Preserving the historical and agricultural past, renewing the traditional downtown business district, and planning for a forecasted future of more local residents working more local jobs.

That, in essence, is the job at hand for the city of Canby, its elected leaders and its employees. The years of work will require citizen involvement, too.

David Eatwell, the new program manager of Canby Business Revitalization, sees Canby as a city with a historic past and a bright future.

The challenge is ensuring that the city's present gels well with its yesterday and its tomorrow - and Eatwell realizes the road ahead is lined with potential pitfalls.

To use the analogy of a watercolor picture, Eatwell, like others involved in city leadership duties, wants Canby to be a canvas whose colors and texture will be carefully painted with citizens firmly holding the brush.

The best communities are those where residents acknowledge the past and actively take a stake in its present and future, he said. The worst communities are those where residents fail to get involved in any capacity, allowing a community to dwindle, stagnate or die.

Only a couple of weeks into the post, Eatwell said he is acclimating to a new town, a new job and new colleagues.

Eatwell is eager to come to grips with revitalization efforts in Canby, and he has already met with the CBR's board of directors, its enhancement committee and Economic Improvement District stakeholders. He also has attended Canby City Council and Urban Renewal District Advisory Committee meetings.

Urban renewal is a central interest of Eatwell's, and he has been working on urban renewal and other community issues to rejuvenate the Kenton area for the past six years. His tenure with the Kenton Action Plan focused on attracting volunteers to do beautification and other work and, consequently, to feel a genuine sense of proprietorship for their North Portland neighborhood.

This past fall, the Canby City Council voted to create a 573-acre Urban Renewal District that changed the city's tax structure and which could generate up to $51 million during its 20-year life for revitalizing downtown Canby and for stimulating growth in the three-phase Logging Road Industrial Park.

City voters will be asked to approve or reject a scheduled Sept. 19 special election ballot measure regarding the annexation of about 300 acres into the city. The land would form phases II and III of the industrial park.

City councilors also voted to act as decision makers for the Urban Renewal District Agency, and created an advisory committee, which has only met sporadically.

Under tax-increment financing, the base assessment of the value of taxable real estate within the district is estimated at $66 million. Taxes on that base assessment will continue to go to the city, the county and other taxing jurisdictions.

The tax rates property owners now pay will remain the same. The URD will collect taxes only on the amount of any increase in property values within the district to pay for streets, sewers, parks, sidewalks and other public improvements.

According to Mayor Scott Taylor, the city projects a $3.8 billion increase in assessed valuations over the URD's 20-year life. However, it could be as little as $800 million if planning for growth were done in a piecemeal manner.

Phase I of the industrial park has largely been completed, but infrastructure and roads issues remain to be determined before phase II work begins. Numerous retail units remain to be leased, and developers Gramor Oregon Inc. have not signed any new tenant agreements since Canby Fred Meyer opened its doors Feb. 16.

Eatwell applauds Canby officials for creating an urban renewal plan to address a need to preserve what features the city has and to identify improvements that could be made.

"People have been very knowledgeable, great to work with, and are very professional," he said. "This very much seems to be a place where people want to see a better place to live and do business."

Because he is new to the job, Eatwell realizes he needs time to learn more about Canby's urban renewal plans and to meet people involved in the effort. "Urban renewal is very complex, and it's difficult to inform the public about tax increment financing because their eyes often glaze over," he said.

"But on the other hand, it has such a profound impact on the texture of a community that one would expect residents to be attentive to what's going on.

''From what I see, (Canby's urban renewal) plan seems to be a good one." However, Eatwell already sees a need to not lose focus on reviving the downtown area, which includes at least a few vacant retail units.

"If they build an industrial park but don't make sure downtown is paid attention to, all they would have really done is build another nice industrial park in suburban Portland," he said. "If the city center dies, the soul goes out of the area.

''It would become a bedroom community to Portland. It would lose its identity, and that would be sad."

Ensuring that more efforts are centered on making the Highway 99E/railroad corridor more "pedestrian friendly" is just one idea that could increase the amount of foot traffic in the downtown area, thus helping commerce, he said.

"Canby's downtown is not blighted so much as it is bland," he said. "Until you can develop something that encourages people to get out of their cars, walk around, visit with friends, browse around the shops and enjoy the area, it is going to be a struggle.

''At any time, I would guess there are more cars parked at the Canby Fred Meyer than in downtown Canby, and most of the cars parked downtown are probably owned by people working outside the city."

Efforts to move the revitalization process forward in Canby received a recent and much-needed boost.

At last week's meeting, the Canby City Council approved the first reading of an ordinance that would go some way to addressing key downtown issues. Councilors unanimously authorized Mayor Scott Taylor to undertake an intergovernmental agreement with ODOT for a $95,671 transportation and growth management program grant for the Canby Downtown Redevelopment Project. The ordinance is due for second reading June 7.

The project's objectives are improve the design and development of the downtown core, to provide better vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle connectivity, and to produce a prioritized list of revitalization projects and marketing strategies, the first of which will be the Northwest Second Avenue streetscape project between Grant and Ivy streets.

The project's long-term redevelopment recommendation is for a connected commercial area along Southwest Second Avenue to provide reorientation of business off Highway 99E.

Canby Business Revitalization would act as consultants on the project, and would be paid $68,250. The ODOT grant would provide $85,846, and the city would pay the remaining $27,078.

Eatwell said the first wave of urban renewal efforts in the 1970s and 1980s generally were failures, and that modern methods must avoid the pitfalls of predecessors.

"They were poorly executed attempts at urban renewal," he said. "A lot of money was spent that had no long-term benefit.

''Urban renewal is not just simply a business profit mechanism. It really defines the outlying community . . . I'm impressed a town the size of Canby has committed to urban renewal."

However, in order to be representative of the community's wishes and successful in the long run, citizens must be involved in the urban renewal process.

An advisory committee board - consisting of councilors, Industrial Area Association members and local residents - is supposed to meet monthly to discuss ideas and planning regarding urban renewal, but at least some members feel the council is merely paying it lip service and that its views are not listened to.

The 16-member committee's chairman, Pat Johnson, expressed disappointment at a City Council meeting last month, saying the panel would have liked input before the council agreed to the IAA's request to increase its representation.

Johnson said committee members are frustrated that alignment work on Sequoia Parkway was progressing without their input.

"The committee was supposed to be about prioritizing projects," Johnson said, "but decisions are being made, and the committee has only met once." He said Taylor agreed to attend the committee's 6:30 p.m. June 5 meeting at council chambers to hear their concerns.

Voice-mail messages were left with Taylor at his work, but no return call was received by press time.

Among ideas that Eatwell endorses is the notion of linking local job development to employee home ownership.

He said there is good reason to encourage employers to hire local people. "It's cost-effective to have employees live close to where they work," he said. "It does so much for the community. Employees don't have to commute to work and, with the extra hour saved every day from sitting in traffic jams, more time can be spent with the kids or donating time to a local non-profit group."

''Think of all that time each day that is wasted sitting in a car in traffic. That time can be better spent in our own communities if the jobs are local. Keeping people in town, rather than watching them all leave in the morning to work somewhere else, helps to stabilize the schools, local businesses and the whole community."

For example, Eatwell suggested that local employers could invite experts in during lunch breaks to help employees get information about home buying.

He also said transportation programs, which the city has committed to studying after Portland State University conducts a needs analysis, and programs promoting the hiring of local people first for local jobs are worth exploring.

Eatwell also likes the idea of "cluster" industries, whereby companies in related fields, or which provide products or services to each other, are located in close proximity.

"With 'cluster' companies, it means every dollar is spent three or four times in the local community before it even gets in the hands of an employee," he said. "It relates to the multiplier effect of macroeconomics, where the impact of each dollar spent locally is multiplied by the number of times it is spent."

''Keeping the dollars here is how you keep and create a community. A lot of the dollars earned by local people do not stay here because a lot of the dollars go to Wilsonville and malls in the area."

Keeping people and their payrolls in the community ensures the wealth is spread among local businesses of all shapes and sizes.

"Every pay day, people who live in Canby but who work outside it get paid, and a lot of the money is lost to Canby," he said.

And, while more retail and commercial companies have set up shop in Canby in recent years, local stores do the most to reinvest cash in their own communities, he added.

Only 10 cents of every $1 spent at large nationwide or multinational grocery chains stays in a local community, compared to about 60 cents per $1 spent at locally owned businesses, Eatwell said.

"That's a lot of money sucked out of the local economy, and that's detrimental to the local community," he said. "In a town the size of Canby, that amount of financial drainage can be highly detrimental because that money is not going back into schools or roads - it's being sent out of state to a corporation's headquarters."

CBR is a nonprofit agency that has collected about $140,000 through grants and partnerships. According to recent CBR statistics, it has invested $246,000 in public funds and $64,000 in private funds into Canby development projects. Business owners pay into a five-year Economic Investment District, which is effectively known as CBR.

The agency has initiated the Canby Growers' Market and managed the Pioneer Plaza and Canby Gateway Project, among others.

For more details about CBR and its programs, call Eatwell at 266-3720, or visit the agency's web site at www.canby.com/chamber/cbr.