Ritter for Klamath Falls City Council

Note: Although they knew the address for this website, the media purposefully omitted any reference to it during election coverage. Draw your own conclusions as to why they would behave that way. Hint: This has much to do with why elections are so expensive and why your candidate choices are limited.

Statements: I live on a street that is in such disrepair the asphalt is crumbling and kids are throwing pieces of it around. It has also become dangerous to walk on.

Financing road work is a large challenge for the City. There is no stable funding source for this most expensive municipal infrastructure. The County receives most of the funding for roads and we depend on them for our projects. We can do better working with the county and state to secure additional road funding in our future.

I used to work at the state level in governor's office meetings when agencies were prioritizing their funding allocations. There were cycles when Klamath was not receiving road funding because the area had road funds and development capacity that were not being utilized. State funds are issued on a need basis and communities and counties without capacity are a higher priority. A factor in prioritization are communities engaged in activities to improve infrastructure for economic growth with potential for cost recovery. The combination of need and proactive development led to large state investments in road projects in Bend. We can similarly be considered a high priority if we stop thinking of road reserves as an interest-bearing savings account. The City needs to stop pretending it has road department when we don't have the funds to support one.

We could make a deal with the county to turn over our equipment and loan our road staff, then join them in development activities that will draw more state and federal funding for future road projects. The caveat is that they need to spend the road funds they have on some of our priority projects. We can also do a much better job developing geothermal resources and offer heat capacity in trade to the county for additional road projects. There is ample funding for renewable energy if we would stop our archaic way of thinking and develop new projects to anchor new funding.

The best way to improve our funding options for roads is to ensure economic vitality. We can also use projects that create jobs as catalysts to secure additional state funds. Then we can finance projects with tax increment financing. We should not be adding or increasing fees or else we will do harm to our economy. When we harm the economy, our tax base erodes, so the short-term view of using fees to subsidize any municipal function has the long term effect of eroding reserves.

October 25 - Herald interview about City policies harming businesses and investment.

Statements: Anyone who has attempted to build a building, renovate a building, start, expand or operate a business in Klamath Falls has experienced the shortcomings in the City policy structure that serve to harm the business climate.

We rely upon investors to purchase buildings, rehabilitate them and recruit tenants. There were many such investors in the 1990's. However, after experiencing Klamath Falls's planning and permit processes, many investors who were involved in renovations in the last six years have vowed not to invest here again. During our recent growth period, City and County planning departments ramped up to expand the number of codes being enforced and increase permit fees. We are now a small, declining community with big city policies in place.

This is fine in a stable and growing economy--government can get away with permit extortion when businesses and investors are making money--they will still work with an expensive bureaucracy if the opportunities are great enough. The problem is we don't have great opportunities. We never did. We had a real estate bubble and chose to exploit, rather than build our climate for investors and businesses.

The City policy on businesses states that anyone doing any kind of commerce in Klamath Falls should apply for a business license. Technically, this even includes someone trying to earn extra income by selling goods on eBay. This policy is largely unenforceable. If it is not enforceable, why do we have it? If we were able to enforce it fully, we would only serve to drive away entrepreneurs or anyone attempting small transactions.

They say doing business here is a privilege. What exactly is the privilege? As soon as you apply for a business license, government demands to enter your premises for inspections--even if you lease and the landlord already went through a separate process for code enforcement. They won't issue you a license until they have bombarded you with more bureaucracy... which you have to pay for through more fees. Just to answer the question of whether a certain business function is allowed requires a $100 review fee.

Cities throughout America are competing for businesses. We have nothing to offer them, except the prospect of being easier to work with than other cities. The City of Klamath Falls is currently MORE difficult to work with than other cities. We will for the next several years rely upon small businesses for most of our economic stability. We need to remove redundant and unnecessary permits and procedures and focus instead on what we can do to make people want to start businesses here and desire to work with the City.

The problem in our leadership, or lack thereof is the absence of true understanding of the problem. People that have only worked in government or nonprofit capacities have no reference or affinity for what businesses must deal with. We need to elect more people with actual recent experience starting businesses in Klamath Falls. The lack of voter focus in this direction is directly responsible for the quagmire that exists in City government.

Occupation: Magazine Publisher (Explore Klamath County Magazine), photographer and owner of a Real Estate Brokerage (541 Realty.com)

Political experience:
Worked with all levels of government (city, county, state; including the office of the governor...and federal) on policy development, lobbying, community infrastructure, job creation, and workforce education.

Positions held: Industry Coordinator, Business Development Intake Specialist, Central Oregon Community Development Coordinator (administered over $24 million in community development funding), dedicated Staff to the Governor's Office for special projects.

Functions: liaison to industry associations, legislative analysis and testimony, business advocacy, grant administration, project development, lead responder to high tech business industrial recruitment projects, and infrastructure development coordination.

Why are you running? I am running to provide voters with the option of recent private sector experience. The City Council role is restricted to making policy decisions, but a Council member can volunteer to develop grant applications, lobby higher levels of government, and lead special projects outside of the administration. My mission in this role would be to preserve our local economy while constantly improving the quality of life within our neighborhoods.

I have the utmost respect for my opponent, Bud Hart, who has served diligently as a member of City Council for the past 12 years. I believe he means well, has done his best and no one can fault him for that. However, the Council is designed to keep the administration in check and turnover can generate new energy to solve entrenched problems.

My balanced private/public sector experience is needed more than ever in Klamath Falls. I’m not running for money or recognition, I’m not retired or semi-retired, I just want to make a positive difference. As an active member of the business community, I’ve observed that some policies are harming businesses. This is now an impediment to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for everyone who lives and works here. The investment curve has already plummeted. If the City fails to enact an effective course correction, more of our businesses will fail and the tax base will erode to the point where we can’t meet the most basic needs of our communities. I don’t want to see that happen and I will commit my passion, knowledge, experience, and track record to address the challenges before us.

How do you see Klamath Falls changing over the next four years? New development?

Due to a combination of fuel, environmental and natural resource constraints, we will be faced with the greatest collective challenge to our well being in decades.

There are some people who don’t want growth. That’s fine, but we must at least strive to maintain economic equilibrium while we improve residential life. Many people have their life savings and retirement tied up in their home. Does anyone who owns property want to lose value? Equity has become the second American dream, following economic prosperity. In terms of property devaluation, we’ve only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Our plight is a function of cause-and-effect and supply-and-demand. If we lose jobs, there is less demand for housing. When demand sinks, so do property values. We’ve lost two percent of our jobs in the last year. This doesn’t sound significant, but it is because it indicates a trend. What you don’t hear about is how many small businesses without employees have gone under. Oregon doesn’t track this information, nor does it track people in sales jobs who file independently but are not considered employees. Take these factors into account and our situation is more dire than most people think. The only way to save property values and the tax base is to restore jobs and improve the climate for small businesses.

Immediate action must be taken to create a friendlier business and resident atmosphere. We need a comprehensive policy review in this regard that includes businesses, investors and homeowners on the team.

I am very passionate about the business climate and the barriers facing businesses. I have devoted a substantial portion of my life to the task of solving economic problems in creative ways. In my role as a business owner who recruits new businesses here, I have in recent years witnessed many of the City’s policies turning people away.

The world is changing and we must adapt: we simply have no choice. There are so many things we should have done or finished that will soon come back to haunt us. There is still time to correct some of the opportunities we missed, but the clock is winding down.

In what ways can the city council and you help to keep air service at the Klamath Falls Airport?

As an economic development expert and the only FAA-licensed pilot on the Council, I would add credibility to the airport policy framework.

The best way to retain commercial air service is through a strong local economy that supports more business traffic. The airport can participate directly by being more open and inclusive. This can be accomplished by applying greater creativity to operations, building better small business relations and improving property marketing, especially by partnering with the real estate community. For example, the airport was unable to secure tenants for its leased land even during the real estate boom. How many years must viable commercial land sit idle before the City recognizes that the strategies in place don’t work?

In 1993 I discovered that a personal aircraft can be obtained for less than the cost of buying a second car. I earned a pilot’s license and experienced the joy and freedom of flying, frequently traveling between Portland, Salem and Klamath Falls. I sold my plane in 2000 in part to start my business, but also because the experience of keeping a plane at the Klamath Falls airport was more costly and less friendly than in Salem or the Portland area. While working on business recruitment for the State of Oregon, I witnessed how the strong presence of general aviation enticed the Lancair Company to locate its manufacturing facility (180,000 square feet)at the Bend airport, eventually employing 260 workers. This was followed by Lancair International locating at the Redmond airport with 70 more high-wage employees.

General aviation can be a boom to tourism. Since the early 90’s, airports in Arizona have done well catering to private pilots by offering specific services to attract them. There are over 15,000 private aircraft within a 5 hour commute radius of Klamath Falls and those owners must fly at least once a month to maintain their skills and engines. In spite of rising fuel costs, more would visit and tour the area if the airport environment was more welcoming. For that group and for commercial air travelers, we need to address multimodal transportation. There are currently no regularly scheduled bus connections at the airport terminal.

The airport tower operations and related federal upgrades are anchored by the military presence and we must prepare for the possibility that the base could be downsized as has been threatened in the past.

Another airport opportunity is to prepare for air taxi service on microjets (aka Very Light Jets—VLJs). New and safer avionics systems sponsored by the federal agencies NASA and NIST combined with these new fuel-saving planes are more economical to operate for smaller passenger groups. There are still a few kinks to work out in production, but companies such as Eclipse and new companies building fleets to support lower-volume airports are becoming an attractive alternative to the larger carriers under pressure to cut costs by serving only the largest cities. For purely economic reasons, it seems inevitable that microjet fleets will be implemented. For this reason, developing strategies that appeal to emerging air taxi services would be prudent.

What is Klamath Falls missing that you can help provide? Klamath Falls is missing visionary leadership. I have witnessed the loss of many job creating opportunities resulting from confusing and redundant policies. City management lacks the initiative to streamline and be friendlier to businesses, investors and property owners. There are a lot of hard-working, well meaning City employees that should be empowered to be more helpful to stakeholders, if only the management would strongly support that role.

I would bring to the office a recent understanding of barriers to private business growth, experience developing infrastructure and the courage to confront the administration on issues that are harming residents, businesses and would-be entrepreneurs.

As an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it is to build something from nothing in Klamath Falls, which is exactly our plight and challenge. I believe with a slight change in perspective, we can rise to the occasion and stabilize our local economy.

The stock market is declining and state agencies are focusing their limited resources on areas like Hillsboro where large abandoned high-tech plants are practically free and the infrastructure is more conducive to recruit big businesses. Because of this, our best bet is to focus on entrepreneurship and small business.

In terms of business recruitment, we are on our own for now. There are far fewer state and federal incentives available to recruit businesses with than there were after the last recession. We have little control or influence over what other levels of government are doing, many of which further limit our options, so the best thing we can do is take a hard look at ourselves and remove the barriers embedded in local government: first and foremost, we must eliminate unnecessary and redundant bureaucracy. We have the ability, but we have lacked the courage and commitment to just do it.

What new ideas can you bring to the position? There are many new ideas that will be explained at my website in the coming weeks. For now I will address the most important: geothermal.

Nowhere in Oregon and few places in the country have such a large concentration of geothermal activity (heat close to the earth’s surface). This is hands-down the most viable and most efficient alternative energy resource. Because it is rare, most people who live elsewhere don’t understand how much more effective it is for offsetting global emissions. No one else will champion this cause on our behalf. We must do it for ourselves.

We can celebrate that we have geothermal sidewalks, some heated streets, a swimming pool and a small handful of buildings heated with geothermal, but that’s not enough to attract commerce. The City charges so much to connect to the loop (associated with natural gas prices that have nothing to do with the cost of distributing heat obtained for free) that many building owners refused to be a part of it when they were invited to participate. In essence, the City is using customer rates to subsidize its own heating needs. This is wrong. They City should be using nearly free heat as an incentive to draw businesses and investors downtown in order to stabilize the tax base.

Now if a building owner wants to connect to the City geothermal loop, they can’t because the system lacks the capacity to support more buildings. There is an easy solution to this: billions of federal dollars have been allocated to renewable energy projects nationwide and the City has received none of this new funding even though we can prove the greatest return on investment for offsetting carbon emissions, which is the primary requirement for most of the funding. The efficiency of using geothermal heat is superior to wind, solar and biomass, so securing federal funding should be easy with the proper focus. Expanding our options will require dismantling the old system in favor of multiple cooperative public/private projects that will work better for everyone concerned.

The reason for government involvement in infrastructure is to use its scale to accomplish what individuals cannot. We could be doing so much more with geothermal and our ignorance has left a lot of money on the table we could have been using to improve our communities.

Property owners with geothermal heating systems should be receiving payments for offsetting carbon emissions with renewable energy just like wind and solar projects already do. In 2006, roughly $5.5 billion worth of offsets were purchased on the open global market. Think of the money we could have earned in recent years had the City created a program for this. It is one of many options the City has failed to notice. Geothermal opportunities will be discussed in greater detail on my website: www.ritternow.com

Opponent's Question: What is his feeling about the tax limitation measures and is there anything he can think of to do about it?

Q: Why does the city annex county property so a developer can build more homes when it cannot find any money to pave streets that are already within the city limits?

Plain and simple: the City makes more money serving new construction over established neighborhoods. System development charges bring money into the system and offset other costs as more households are connected. To the City, new homes are worth more than older homes subject to property tax limitation. This doesn’t mean new housing development is always bad. In moderation it can be good, depending on the project. Although it is outside City limits (but connected to City sewer) JELD-WEN’s Running Y Resort, for example, has had an enormous positive impact on our economy by influencing tourism and other investments.

Long before the crash, most real estate agents noticed that the City approved more new housing projects than the market could support. The writing was on the wall when new homes began selling for less than existing comparable homes. The City’s greed cost a lot of people their equity by creating such a large oversupply. We can only sustain home values as long as there are jobs to sustain demand. We must always have real core jobs like manufacturing to anchor our economy and the other sectors. The Council thought retail alone would support the economy. It can’t and they were wrong. The people need new people on the Council that understand real estate and economics better.

Q: How would you help shift the focus of our local economy from timber and agriculture to eco-tourism and/or light industry?

When recruiting manufacturers and other big businesses, we are competing with communities in other states who have far more resources than we do. These companies will located where they will make the most money, including gaining the biggest return on their investment. Oregon's state legislature always redirects economic funding when the economy is doing well, we stop working on diversifying our economies and when we fall on hard times, have no resources to apply toward recovery. East coast states do not do this: they always keep building their economies because they realize how they cycle.

The limited funding in place in Oregon will be applied to the Portland area where it is most likely state funds will actually create jobs. They have abandoned semiconductor facilities in Hillsboro they are practically giving away to attract solar cell manufacturers. We have nothing to offer like this, nor do we have a large enough workforce to attract such manufacturers.

Other companies just evaluate how much money a community/state partnership will give them to offset their startup costs. Like every other Oregon community, we can offer tax incentives. That's about it. It will take many years for any new money allocated at the state level to trickle down to our little economy. We aren't a state priority.

So what do we have to work with? One of the things the City should have done when developed the Cogen facility was to use the project to ensure lower power rates for Klamath Falls. Instead, they took a short-term approach of direct payments that never materialized, then a buyout.

Agriculture. First of all, there is hardly any direct agriculture within city limits. We have businesses that support agriculture and they have the same business climate needs as the others. The city can't do much about agriculture except be a good consumer and lobbyist. Is that the best use of our time for 5% or so of the jobs? No.

Agriculture as a local industry is hitting electrical rate barriers for pumping water. Bonanza-area farmers could have addressed this when they protested the COB facility (including Senator Whitsett). The project was destined to be implemented regardless of their objections and they could have angled for a compromise ensuring lower power rates.

Ecotourism

We have plenty of wetlands and wildlife. This is not enough to generate ecotourism. The municipal flavor must be seasoned with projects that walk-the-talk. Once our city developed its geothermal loop and heated sidewalks, it sat back and decided that was enough. It is not. Especially considering billions of dollars of federal funds that have been granted to renewable and sustainability projects this year, mostly on the east coast and in the mid-west. With such a tremendous resource in geothermal, we should be receiving a lot of funding for projects. We've done nothing to go after easy millions in 2008. We need to completely restructure our eco-structure for 2009 and beyond.

After speaking with executives at JELD-WEN, the Friends of Moore Park and the Parks Department of the city, the conceptual support for a lift mechanism to haul bicyclists up the historic ski hill during the summer and for snow sports in the winter seems possible if we can anchor some federal funds for the project. All we have to do is plan it, borrow the technology from projects in Idaho and the world list of the best places to bike in the world. A solar-powered lift providing access to the thousand acres of City land full of trails in and around Moore Park, with paths leading into Southview, Ridgewater, Buck Ridge and Running Y will draw thousands ecotourists to Klamath Falls. Since the trail network connects to downtown, we'd see a lot more people there spending money to support our businesses and infrastructure.

Light Industry

Lately when we've tried to develop retail and large projects, either the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) or the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) has shut us down.

It’s not viable to go after big businesses right now because we don’t have enough incentives. It would be better to focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs. Our city government is hostile to small businesses right now and we need to be much friendlier to attract and retain them. For example, what happens to a business that applies for a business license with their $100 fee? A barrage of bureaucracy. The city says it is a privilege to do business here. In reality, it is a major hassle. There are many things we can do to overcome such barriers, beginning with eliminating some of the unnecessary and frivolous permit requirements.

Q: Some of our oldest neighborhoods are in bad shape and need attention to infrastructure as well as attention from police and code enforcement. What will you do to encourage their revitalization?

The concept of a neighborhood from the 40's and 50's was true Americana and the remnants can be seen in areas like Pacific Terrace. However, we've departed greatly from the original vision of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods with friendly front porches and everything a family could need close by.

Cheap fuel prices of the past are gone. We've recently seen a direct relationship between the global economy and fuel prices. If the global economy is good, fuel prices go up and harm our domestic economy. As the economy recovers, fuel will run sky high again.

When fuel seemed eternally cheap and abundant, it made sense to compartmentalize our communities so there was a district for shopping and a suburb for living. We can't do that anymore. I want to see every ten blocks or so a nice restaurant, a great store and other types of shops. Not a lot, but enough to cover the basic needs of living and socializing. And it needs to be done in a way that reflect the character of each neighborhood.

Crime

We keep buying more police cars. Yes, we need some cars, but an officer driving around can't hear a window break, a gunshot, a scream, or suspicious steps slapping the street as a burglar flees a victim's property. This is why with more patrols downtown, vandalism had not decreased. We need more officers walking the streets so they can listen for problems. As fuel prices increase in years to come, we may not be able to afford to keep so many patrol cars on the road, so we need to begin the transition now. We can then apply the surplus to other crime prevention and public safety projects. Roaming patrol cars can provide support for foot police, possibly with greater efficiency if we approach the topic creatively.