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Gold Hill may serve as fiscal example Grants will help the city with a fiscal analysis that other towns could use By BUFFY POLLOCK for the Mail Tribune Gold Hill soon could become a model for small-town finance. Two grants awarded recently by the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department will help Gold Hill plan downtown growth as well as conduct a financial analysis that eventually could be used at the state level. A downtown planning grant, $15,000 from the U.S. Forest Service Old Growth Diversification Fund, will fund a contract with Medford communications specialist Sue Densmore. Densmore and her partners for the project - Portland financial analyst Jeff Pashman and former county administrator Burke Raymond - will conduct downtown planning workshops with community members, city staff and the city's community development committee, CanDo. They also will assist in grant writing. "This will basically help them plan downtown growth while considering the fact the city is getting a new library," said Bev Thacker, southwest regional coordinator for the OECDD. "It will help them decide things like where they want to have it, how they'd like to plan other things around it and how to apply for additional grant money to make it larger." The city's new library building is part of a $38.9 million bond to improve every library in the county. Construction is expected to begin in 2004. The second grant, a Housing and Urban Development community block grant, will fund an $8,500 financial analysis and small city model project. It is also contracted to Densmore's group. Goals of the project are to analyze city income, expenditures and other possible sources of revenue - "basically, why we don't have any money and how we can still manage to do things," said CanDo member Gloria Eilefson. On a larger scale, Thacker said, the project would give a better understanding of special struggles faced by small communities. "Our goal is not just to have something for Gold Hill, but at the end of the day to have something other communities can use as well," she said. "We can come up with a model program that can be duplicated because Gold Hill is not unique in having any of these issues. "City governments in small towns are really overwhelmed. They have all the responsibilities of bigger cities but only a few people to do it all. By starting at the community level, we can try and learn different ways for them to do things." Densmore said she was looking forward to helping Gold Hill set goals. "This is the community of Gold Hill's conversation, and we are just the facilitators. It's their planning and their goals that we are helping them work on," said Densmore. "It's an opportunity for Gold Hill to really look at the future, not in a way that's attached to any particular source of income, but look at what their hopes and dreams are for how they want Gold Hill to grow." Buffy Pollock is a free-lance writer living in Medford. E-mail her at [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.