The Green Dream

Private and public development partners hope an Oregon City Golf Course will become a green economy center

By Matthew Graham

The Oregon City News, Oct 14, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

courtesy of SERA Architects / Oregon City News

A conceptual drawing of the green economy center slated for the current site of the Oregon City Golf Course.

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Cutting-edge, research-backed food production techniques coupled with the practical technology and plans to implement them, plus the means to directly distribute that food to a nearby urban population.

Sustainable design firms, geotechnical engineers and architects working on projects together to maximize efficiencies and develop new sustainable practices.

College students learning in a hands-on environment and innovating practices as the next generation of sustainable leaders.

That and more is what partners from throughout the county and region are dreaming up as the Green Economy Center, a sustainable initiative the county hopes to develop at the current site of the Oregon City Golf Course.

The project would bring together public, private and non-profit groups, allowing those partners that are already working on the same projects individually to do so collectively.

“There’s a complimentarity to all of the partners, there’s a synergy to be had because while we tend to work with similar clients, we tend to do different things,” said Rick Gruen, district manager of the county Water and Soil District,

Food production

Clackamas County is the second largest agricultural producer in the state, with more than 4,000 farms and over 215,000 acres devoted to agriculture.

Both Extension Services and the Soil and Water Conservation District work with farmers to improve farming practices and efficiency.

“The local Extension office is linked to campus-based research, and the local Extension agents disseminate that info to the public,” said Gruen. “Our linkage is the technology that we provide comes from the United States Department of Agriculture and our partnership with the U.S. Conservation Service. So on a broad overview, extension may be providing general education relating to farming or forestry … we can then step in and provide design specifications, from an overhead sprinkler system to a low-pressure drippage system, or a rainwater catching system into a cistern so that they’re irrigating with runoff instead of well water, so we’ll help with technical assistance with how do you build that.”

Food distribution — global to local

The center would sit right at the edge of the Urban Growth Boundary, where the urban and suburban Portland area meets rural Clackamas.

Ron Paul, a Portland-based consultant, sees it as a perfect place to begin coordinating the local distribution of local food.

“I often refer to the Foodshed in the same way people talk about watershed — literally tracing where our food is coming from and realizing a lot of the food we’re using is coming from rural Clackamas County,” Paul said. For example, there’s “a lot of cabbage being produced in Clackamas County farms. So what happens to that cabbage? Well, it could be trucked all the way to Salem almost and sold to a firm that in turn processes it, packages it and off it goes to wherever its destination is.”

He said that if they could process it between Oregon City and Portland, it would save time, transportation costs and more.

He said private businesses are starting to seek out ways to increase local foods. With transportation costs rising, Paul said the big-distributor foods would start to come more into line with the higher costs people tend to associate with farmers market produce.

Even if those efforts are preliminary, the Green Economy Center would seek innovative ways to lower costs and increase distribution capabilities.

“One missing link, for instance, is how do you handle distribution for small and mid-size farms so your carbon footprint diminishes?” Paul said. “It doesn’t make any sense for each one of those users to bring those half-filled trucks into the city center; how can the GEC develop a transportation network?”

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