News

Success of Estacada Industrial Park spurs talk of new urban renewal area

Northwest Technologies Inc. is among companies thriving at the park, which is helping transform the former lumber town.

POSTED: 04:00 AM PST Wednesday, November 26, 2008
BY TYLER GRAF

Five years ago, a 25-acre parcel of land on the outskirts of Estacada, in a verdant wooded valley near the banks of the Clackamas River, was home to a small storage unit business and nothing else. It employed a single person.

In the last five years, the once paltry property has exploded, morphing into the Estacada Industrial Park. The new center of all things industrial – typically steel fabrication and mechanical work – now employees more than 100 people at 12 locally owned companies.

Estacada City Manager Randy Ealy calls the industrial park a success story. But if it is, then the ending has yet to be written. That’s because there are bigger plans for the industrial park and Estacada as a whole, the town’s mayor, Robert Austin, says. These plans call for an expansion of the industrial park and the city, and the creation of an urban renewal district that could bring $6.6 million in development activity to the city over the next 20 years.

“The industrial park goes a long way to providing job growth for Estacada,” Austin said.
The urban renewal district, as proposed, would cover about 79.2 acres, or 6 percent of Estacada. Thirty-five acres would be in the city’s central commercial district, and 4.3 acres would overlook the Clackamas River.

The urban renewal district would represent steady growth for the city, Austin said.
“Perhaps we could have a movie theater here, or a community pool,” he said.
And this year, the city of Estacada voted to overlay an enterprise zone over the city’s new industrial park. Now, as part of that designation, businesses are given tax abatements for additional work done to their companies, including expansion.

Both Austin and Ealy see the success of the industrial park benefiting not just Estacada, population 2,700, but the region as a whole. The roots of the industrial park sprouted in the late 1980s, when Estacada-based investor and former mayor Michael Park bought the acreage and started using it for farmland.

Park still owns about 125 adjacent acres, which the city hopes to develop once the real estate market rebounds. Park’s Christmas tree growing operation can be seen on his nearby property. The rest of his property extends to the hills that rise at the horizon.
To keep growth of the industrial park in line with current infrastructural services, a new sewer pump was recently installed at the edge of the industrial park. The new pump is capable of servicing up to 300 acres – more than any development that could fill the land.

In addition to the proposed growth in the industrial park, Austin hopes to see the city grow as well.
“A lot of places suffer from job-housing imbalance,” Austin said. “We’re trying not to.”
More jobs will undoubtedly attract more residents, Austin says. Estacada hopes to accommodate an influx in residents with 1,000 new housing lots that are waiting for development.
But with a slumping housing market, city leaders realize that they must continue to place a premium on economic growth in order to attract new residents.

Slowly, they say, that’s being done, two decades after a timber-industry slowdown sent Estacada’s economy southward. The city was once defined economically and socially by lumber.
Currently, the largest single employer at the industrial park is Northwest Technologies Inc., a steel forming and fabrication company.

In fact, it has been one of the fastest growing companies in Oregon for the past four years, and has seen a 20-percent revenue increase in the last fiscal year, according to NWT owner Eric Sale.
“Industrial jobs … they are a good line of work,” Sale said.

In NWT’s main manufacturing facility, which looks both futuristic and antiquated, several cast-iron benches the company has made for the school district sit near some spare parts.
The benches have holes on their wide bases for fastening to the ground. But they look as if they’d hardly need that; these sturdy steel pews could break Atlas’ back.

Austin is apt to agree with Sale’s pronouncement that industrial jobs are a “good line of work.” He says the industrial park goes a long way in providing job growth for Estacada – and not simply retail jobs “but rather jobs with good wages and fairly good benefits.”

And this is the first time since the lumber-industry downturn that city leaders feel confident in the future of the economy and their ability to build solid community foundations, Ealy said.
Several companies have expressed interest in relocating to the industrial park, Sale said, including TransGo, a distribution company currently located near Portland International Airport.

“A small town has a lot of benefits, actually,” Sale said. “There’s more of a community here and you can get things done.”