Woodburn gets national recognition with All-American Cities Award

The National Civic League has announced the 10 recipients of its prestigious All-American City award. Woodburn was the smallest of the 10 cities from around the country to receive this honor, and the only one on the West Coast.

The winning cities were chosen by a panel of judges based on how they demonstrated “innovation, civic engagement, and inclusive collaboration.”

Woodburn Mayor Frank Lonergan joins us to share details of the award and what it means to the community.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Woodburn just became an All-American City Award winner. The award is given by the National Civic League in recognition of innovation, civic engagement and inclusive collaboration. There were 10 recipients this year from around the country. Woodburn is the smallest and the only one on the West Coast. Frank Lonergan is in his second term as mayor of Woodburn. He joins us now. Congratulations and welcome.

Frank Lonergan: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here and sincerely an honor to be serving Woodburn as its mayor.

Miller: What is the All-American City Award?

Lonergan: So they’ve been giving this out for over 70 years. The National Civic League has been working over 100 years. They primarily work on civic engagement, and work with cities on democracy, and give communities assistance on programs and research. What they do then is, annually, they put out a theme and they receive many applicants. They don’t quite tell us how many, but they said it was the largest this year and so I’m figuring over a few hundred.

The theme this year was America at 250: Strengthening Civic Health and Building Trust. So we saw that in late February, March. We have had two directors that work for the city, Jesse Cuomo and Renata Wakeley, that saw that and went to our city manager Scott Derickson and said, “We think that we can answer these pretty well. This is exactly up our alley, what we’ve been working on for years.”

[They] filled out a long application, not knowing what it was going to get us. But it did get us recognized as basically a finalist. They picked 20 communities, not really dependent on the size or geographic area, and we’re the only one from Oregon that went this year.

Miller: Right, my understanding is that as a finalist, you and 20-something other city teams went to Denver for this recent three-day conference. What was the conference like?

Lonergan: Very formal, very busy, high energy. There were a lot of breakout sessions. You meet with other communities, talk about local issues, problems that some cities have and other cities might be able to help them with – things like polling safety, like working with young youth leaders or aging infrastructure.

So Friday and Saturday was a lot of meeting like that. During that time, we had to give a presentation to 12 judges. That happened in groups of three or four. Because Woodburn isn’t high up the alphabetical list, we were picked to go last and went Sunday about noon. The presentation, they gave us 12 minutes to march in – we’re on a stage – and make our presentation to the 12 judges.

Miller: Can you describe the way you put the presentation together, and even just who you had up on stage? That alone [seems like it] was a pretty important decision that you all made.

Lonergan: It was. We put a very good group together of community members. Because we are a culturally-diverse community, because we have a very large, high Hispanic population – that’s a very big part of our culture and our community efforts – we brought six high school graduates with us that were members of the mariachi band. A couple of them were dancers, and one was our fiesta queen from last year. That was Aleida Robles, who was our queen. We had a singer from the high school, Deandrea Tlatenchi, and then our two dancers were Julimar Perez and David Villaneuva, along with a couple guitar players, Joaquin Larios and Juan Larios, and Carlos Flores that performed. So they did mariachi music. We had two-and-a-half minutes to get up to stage, and they danced, sang and played the music as we walked up to the stage.

Then we had other community members that talked about the efforts that Woodburn’s been doing over the years, programs. We had nine minutes left. I should say we showed a video of the “American Dream,” which was about a minute-and-a-half, that showed about six businesses in Woodburn that started up – some in downtown, some up on the highway – and how the cultural diversity has changed over the years. And these businesses reached their American dream by coming to Woodburn and being able to start a business.

Miller: The city’s press release announcing having gotten this award … it said that Woodburn’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths. It says 58% of residents speak a language other than English at home, 95% of businesses in the downtown core are Latino-owned, and students in the Woodburn school district speak more than 30 languages. What do you mean when you say that diversity is one of your greatest strengths?

Lonergan: Well, it’s amazing just what you said. The high school has such a great language program. I think it’s almost 80% of the graduates speak a language other than English when they graduate. That’s not offered very often around the country, so Woodburn is unique that way. The cultural diversity certainly has been a strength of Woodburn. One of our presenters was Irene Konev, who was an Old Believer. Her family was one of the first to migrate to Woodburn back in the ‘60s.

Miller: From part of the Russian community.

Lonergan: Exactly. Part of the Russian community. They went from Russia to South America and then came up to Woodburn and have been an integral part of the growing of Woodburn. Back in the ‘60s, we were about 3,000 people that lived in Woodburn. Now we’re a little over 30,000. So it shows the growing effort that Woodburn has. And certainly the Hispanic culture has been awesome in Woodburn, coming up also probably back in the ‘50s, working in the fields, and then being an integral part of Woodburn’s growth and the diversity that we have.

Miller: I want to turn to what this has meant for you as a city leader over the last year-and-a-half, a time of unprecedented federal immigration enforcement – a lot of it obviously targeting Latinos, regardless of legal status. How have you responded as mayor?

Lonergan: Well, I wish I could do something to stop the federal agents that come in. They will arbitrarily stop vehicles that might look like they have Latinos in it. There’s several things that we’ve done. We’ve asked them to stop and not come to Woodburn. They have certainly set up a fear in our community where kids are scared to go to school, scared that their parents might be picked up while they’re gone. It’s affected businesses downtown. Like you said, 95% of them are Latino-owned. But they certainly slowed the economic development and the part of their businesses because of the immigration and the federal enforcement issues.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest challenges that Woodburn is facing right now?

Lonergan: Well, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Oregon, and certainly meeting that [growth] brings some infrastructure issues. Transportation is one, being able to meet the road improvements. I mean, we’re pretty good on other utilities. But keeping up with the need for housing is a big issue. We have, over the last few years and going into the next couple of years, about 3,000 units being built. But we’ve been pretty smart, we’re not just looking at residential, we’re also looking at commercial and industrial. And we see that happening in Woodburn.

So, meeting those challenges. Then trying to keep up and provide affordable housing is a huge challenge for our community and I think every community in Oregon.

Miller: Yes, we’ve definitely heard about the challenges of that. But the challenge of growth itself is one that some larger cities in the Portland area, I think, almost wish they would have now. That’s certainly something they talked about in the past. But there’s been a lot of coverage in recent years about a kind of stagnating Portland area. Why is Woodburn growing?

Lonergan: It’s Woodburn’s time. Location is so important. Being 30 miles south of Portland, 20 miles north of Salem, being right on I-5, we knew it was going to happen. We’re growing because we’re a community – and this is what the All-American City Award shows – of good people that live here, good people that want to improve their life. They also are willing to help others in that process. And that’s happening.

We have a fantastic staff that work in every department, from development to economic[s] to finance, that are kind of the cream of the crop and work well under our city manager, Scott Derickson. So that’s certainly part of it, having good people here to help, good people come to Oregon, come to Woodburn and make a good living. So we’re getting there.

Miller: You mentioned location and proximity, sort of equidistant between Portland and Salem. Has there been an increase in local employment or do you see this more as a question of a growing bedroom community between these larger population centers?

Lonergan: Dave, we used to be a bedroom community. We used to be nothing but a farm community back 60 years ago, and then a bedroom community for 20-30 years. We used to have 70% of our population, the workforce leave Woodburn to work someplace else, come home at night. Now, it’s less than 50%. So no, we have the industry that’s coming in. Amazon certainly has offered a great chance for employment. At times there were anywhere [from] 4,500 to over 5,000 employees. So they have been a very good partner here. We have other businesses that have come in and stepped up.

Like you said, currently some of our downtown businesses are hurting because of the fear of enforcement, but we still provide the best Mexican food in, I think, not only Oregon but the whole United States. So I invite anybody to come to downtown Woodburn and get a great meal.

Miller: The Amazon distribution center that opened up there about a year ago, the size is almost incomprehensible: 3.8 million square feet, something like close to 70 football fields in area. As I understand it, Amazon asked for a tax break in return for building that massive distribution center a number of years ago, and the city said no. And then the company went ahead and did it anyway. Is there a lesson there for other cities?

Lonergan: I certainly think so. It is an economic development area that they had. But yeah, they have been a great partner to work with. We did not give any incentives, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that we didn’t have to. Then they stepped up and made a contribution that helped us do a soccer field – we’re known as a great soccer city – and they put a turf field in our main park. And then they stepped up again when there was a problem with some transportation issues, restructuring a road in the county, and they built a roundabout with their own several million dollars.

So they’ve been nothing but a very good partner. And I think it’s our people that are willing to work with them and help them in those aspects. Yeah, they were not looking for tax incentives, knowing that they’d be here for a long time and they wanted to help Woodburn grow.

Miller: And you had the location that they desperately wanted, so it seems that there was also nowhere else that they could go to get what they wanted in terms of location for logistics.

Lonergan: Very true.

Miller: Well, Mayor Lonergan, thanks very much for joining us.

Lonergan: Thank you. The last thing, if I can say, is I’ve never been more proud of our community and our team that went back to Denver. It is a good time for Woodburn. It shows who we are and what we expect to be in the future.

Miller: Frank Lonergan is the mayor of Woodburn.

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