Groundhog Day - Long winter of discontent

Another downtown Bend restaurant has closed. Ciao Mambo, part of a small Italian restaurant chain, shut its doors late last week. This is sad news, but expected since Olive Garden opened recently.

Also, Ameritech Machine Manufacturing in Redmond went belly-up leaving 45 without work. Unfortunately, this long winter will prove to be the undoing of more small, and medium-sized businesses in the region.

And, it has nothing to do with the tax hikes passed last month by an overwhelming majority of voters. No, it’s the reality of the Great Recession.

We’ve seen this movie before. The groundhog saw his shadow.

Bend has always depended on the economy outside the region. When that economy is bad, so is Bend’s. This time around, instead of putting all its eggs in the basket of wood products, Central Oregon bet everything on the continued growth in the local housing market. When that collapsed, so did the local economy.

If voters had rejected the tax measures, there would have been hundreds of layoffs in the region of family-wage jobs because many teachers, police and other government workers faced the ax. And, for each of those family-wage jobs lost there would have been a doubling or even tripling effect because the loss would trickle down to local small businesses.

Unemployment and underemployment in Central Oregon is well over 20 percent. The state is one of three, along with California and Michigan, to have 20 percent unemployment/underemployment.

Part of the reason is that Oregon does not feed at the trough of the bloated military budget. There are no military bases in the state and too few military-related contractors.

Also, Oregon has yet to realize that education, all the way through post-graduate research, is the real ticket to economic stability.

Bend Councilor Jim Clinton, a physicist, is proposing a research center for Bend. He’s on the right track, but until business gets on board, there is no chance of it happening here. Bend should target its research with a facility at Central Oregon Community College geared toward sports medicine. With so many Olympic-caliber athletes residing in Bend, the area is a natural for such a facility. In the 1990s, Nike was rumored to consider a multi-sport complex in Bend. Again, this area, with its focus on skiing, snowboarding, cycling, golf, running and other outdoor pursuits, is perfect for it. We likely won’t see anything like this soon because the area is too narrowly focused on housing development. That’s where most of the tax breaks go and much of the government subsidies as well.

Punxsutawney Phil says it’s time to keep hibernating along with our economy.

Yet, more trains are whistling and rumbling through Bend while clogging rush hour commutes. Is that more of a sign of an early economic spring than a Pennsylvania groundhog?