September 26, 2007

City celebrates good business
Business is Good! tour members hear of city’s economic success stories

By ED COX
of The Chronicle

Marketing itself as “uniquely situated,” “simply sun-sational,” and the city that landed Google, The Dalles played host to a small but diverse group of business leaders Tuesday as the 14th stop on the Business is Good! Tour of Oregon.

Emissaries from electric and software companies, legislators’ offices, and non-profit institutes were on hand for The Dalles part of the tour, which included breakfast at Columbia Gorge Community College, an orientation at Kelly Overlook, and visits to the Google campus and the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center.

Although a trip to the Klondike Wind Farm, planned for the previous evening, was scuttled by a tour bus breakdown that required a timely rescue from The Dalles crew, Tuesday’s itinerary offered local officials and business leaders ample time to extoll the city and region’s virtues, from climate and recreation to history and people.

“I haven’t seen a community that’s so cohesively bound before,” Google The Dalles site manager Ken Patchett told tour-goers as part of a breakfast-time Power Point presentation.

Saying he would not only like to grow Google’s nearly 200-employee presence but also see other information technology firms locate to the region, Patchett confirmed once more that “connectivity” (read: the Q-Life network) and cheap, sustainable hydroelectric power factored heavily into the company’s decision to build its first rural data center here.

Wasco County Judge Dan Ericksen added the Scenic Area to that list, saying Google was the first company to find that attractive.

“We marketed the Scenic Area, and we sold Google,” Ericksen told the visitors.
While much of the focus was on information technology, tour-goers also heard about other industries that are making inroads, including wind energy and, possibly, biofuels.

Dr. Susan Wolff of CGCC praised industry support for the college’s renewable energy technology program, noting that the program has been a success because it was “industry-driven from the beginning.”

The one-year program, which has moved beyond the pilot stage and is now being offered for credit and a certificate, is the only one on the West Coast and currently has 34 students enrolled.

“Instead of the little engine that could, we’re the little college that does,” Wolff said.

College president Dr. Frank Toda echoed the sentiment.

“When you get hope going and start doing things, you create the excitement you see around you,” he said.

That excitement was palpable in Wasco County/OSU Extension agent Brian
Tuck’s brief report on local investigations into the biofuels industry.

Tuck said he and other university professors in the region have done “a fair amount of research” into the growing of crops used in the industry — including camelina and safflower — and have concluded they show “some real potential.”
He thinks that with legislative support for biofuels on both sides of the river, the Mid-Columbia basin will be significantly impacted by the industry within the next five years.

That means, he emphasized, that the growing of wheat or other small grains will be enhanced rather than diminished. Farmers, he predicted, will begin to find it viable to put oil-seed plans into the rotation and thus reap the soil enrichment and disease-fighting benefits of alternating crops.

“We think this will change the color of our fields and make agriculture sustainable for this area,” Tuck said.

The Community Outreach Team — which includes the city, Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, college, port, county, and Mid-Columbia Council of Governments — organized the local portion of the overall tour, which was spearheaded by Oregon Business Magazine, the Oregon Business Plan and the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department.