Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “A man without a plan, is not a man.” After speaking with La Pine City Manager Cory Misley, it wouldn’t be absurd to say the same thing about a growing city.

Planning is crucial in making any substantial improvements to a city. In La Pine’s quest to renovate its downtown area, city employees, citizens, and staff are well aware and deeply entrenched in this process.

“Sometimes people can feel like all we’re doing is planning. Well, no. We’re not. We’re planning for one thing—then we’re going to move that into action, but at the same time we’re going to start planning somewhere else,” said Misley.

Heavy alterations to the heart of a city isn’t as easy as sketching out a blueprint and erecting a structure. Currently, La Pine is going through a code update. Working with a Transportation Growth Management Grant, the city is in the midst of updating codes to become more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. Misley notes that the current planning will make for significant changes over the next five, 10, even 15 years down the line.

It’s easy to become frustrated, without understanding how dynamic the projects are, such as La Pine’s downtown renovation. Bullet-point goals—improving La Pine’s “walkability,” for instance—cover the birth of several square miles. It would cause major setbacks to rush through plans, only to return a few years later to completely overhaul the progress because of some oversight.

The community of La Pine should know that the planning process is looking much further down the road, a decade or more, and projecting what an ideal city would be at that point. Only then can the action begin. Not to mention that there are multiple projects that often overlap and impact on one another.

Teri Myers, executive assistant at La Pine Chamber of Commerce, is excited about the new downtown project. According to Myers, in addition to the downtown planning, other new and invigorating progress is occurring throughout the small town.

“There’s a city beautification program starting early June, which will involve all of the landscaping that goes up and down Highway 97 and along Huntington Road,” said Myers.

To make such changes, the City of La Pine is working with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). Misley adds that ODOT and La Pine are also working together on a refinement plan to address concerns in the Wickiup Junction area. This area, to the north of the downtown project, will be looked at in terms of its current connection to the rest of the city, and how to smooth the transitions between different segments of La Pine.

As a very young city, in terms of incorporation, La Pine has and will continue to look to other cities to establish a natural order of operations and progress.

“We look at big cities, small cities, rural and urban cities, to see what will work best for La Pine,” said Misley.

Some work on La Pine’s transit and city center will begin this summer, with the bulk of the changes to follow during the summer months of 2019 and 2020.

“It could be a place to carpool or catch the bus. It could be a place to use public restrooms. It might have food carts and outdoor heating amenities. There are possibilities for areas like a farmers’ market, electric car charging stations, bicycle amenities. It could have all of that, we don’t know yet,” said Misley.

With such dynamic planning and advancement in the works for the city, ongoing community engagement is paramount. In the meantime, the community can get excited about a new cidery moving in on the north end of La Pine. According to Myers, the cidery will start with a tasting room and build on as it grows. •