Creative approach could be very useful
Lou Marzeles
News Editor
There were a lot of good ideas expressed at last week's Java Talk meeting, but one particular point was especially interesting, I thought.
"What is Goldendale doing for itself?" someone asked. Her point was the city seems to look at itself in relationship to pretty much any place other than itself. It's always viewing its future in juxtaposition to the Gorge, to Yakima, to The Dalles, to the vast urban wilderness west of the Cascades. This woman's point was that there are places of sometimes striking geographic disadvantage that nonetheless took steps to creatively reposition themselves. An example is Freeport, Mont., if I understood her correctly. That's a town largely in the middle of nowhere that established itself as a tax-free shopping base, as a way to draw shoppers. The person at Java Talk pointed out that shoppers around here have a powerful incentive to drive across the river, and that's beyond the fact that, as she observed, "you can't buy a new shirt in Goldendale." With Oregon's lack of sales tax, commonly one can save more money than it costs in gas to drive over.
Don't mistake this as criticism of Goldendale's business community. Rather, I'm making the point that there is a consideration of creativity that we may be missing here.
Why can't the city do something creative to establish itself more as a destination point, rather than as a place relative to other locations? Of course attention has been increasingly brought to bear on this very point of late, and I hardly mean to suggest that anyone around here is just sitting on their hands. I'm thinking more in terms of creative brainstorming, adventurous ideas to help facilitate the repositioning of the area in dramatically new ways. If we had our way, what we would most want to see in Goldendale?
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