Katz

In the city of Bend there are 13 neighborhood associations (NA) officially recognized by the Bend City Council and each provided an annual budget to spend on such things as a website and an annual general meeting. Each NA is assigned a city councilor as a liaison between the council and the NA.

Each NA sends a representative to something known as the Neighborhood Leadership Alliance (NLA), which meets once a month. The current chair of the NLA is Hans Jorgensen from the Awbrey Butte NA. The NLA periodically reports its considered positions on various issue to the City Council. This is an officially recognized group.

Each NA also has a land use chair who represents the NA at the Land Use Committee meetings whose current chair is Deb DeWeese. This group is also officially recognized by the council and issues reports as necessary.

Finally, there is the Neighborhood Association Roundtable (NART), which is an informal grouping of representatives from each NA.

It is not officially sanctioned and does not issue reports. The leader of this group is Joette Storm, who is from the Boyd Acres NA. In this group the NAs can sort of “let their collective hair down” and speak very candidly about pending local issues and their frustrations with having those issues addressed appropriately by city government.

Out of discussions at NART came the idea of approaching The Bulletin for an occasional column for NA leaders to directly discuss issues publicly without any filter. I can assure you that we do not speak with a single voice; there are definitely a range of views on different problems of which there are many (and most overlap with each other):

Water; wildfire; illegal fireworks; Mirror Pond; transportation; parking; legacy trees; HB 2001 and middle housing; affordable housing; rapid growth; homeless/houseless; policing; effective bilateral communication between the bureaucracy and concerned residents; public notice of proposed projects; racism; density; city revenues; building codes; pandemic; schools; septic tanks; land use planning; urban growth boundary; tourism; recreation; transient rentals, the dump; the railroad; preserving a small town ambiance; library expansion, parkway improvements, downtown street closure(s), the railroad and many more.

As Bend morphs from a lumber mill town into a real city, our part-time City Council will find it difficult to grapple with all of these many issues; thus it imperative that you, the residents of this community, speak out — not only about identifying problems but helping find solutions,

Civic responsibility does not end with Election Day voting and simply leaving all decisions to the City Council. If you are concerned about the future of Bend, attend your local NA board meetings – and even better, become a member – some NAs lack a full board. The squeaking wheel gets the oil.

In order to provide a more effective outreach to the Bend community and a greater discussion of topical issues, on June 2 we met with the editorial staff of The Bulletin; the paper has agreed to periodically publish essays written by NA leaders. Each essay represents the opinion of the writer and not necessarily of anyone else. Disagree with an essay? Write a letter to the editor!

I suspect The Bulletin will welcome your additional input; after all, its staff resides here too.

Do you have a point you’d like to make or an issue you feel strongly about? Submit a letter to the editor or a guest column.