[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 1]

MW: This is Melissa Williams for the Center for Columbia River History interviewing Mayor Dean Dossett of Camas, in Camas, Washington on July 18, 2000. First I would like to tell about you, your background, where you’re from and how you came to Camas.

DD: My name is Dean Dossett, currently Mayor of Camas. I came to Camas in 1963, was born and raised in northern Idaho, small town, Kellogg, Idaho, which was a mining community, primarily mining and logging industry. I had worked as a teenager while I was going to college for the Forest Service for like three years and enjoyed that work, it was kind of fun, it was outside, got to do a lot of different things, but the pay was lousy and the only other real choices were logging or mining, and mining was not too desirable to me because it was all underground and kinda clammy, and cold, and wet, logging was very, very dangerous in those days, it was not uncommon to have people severely injured or even killed during the summers that I worked during the Forest Service, so I knew a couple of people who had been seriously injured, so I thought “Well, that’s probably not really where I wanna be either,” so I decided to just take off, like September of ’63 to see what I could find. I’d been in this area of the country before, primarily Vancouver and down into Salem and enjoyed the area so I thought well I’d head this direction, plus I had relatives in Vancouver I figured I could mooch off of them for a few days if I needed too [laughs] while I looked for work. Actually as I was passing through Camas, on my way to Vancouver, stopped at the mill just to see if they were hiring and ended up going to work for them the next day, and I’ve been here ever since, I’m still employed at the mill, I’ve been down there for like thirty-seven years now, I guess; have also been involved in city politics for the last– well this is my thirteenth year, so it’s been two careers for the last thirteen years.

MW: So can you tell me how you got involved in politics then, what was your interest?

DD: Actually people have asked me that before and there was real no particular reason so much as I just wanted to get involved in things, and I’ve always been the type of person even at work, up until al the reorganizations and the takeovers, and just got purchased again [laughs], anyway I was always kind of upwardly mobile in that I was always progressing and learning new things, taking advantage of things, you know training classes and anything that they would offer in that area. So I’ve always been kind of interested in improving myself or learning new things and helping people because a lot of the work I did at the mill were human resource type jobs and I like dealing with people, so politics seemed to be kind of a natural extension of that particular desire or what I like to do so it really was more that than anything specific to politics or anything that was going on in the city that was wrong, or I needed to fix or anything like that, so mush as just really wanting to become involved in experiencing that side of life I guess in that sense. Since I’ve gotten involved it’s been very enjoyable, obviously I wouldn’t still be doing it, and I’ve kind of taken advantage of the same opportunities being that I’ve tried to learn new things, I’ve progressed from council person to mayor and am currently the president of the Association of Washington Cities, which is a statewide organization, so there’s opportunities to continue to grow and learn, plus still work with people.

MW: What things can you tell me about the feel of Camas when you first got here, was it small town atmosphere?

DD: Yeah, pretty much so, it was very similar to the town that I came from ’cause Kellogg was actually about the same size, I think at that time they were both about four thousand probably, they were both mil towns in the sense that Kellogg itself had a large mining company that was a predominant employer, Bunker Hill Company which has since closed down, but the feel of it really was about the same, just kind of the cultural feel. The environmental feel was much nicer here, even though people have always complained about the paper mill and the smell of the paper mill and all these terrible things, coming from a mining community where– I mean if you wanna see pollution [laughs] go to a mining company in the early ’60s, so coming to Camas was really to me a very pleasant experience and people would complain about the smell, and you could smell it, and there still is a slight odor now, but for me it was kind of like this is nothing compared to what I had grown up with, so it was significantly better to me as far as the quality of life. Plus it paid better [laughs], compared to toady’s wages it paid very little, but.

MW: So your experience at the mill has obviously been good.

DD: Yeah. Like as I say the last few years I think has been upsetting for everyone because there’s been a lot of reorganizations, you know they’ve gone from being Crown Zellerbach what ten years ago, fifteen years ago, to James River to Fort James, and now I’m assuming it will end up being Georgia Pacific, so there’s been four basic huge changes plus there’s been a lot of internal reorganizations that have gone on too. Probably for the first twenty or twenty-five years of my career there it was very pleasant, very relaxing, everybody got along, everybody kind of knew what was going on as far as the security of the mill and then when everything started changing I think people probably feel less secure than what they used to. So the cultural change has been pretty significant, internally, but it’s still a good place to work.

MW: Can you tell me about he development here, attracting technology, attracting different types of businesses, are you trying to diversify?

DD: Yes, very much so. Actually, that began as a part of one of the mill considerations around their own future, I think it was in ’82 or ’83, they were at a turning point as far as this particular mill was concerned and they were actually contemplating shutting the mill down as opposed to putting more money into it and lucky for us as a community they decided to put more money into it, I think they invested like five hundred million almost in upgrading the mill, put in a new paper machine which at that time was state of the art paper machine, and basically kinda sounded a warning bell though for those people who were currently involved in city politics, which I was not at that particular time, but it kind of was awake up call that this is our bread and butter because at that point most of the tax revenues came from the mill and there was very little otherwise that kept the city going from the economic point of view. So when they really realized that threat could have gone away I think they started thinking about “Well, what can we do to try to at least forestall that or minimize it if it were to ever happen?” So the current mayor then, Mayor Henrikson, in the council basically started taking a look at what might make sense. They talked to some of the major landowners in the community, which were McKay and McDonald, and over a course of a couple of years came up with a business park essentially that we invested enough money as a city to put a four lane road through, water and sewer, and essentially provided a setting for industrial development. Coincidentally with that she was also working closely with RCA/Sharp and then it was Sharp, it was kind of changing names like we’re doing down here [quick laugh], and they announced that they were going to build in Camas at one point, kind of along about the same time span and then about a year later announced that they weren’t because they’d had some organizational changes, so that kind of came and went. They actually had gone to the extent to where, Sharp is located now up on the hill, they actually built some footings for the buildings and then they shut down the project, so for about two or there years or more essentially all there was up on that hillside was footings for buildings and no buildings until they finally rededicated to come back as Sharp. So we had that going kind of and then that went away so I think there was probably some concern on the part of some of our citizens as to whether or not the investment we had made in the park had been a wise one, as far as the roads, and the sewer, and water, I think it had proven to be that it was. I think really the industries that have come to Camas now basically have made us a very diversified economic city in the sense that if the mill were to decide to shut down for some reason or not, it would be much more easily absorbed from the standpoint of our revenue stream, we’d notice it obviously because it’s a lot of money, but with Wafer Tech, and some of the other ones that have located in the city, that’s taken a lot of heat off of the mill from the standpoint of being that supply of money. So it’s been pretty dynamic. The last four years, five years as far as the recruitment of the industries that have come here. None of us– myself, City Administrator Halverson, or Public Works Director Quinn, who have been the three primary negotiators with these companies as they come in– none of the three of us had ever really dealt with that type of recruitment or the type of competition that is prevalent when you get into those kinds of things. It’s like here’s the City of Camas, which is ten thousand people, competing with the city of Austin and the City of Denver and some of those things, it’s like wow [laughs], and we were wining, in the sense that we were actually having them come. We found out kind of after the facts in some cases as to what really attracts companies because we were so set on– a lot of the things are important, I think you have to have them, but we were so set on the infrastructure being in place, which is important, the roads and stuff, we were very, very set on making sure we could guarantee them quick permitting processes, because that’s very important to them, they wanna get on the ground and start producing, so we concentrated very heavily on that. We found out that one of the companies basically decided in Camas because of it’s proximity to the airport, it’s like “Gee, wish we would have known, we could have sold that a little harder” [laughs], but there’s things like that come into play that you really don’t even realize. I think we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve had an advantage because of that proximity. I think most of these companies are either national or international companies and they like to have their people be able to get to an airport and get where they need to be quickly, plus it’s nice for the people themselves because they can, in some cases, fly to the other branch and be back home that night, so it works out very nicely. So it’s been a very exciting time from the standpoint of our economic development. Residential development, if I compare where it was at when I moved here, it’s gone from basically what I would have considered a very rural environment, particularly on Prune Hill, there were farms up there for the most part, there was a little pocket of fairly new residential development but of the most part it was very, very rural, and there were still actually I think some prune orchards up there when I got here, so that’s changed dramatically. The downtown area really, other than maybe on some of the riverside, has not changed too much, but Prune Hill itself and the Grass Valley area, which is by the Cascade Business Park area, that’s basically been where all the development is and it has not been with turmoil I guess, particularly the big development right by the lake, that was met with a great deal of resistance, and it wasn’t so much really because of the houses I think so much as it’s just the memory of what was there before they started building houses because that used to be very, very heavily forested area, they called it the Black Forest, it was standing when I came in, it was very large timbers, very,. very pretty area, it was totally undeveloped, I think there was one big home that sat down in the center of it that a family did own at that time, but other than that it was all just forest land and at one point it was actually offered I think to the city as I recall, and the county, and neither one of them had the money or the interest in buying it at that time, so it was sold to a private developer who later cut the trees down, which makes sense [laughs], I mean you’re gonna spend the money for the land, but doing that I think made so many people mad to actually see those trees come down because it was a very beautiful stand of timber and it made so many people mad that when he finally did start developing it and putting houses on it there was already a lot of people who had ill feelings towards what had happened and then to start seeing what they considered extravagant homes being built where their trees used to be, it was kind of confrontational I guess, a little bit. I think that’s eased and I think really in a way that particular development, which was one of the larger developments, prior to that time most of them had been pretty small and relatively compact, not big houses so much as small more affordable houses, and I think that particular development kind of opened the eyes of other developers as to the potential for a lot of the view properties in Camas because Prune Hill itself offers three hundred sixty degrees of view, property around the perimeter of the hill, and I think that kind of woke people up to that fact so since the Lacamas Shores, the lakeside development began, we’ve had a lot of upscale development occurring around the perimeter, and then the infill part of it around on the top has been, I would consider, more affordable than what’s been going around the edge. We’ve actually, through no real effort on our part, I think have become probably one of the more expensive cities in southwest Washington as far as housing, and that’s just, again, more geographic than anything because the hill is there and people like to build big houses if they have a view and that’s what they’ve been doing. We had a interesting thing occur, it’s about four years ago now, so it’s probably not as current, I can’t remember who it was, I think it was a magazine in Portland area conducted a survey of the most livable cities in the Portland metropolitan area and Camas came in second to Lake Oswego, and Lake Oswego has always been touted as the place in the metropolitan area to live and that was with a mill in the heart of our city, so it was kind of like “We must be doing something right’ [laughs], I mean that was based on quality of life, you know, a lot of the other factors, but we ranked very, very highly, so it was nice, it was satisfying to get that kind of a rating.

MW: Touching on what you were saying about people being disturbed about this development, and you really think that has more to do with the fact that they were losing the forest and they were losing the environment.

DD: Yeah, I think that was the predominant problem because people were really, really upset, I didn’t realize it at the time, of course I wasn’t probably paying attention at the time [laughs], but there were a lot of people that were still, I mean this was years later, still very, very upset by the fact that those trees had come down, and the same person who cut the trees down was a developer., and it was like they just had focused in on him as a person to not like [laughs], so when he actually had the gall to start building homes where he’d cut down the trees I think that just got their ire up again. He actually had a lot of law suits filed against him, had to do a lot of things. It was all very legal in the sense that it was shorelines issues, pollution issues, storm water drainage, that sort of stuff, and he did really work very hard to make sure it was all done right, but in spite of all that there were still two or three lawsuits, in fact I think they finally, this has been twelve years ago, just finally came to a settlement ion the last of the lawsuits within he last six months. So there was a lot of upset people, and a lot of it mainly was around the environmental issues and whether or not he was actually complying or not, and even if he was he wasn’t type of thin, in the lawsuits anyway. We were actually the city was kind of a third party to it. We were dealing with him in that we were trying to help him figure out how to do it because he had the right to do it on his land, and yet the people who were watching him do it didn’t like what he was doing and it was kind of a no win thing for a while.

MW: So has the tension eased now?

DD: Yeah, I think so. There are some people probably that will never forgive him for cutting down the trees and I think that’s human nature, but I think overall it seems to have pretty well dissipated and I think a lot of that is because there’s been so much development after that, not on the lake necessarily but there’s been a huge swell of housing development in the last five or six years, so it’s kind of like there’s so much of it going on now I don’t think they have the same focus on that particular development that they did at that time.

MW: The environment is something that I did want talk to you about. Is it fair to say, do you think, that a lot of people in Camas have a great concern about the environment here? Is it something that’s important, are there activists involved in protecting?

DD: I haven’t really seen, other than the groups that was involved in the lawsuits around that development, I haven’t seen that many what I would call real environmentalists in a radical sense. I think really, and I won’t take full credit for this, but one of the things that I’ve always tried to do since I became a council person was to preserve the trees and stuff that we’ve had. I don’t know if it’s because of my upbringing in Idaho that I just like trees or what, but we had an opportunity, actually I think I’d been a council member for two years, three, maybe something like that, and there was a major area kind of in the center of the city that was another heavily forested area and again the owner was gonna cut the trees down, and I wasn’t really even thinking in terms of what had happened out at the lake so much as I was just looking up at the area that they were talking about cutting down and it was just like “We can’t do that, it’s right in the heart of the city,” so we actually ended up purchasing that land to save it, which was then first time the city had ever done that. We had some land dedicated to us by owners and stuff, but we had never purchased, particularly for preservation and from that point on we have purchased considerable amounts, plus we’ve purposely set up ways of allowing developers to set aside property to preserve it for trails and that type of thing. So we started out, what’d I say twelve years, so probably ten years ago with little or no land inventory and I think we’re up to about six hundred acres now that we’ve obtained over the last ten years. So I think the environmental feeling in the city is what we live in. We have a lot of trees, we preserve the trees, we’ve tried to create trail networks, we’re still working on those, but we have tried to provide, even though we’ve had a fantastic amount of residential and industrial growth, we’ve tried to maintain and or increase the greenspace within the city and we’ve been very successful at doing that. So I think the environmental probably aren’t there because we’ve done that. If the citizens would have seen us allowing large tracks of trees to be cut down and if we would have filled the entire hillside with houses instead of keeping spaces of trees, and breakers, and barriers, and that type of thing I think probably there would have been many, many more environmental challenges, but we haven’t had that many and I think that’s probably part of the reason.

MW: We’re interested in the ethnic make up of Camas, about diversity in general in this area, and how was it when you got here compared to now, or is it any different at all?

DD: When I came here there was none, it was all white basically. There were a few minorities that worked at the mill but most of them lived in Portland and commuted. I think what we’ve seen over the years, particularly with the hi-tech industries, there’s been many more Asian Americans moving to our city, or at least to the region, but it’s still predominantly a white city and there’s no real reason for that. Certainly since I’ve been involved in politics it’s like there’s nothing… well anything and everything that’s done is done totally open and accepting of any cultures or ethnic diversity that can come here. I think part of the problem really is the cost of housing, there is a limited amount of affordable housing in the city, and there’s good things about that, there’s bad thing s about that, but to some degree– and you always get touchy about this– but to some degree affordable housing is a requirement if you wanna have cultural diversity, and if you don’t have that I think it happened slower and I think that’s kind of what’s happened with Camas is that most of the houses that have been built are big houses, they’re CEO type houses, they’re people who wanna leave Portland and live in a smaller town, you know that type of thing, but they’re still fairly spendy, sot they’re not what I would consider a wage earner’s home for the most part. I couldn’t afford them myself and I make fairly good money at the mill. So if you go down from the wage levels of the mill which is probably the highest paid employees in the city for sure, and I think in probably in southwest Washington are among the highest paid employees, and if you start ramping down from what they’re making to what most people make it’s very, very difficult to find a house in Camas that you can afford. We’ve worked with developers, we’ve encouraged them to provide affordable housing, but the reality of our geographic situation is they don’t want to [quick laugh], they wanna build the big homes and they can sell them. It’s very difficult to convince a developer of the wisdom of putting apartments on a view lot, they won’t do it, and it gets it a situation where legally, and we’ve talked about this, how far can we go with insisting, or suggesting, or whatever word you wanna use, how far can we go towards having developers provide those kinds of dwellings without being accused of– another awful legal word– a taking. Because if they can sell that lot and sell a home for, say $400,000, as opposed to building a duplex on it or something like that and selling it for $150,000, who owes them the additional $250,000, the city? It becomes a taking in some points of view that’s been legally challenged and actually has been won by the people who weren’t allowed to built what they wanted to build. So it’s kind of like we try to convince people that they should provide those kinds of places, and they’re actually doing that in some parts of the city, but it’s only because they’re running out of view property now and they’re willing to start looking at different kinds of development.

MW: You mentioned people wanting to build here or live here because they’re escaping the bigger cities, would you say that that’s true?

DD: Yeah, I think Camas still has a really small town feeling to it so I think people even if they still have to wait in line at the stop signs, maybe not as bad as they did if they came from Portland or something. it probably still feels small and the neighborhoods are not huge neighborhoods, it’s not like you’re driving through the old part of Portland and it’s block after block after block. So I think to that degree– and again, just the simple fact that we’ve preserved a lot of the trees and we provide the trails and that kind of stuff– I think that combined kind of lends ourself to a small town feel. If they come downtown, which I’m not even sure a whole lot of them that live on the hill come to the downtown that much, but it’s a very small town and we like it that way, we try to make it look that way, and we’ve tried to enhance it as much as we can. We’re gonna be doing a few more things over the next couple of years just to try to bring it up, but it’s a very small town. The library across the street is the only city owned library in southwest Washington, and that’s because everybody wants it that way and they like the idea that we have our library. City Hall, we’re looking at a remodel or rebuild of city hall and it’s already been decided that it will stay here, essentially either as part of the library complex or as a separate building, but we’re trying to keep everything in the downtown and keep it a small town feel, and it’s working. It seems to because everybody I talk to, the people that move here, that’s one of the things that they say, it just really feels comfortable to ’em, there’s not crime threat to speak of, not to say we don’t have crime, but I mean we don’t have major crime. School systems are excellent, Camas schools are gangbusters right now, they’re building new schools like crazy and still providing quality education, people look at that, and again that’s one of the common things I hear “we moved here for the school district.” Right now we are able to present a fairly nice package for people who are considering moving to this area, it’s a nice little town and will continue to be so until it gets big [laughs].

MW: Well, yeah its it fair to say people would like to keep it a bedroom community then or is that something that

DD: Well, see oddly enough we’re not a bedroom community, because we have I’d say probably two and a half billion dollars worth of industry in place, people who live here work here, to some degree, there’s always a crisscross into Portland, but we really are kind of the only city in Clark County, other than Vancouver, that is as independent as we are, as far as the economic base. So I think we are a bedroom community to some that have decided just to move out of Portland and come over here, but we’re no to , I don’t have a percentage, but my feeling is that there’s a lot of people who live here that work here. It’s kind of a unique situation that we have been able to provide jobs for our citizens ’cause it’s very difficult to do for a lot of cities. If things continue to go as well as they have been I think we’ll probably continue to provide more. The problem really, from what I hear from the hi-tech people at least, is they’re running out of people, I mean they’re looking for more and they’re hard to find because of the competition so it’s a good time to get in there.

MW: About growth, just about population growth in general, how did I-205 traffic effect this area?

DD: Well to me Camas would probably…

[Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 1]

DD: … I don’t think any of us realized it at the time that the bridge was built really what the impacts would be or could be, but yeah it opened our city up in particular to much easier access to metropolitan area, much easier access to the airport, it was essentially, particularly for economic development, it was like a dream come true because seven miles from our city limits is a major highway, and a major bridge, and a major airport essentially all in one place, and when you think about it from the standpoint of what that is really providing our citizens as far as access to some really important features, it’s like wow, if we could have decided to do that we should have done it a long time ago. The obvious impact is they also come from there to us instead of us going from here to there, so I think a lot of the growth that we’ve seen, both economic and residential, is directly attributable to that bridge, because like I say there are people that are moving from Portland to live here that wouldn’t have absent the bridge. There’s companies, I know of one in particular, maybe more, of the ones that have located here would not have located here had it not been for access to the airport, so just those realizations alone on my part tell me that probably a lot of the growth that we’re seeing has the bridge to thank for, and that’s how we see it. Some people don’t thank it at all [laughs], a lot of people don’t like it. I think it certainly accelerated the growth. The growth would have occurred, but it would have been much slower.

MW: What role do you think the paper mill still plays in this town, especially whit all these other things coming in, is it still a key, is it still very important?

DD: Well, as an economic consideration it is still very important, but it is not the only game in town, which it was for years, and years, and years, so to that degree, I don’t wan minimize their importance because they bring in a huge payroll that is not necessarily of any benefit to Camas other than what they spend here, but it keeps our people working, and living, and enjoying their lives so from that standpoint they’re very, very important because they are the provider of the highest wages around. Probably from the standpoint of the tax, if they went away would it kill the City of Camas? I could probably fairly safely say no, where ten years ago I would have said yes, we would have been in dire straights had they gone away. With what’s occurred now, with the development that we have I’d say probably the importance as far as the city’s tax revenues is much less than what it was. I think probably at one time they were providing sixty-five to seventy percent, and they’re probably providing about thirty-five to forty now, which is still a significant amount, but it wouldn’t bankrupt the city if they did happen to have to close their doors and it would have literally shut the city down if they would have gone away ten years ago.

MW: What kept them?

DD: I don’t know. The corporate [laughs] minds being what they are, again it may have been the area, I think there’s certain, particularly then, I think power, electricity was very cheap, they basically use the Columbia River for their source of water, and I don’t think that’s common throughout the Northwest that you can basically pump out of the river to provide the water that you need. So I think there were probably economic factors around this particular location that made it make sense to put the money into the mill, because it was a significant investment it was obviously long-term. They put in a state of the art paper machine, new pulping facilities, took out some old paper machines, so it was a big, big project and corporate people don’t do that unless they know there’s going to be, or at least expect that there will be, a payout. For them I would probably say they were probably economic factors more so than the quality of life that would have caused them to make the decision.

MW: I’d like to ask about the United Camas Association of Neighborhoods. Are people really trying to come together? Is there a sense that they’re loosing something and that they’re trying to…

DD: Well having been here so long, I was actually I and an ex-council person we wanted to try to create an organization of neighborhoods because basically my concern was, and he agreed with it, basically it seemed like the only time that we heard from anyone in the community was during our council meetings when they were mad at us. They’d come in, and it usually was a neighborhood, because we’d have a project going somewhere or something that they were upset over, there was something occurring in their neighborhood that they wanted us to fix or whatever, and it always seemed to me to be not the best way to communicate when they’re already upset and we’re automatically either confused or on the defensive because we may not even know what the issue is when they come in the door. So it always seemed to me to be probably a better idea if we could get people together early and maybe talk about things on a more proactive basis, either with us or among themselves, and then come to us on an organized basis. So basically I kind of put the word out that I was interested in trying to put some neighborhood associations together. Didn’t really have a clear picture in my mind as to how we would actually accomplish that. We had about ten or twelve neighborhoods that started attending the first few meetings we had, essentially we organized ourselves based on input from Vancouver, they have a neighborhood association group, so we asked them for help, we had them come to speak to us three or four times, and essentially kind of learned the ropes as to how we should basically formalize the organization and the actual neighborhood associations themselves because they were pretty loosey-goosey, I mean they were just people that kind of wanted to try to do something in their neighborhoods but they weren’t organized in any way. We found that if we were going to have an umbrella group, which is the UCAN [United Camas Association of Neighborhoods] group, that not only it needed some organization but we also had to kind of formalize the organization of the neighborhood associations themselves. That was kind of what we did initially and we really didn’t have– again there were no real hot issues at that particular time for anybody so we were kinda doing the busy work, I guess is the way I looked at it in the organizational efforts, and we kind of floundered for a little while because it was just kind of like “Ok, we did bylaws, now what do we do?” type of stuff. It kind of concerned me because it was kind of like “Well, we did that but still nothing’s really happening,” we had the group but it wad floundering is probably about the only word I can think of, so I got reinvolved in it and basically started trying to get them doing some different things that were kind of more fun type things, and we do, we have some clean-up days now and those kinds of things. But the idea is still basically the same thing, and I think we’ve got twenty-two or twenty-three neighborhoods now in the group. Essentially what I still hope they will be able to do is address things proactively. I know they’re working on a Visioning Project is probably not the right word, but a Visionoing Activity that they wanna conduct for themselves because they wanna get people from within the community to kind of put together a vision of what they think the community should look like, or should be should do, and it think that’s probably a good exercise, it would give the City Council an idea of whether or not we’re doing the right thing, ’cause we always feel like we are, of course we are [laughs]. You know, you can only go from the comments you hear, and really all of our comments are usually positive and people seem to like the city, but it would be helpful if someone can organize an effort that says “Ok, we want you to continue to do what you’re doing,” I mean, if nothing more than that, that means we’re doing ok and we can continue. If there’s something we’re doing that people don’t like, other than growth, which is almost unstoppable and I’m sure that will come out, the people who move here wanna shut the door behind them, that’s how it usually works. You can’t stop growth, you can control it and we’ve tried to do as much as we can around that, and you can make sure it’s high quality and we’ve done as much as we can do around that. I think if there seems, I would say on a more esoterical level, that we’re missing, if there’s something in the quality of life arena that we’ve left out, or we’re ignoring, or we don’t see, or whatever, it would be of significant importance to the council and myself to hear what it is, I think it’s a good exercise, and it gives them an opportunity to really sit as a groups and talk about “What are we here for? What do we want to do as a neighborhood association group too?” because they’ve been in existence for four, five years now, but they’re still kinda trying to figure out what their role is.

MW: So four or five years was when this really…

DD: Yes, it’s been active for the last four or five.

MW: And they play a social, I mean it’s not just political, they are trying to play a real social role in the community?

DD: Yeah actually they haven’t done too much on a political basis so much as they’ve gotten involved in a few specific items that they were interested in, again not politically so much as to say “Hey, can we play in this game? ‘Cause we’re interested in this” type of thing and we always try to incorporate them into any committees we form that are looking at anything within the community, ad hoc committees, that type of thing, we always call them or got to them and say “You wanna put a member or two on this committee” so that wee have their involvement. In some cases they basically said “We wanna be on this committee” before we’ve asked, so it works out pretty well really. I think there’s been pretty good involvement.

MW: Who are the people who are involved in this? Are senior citizens more involved in these…

DD: Actually no. the presidents of the neighborhood associations are pretty good mix actually. The person who is currently the president is retired, he was at University of Portland or Portland State, he was actually I don’t know what they call him, the minister for the college? Anyway, he’s retired, he’s the president but there’s a mix. There’s probably, of the one that got to meetings, there’s probably maybe three others that are retired and the rest of them are either working or in the age level; some of them are working mothers, some of them are working fathers but they’re all probably ’30s to ’40s, so there’s a fairly good range of ages between he groups so… men and women, it’s a nice mix, it’s not all men [laughs].

MW: I think that just about covers it, but is there anything you’d like to add about anything at all?

DD: I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve given you any history so much as just babble but…

MW: Oh, this is what we’re looking for.

DD: Is it? Ok. I’m trying to think. Actually I think so. We haven’t touched on any details with the schools and some of that stuff, but I’m not the person probably who would be the best one to elaborate on that anyway.

MW: Who would?

DD: Well actually there’s two ex-superintendents that live in the area for Camas school district, and the current superintendent, I think between the three of them they’ve been here– I think those three probably have been here as long as I have as far as the actual history of the school district, so if you could run them down… Milt Dennison is the current superintendent, and then Dick Mariotti was the superintendent before Milt and then the one before Dick was Stan Hosman, and they could give you a pretty good over view of the school. I think we’ve touched on everything really pretty well.

MW: Alright, great.