up for it. This is why we elect these folks.

I'd rather see a split vote where you emphatically believe in what you are supporting, argue for or against it, and then LEAVE it in the meeting room, not a split vote that leaks out into the community and causes all kinds of havoc and an "us and them" situation.

All opinions are valid, all people are valid, and it is opinions and not people that should be criticized.

Does Sisters need jobs? Absolutely. Can the Sisters City Council create jobs? No. But they can make it easier for jobs to be created, whether it's creating an enterprise zone or hiring an economic development manager or just making it easier to deal with city policies while opening a new business.

I've lived here for 23 years, and have seen this community grow and change. It is much easier now to open a business here. City staff is helpful and friendly and they know that they need us as much as we need them for Sisters to become a well-rounded and economically healthy community.

A viable community is one that is comprised of a well-rounded population, from retirees to young

families. We need to support the tourism this town is known for and help to build up the industrial area it could support. To do that we need the land that has been brought into the UGB, even if right now it seems excessive.

We also need to support the downtown core as well, help to find a way to keep the businesses that we have here and encourage new ones to open. Growth and change is painful and hard at times and I know that there are some "newbies" and "old timers" that would prefer Sisters just stay the way it is.

But it wasn't too long ago that a few forward-thinking businessmen, Realtors and developers I believe, realized that our great community would be no more if they didn't come up with an alternative economy for it when the logging era started to fade, and a Western-theme town was born.

We've all chosen to live here for a specific reason: the schools, the recreational opportunities, the natural beauty, the small hometown feel.

Whatever your reason, remember that Sisters needs all of us and our ideas to work together to keep all of these things available to our children and their children.

I'm not going to ask you to vote a certain way. The ballot this year is small, not many "hot issues" on it, so voter turnout will likely be low. I am going to ask you to do your homework, go to a city council meeting, call up the candidates and get your questions answered directly.

Vote and then support YOUR elected officials, and if they aren't doing it the way you want it done, then there will be another election in two years...run.

Heather Wester is a long-time Sisters resident and former chair of the Sisters School Board.