Three views about growth preview debate ahead

By Steve Law and Christian Gaston

The Portland Tribune, Sep 3, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (5 Reader comments)

KIDD

Portland residents’ perspectives about future growth vary according to geography, occupation and land-use philosophy. Here’s a look at the views of three people who have a lot at stake in the current “urban reserves” process:

The rural resident

If Hillsboro gets its way and expands the city’s maze of industrial parks north of the Sunset Highway and into Helvetia, the whole region could lose out, says Cherry Amabisca, a leader of a citizen group called Save Helvetia.

It’s not just that she’d have a harder time raising red Angus on her land, she says, but the high-tech companies the region is courting would lose a key recruiting tool.

“The close-in countryside is an attraction when you’re recruiting, because many of these people come from Santa Clara, and Arizona and Detroit,” Amabisca says.

Washington County’s different, Amabisca said, and Helvetia’s one reason.

The grassy rural counterpoint to the cubicle-dominated world of the technology business is what drew Amabisca and her husband, Allen, to Oregon in 1987. They’d lived in California and Arizona in sprawling suburbs. But they wanted to escape.

So when Intel offered Amabisca a job, she and her husband snapped up 8 acres of rural land and settled in.

“It’s not like Phoenix or the Bay Area or Los Angeles,” she says. “It’s sensible.”

Amabisca and her group worry that Washington County’s push for economic development could threaten the landscape – and the recruiting tool that worked so well to lure them here – all in the name of an industry that’s shipping jobs overseas.

“High-tech employment is the lowest that it’s been in 10 years,” Amabisca says.

If the push to urbanize Helvetia succeeds, Amabisca worries that farmers and rural escapees will depart, while buildings or industrial lots sit empty waiting for a buyer.

The mayor

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