Trust, reliance and definite confidence glisten from Mike Murphy’s eyes as we meet in the Mayor’s City Hall office and chat about his vision of Grants Pass. His Honor couldn’t look better for the part, if this was a movie. He’s rather handsome, debonair, fits his office chair well, and offers a genuine smile you can’t refuse.
City building style and decorative office motif exudes small town, down home architecture which instills a calm, collected and composed feeling in those who visit. His professional and friendly staff adds to the charm of your stay. And, to top that, says the Mayor, “Grants Pass has the distinction of being one of the state’s smaller successful cities.” And, he continued as the city’s number one spokesperson, “It’s such a wonderful place to live.” He obviously could have gone on and on about the pluses of G.P. living, had I not asked the next question.
MURPHY IS ORIGINALLY FROM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA and graduated from Pasadena City College and the University of California-Bakersfield. He joined the university staff in their public relations department and first vacationed in Southern Oregon in 1974. Grants Pass’ future mayor confessed, “I was born down there, but never felt comfortable. It was really never home to me, if that makes sense?”
While vacationing in his future home town, he applied for a job and was accepted. His two week notice was immediately dropped off at UC-Bakersfield and he arrived here Memorial Day weekend, 1974. And, the Mayor says, “It has felt like home ever since.”
The mayor has a daughter and son-in-law who are both reporters for the local newspaper in Yakima, WA. His son attends school in Portland.
MIKE MURPHY WAS ELECTED TO THE GRANTS PASS CITY COUNCIL IN 1990 and served in two wards until 2004. He was elected mayor last November. Unlike our county commissioners, the city council is not compensated.
WE GOT DOWN TO BUSINESS and discussed some issues of national interest that parallels with city problems, such as the economy. There have been recent layoffs at some of the city’s largest employers, and that concerns Murphy. I asked him about the possibility of attracting new business to the area? “There is only so much a city can do”, he said. “What we are concentrating on is not getting in the way, nor creating roadblocks for businesses who wish to locate here. My emphasis, based on what I have learned with the assistance of the economic development people, is you have to offer the environment where businesses want to locate. When a business is established, or re-locates, you have to consider employee needs and desires. Of course they need land, brick and mortar, equipment, etc, but as much as anything, it’s creating the environment they want for their families. Our most successful tool for recruitment in Grants Pass is tourism. Most folks don’t realize that. A big percentage of businesses locate here because they first discovered Grants Pass while visiting. So, first you got to get them here and have them fall in love with it, as I did.”
THE MAYOR CONTINUES, “We have to be a community that offers a level of certain services as well as charm and all that good stuff, so that they want to come here as it’s a great place to raise children, that sort of thing. For instance, some the local retiring doctors are recruiting for replacements. A negative would be the closure of our libraries. People don’t normally associate those two together. And, when you’re recruiting the best and the brightest, which is what you want to do, they have choices by the very nature of it. There’s more than one place for them to live. So, they come here to visit and love a lot of things about Grants Pass, then they see some of the turmoil of local politics, places shutting down, threats of closing jails, lack of public safety and supported funding levels and then you hear, ‘This town doesn’t have a library?’ I heard that allot. If they use the library or not, it’s like a flashing warning sign saying that something isn’t quite right, here.” Of course the problem is choice, again. They are thinking, ‘maybe we better go somewhere else?’
MAYOR MURPHY FEELS A LARGE PART OF HIS JOB is to accentuate the positive of our way of life in Grants Pass and not let it erode during these hard times of economic disaster. He made a point about the national stimulus package that just cleared congress, and soon available from the state. “If you agree with it or not, if it’s available, we want our share. During recent city budget talks and workshops, there’s been significant conversation about cutting out our capital expenditures programs”, complained Murphy. “This is about things already in our program that we want and need to accomplish. So, I’m thinking to myself, when you spend money to improve a road, a street intersection or something locally, it isn’t like piling all of that money in the center of the road and burning it. You’re actually paying someone locally to do the contract work. On one hand we are asking for a portion of federal and state monies to create local jobs while were thinking about getting rid of our own capital outlay to spend money locally”, he questioned.
“MAYBE THIS ISN’T THE TIME TO CUT OUR CAPITAL EXPENDITURES?” It’s an investment in our city’s future and expenditure today to keep our people employed. We could employ local firms to work on our needed infrastructure projects. Maybe, this is an especially good time to do just that,” Murphy told us.
BIG BUSINESS IS COMING TO TOWN such as Home Depot, among others. The Mayor says they could employ about 100 people, but a good percentage of them will be part time, “I don’t see a big job increase.” says the Mayor. “I see these types of stores more as a ‘job shift’. There’s only so much money people have to spend on home repair. So, if they’re buying paint and nails there, and not somewhere else, some local businesses could suffer and perhaps close their doors. So, it’s moving jobs from this store to that one.”
Mayor Murphy explains, “How does that change the situation? It’s going to depend how much Home Depot draws from outside of the community? It’s different of course from a manufacturing base business, that creates a new product, thus, new jobs.”
THE MAYOR WAS ASKED ABOUT POSSIBLY TELEVISING The Urban Area Planning Commission meetings, “I’m not against it, but I would first like to see them cover the special city council meetings and workshops. There’s money involved on how many of these we can do. The regular scheduled council meetings are held twice monthly, and we have several special meetings from time to time, such as the recently held tax rate meeting. This was one of the more important and most significant decisions the council had to make. To me, those should come first”, emphasized the Mayor.
Funds are usually always a problem these days with government entities as well as private concerns. Mayor Murphy is going to look into the possibility of obtaining sponsors to allow more TV coverage, similar to current Public Television.
THE LACK OF TRANSPARENCY in city Government operations has been charged by some constituents. Councilperson Tim Cummings said he thought the Budget Committee had discussed a certain issue prior to the council meeting, thereby a possibility that minds were made up before any meeting discussions on the matter took place. Some look upon this activity as a bad idea.
THE MAYOR RESPONDED with, “It depends on what they were discussing and how far it was going? Having conversations about issues of local interest is good. What could be a problem is going beyond that and deliberating to a conclusion out of the public’s watch. That is passing the line and we don’t want that. There’s reason to think that we were flirting with that line. What we must do is be very sure everything we do is transparent, that public business is conducted in a proper public way, and that we’re not reaching conclusions ahead of time. Public trust is a delicate thing. People have their lives to live and don’t watch what happens in city government on a daily basis.
“THEY ARE TRUSTING PUBLIC OFFICIALS, trusting their government, to do things right: most folks are only marginally involved with local government business. We, as city officials must preserve that trust”, Murphy assured.
“Once the people are not sure of what’s going on, if elected officials are doing things behind closed doors, you’re creating doubt in their minds. Then, they rightfully question everything we do. If the system breaks down in one specific area, it transfers over to everything else. The integrity of the system has to be protected. You have to be up front. Once the faith is broken, it takes ten times the effort and time to regain the peoples trust, and it’s so unnecessary”, reiterated Murphy.
THERE ARE FOUR NEW COUNCILORS who were elected last November. I asked the Mayor how it was working out. “I’m optimistic”, he said. “There is a significant learning curve going on right now. Our new councilors care deeply about the community, but frankly, have no experience. And, we have three councilors who only have two years experience. We’ve had a significant turn-over in executive staff in the last few years and we have a new mayor. What I’m suggesting here is that we’re at risk of losing our institutional memory. With so much turn-over, people don’t know the traditions and processes by which things get accomplished. They get lost and confused”, explained the Mayor.”
“OUR NEW COUNCILORS HAVE VERY LITTLE OR NO ‘BOARD’ EXPERIENCE”, Mayor Murphy said. They are very successful small business persons who are comfortable to themselves, and as such make decisions, but have only one person to satisfy. They haven’t been part of a large organization, and as far as I know, have never been part of a board of directors? We are now the council and mayor, equivalent to the board of directors of a multi-million dollar corporation, with a whole bunch of products we put out from public safety to safe water and we have the oversight responsibility, and not the day-to-day operational responsibility, thank goodness. This is where the City Manager, David Frasher, and our entire professional staff, comes in.”
Mayor Murphy continues, “It is my role and the Council’s role to set policy, plan for the future, and to have oversight of the operations. The City Manager carries out our set policies, is the overseer of the organization, and the employees. Not the City Council.”
“THERE HAVE BEEN SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF LATE, due to our changing situation in Council”, said the Mayor. “But, this will go away once everyone understands what their roles are and what they aren’t. It’s new territory for the new Councilors. It was for me too at one time. You’re part of a group process, now. You are one councilor in a group of eight councilors. Being a councilor, by itself, has no authority. By our charter, you’re a citizen. The power comes from the full council, the group of eight, when they collectively pass a resolution, a motion, saying this is what we want? Some think the mayor has the authority to do things on my own, get involved. That isn’t the way it works. It’s a group process and the group needs to give direction, not individual councilors. In other words, work as a team.”
MAYOR MIKE MURPHY SUMS IT UP THIS WAY, “Even in this economic downturn nationally, Grants Pass is doing better than most every place else. No doubt we are hurting, but when I hear about what’s going on in other places, we aren’t doing so badly, and maybe more importantly, we are so poised to be one of the first to recover. When the national economy improves a little bit, Grants Pass will improve a bunch. We’ll be one of the first ones to move up because everything that was right before the downturn is still right. I’m very optimistic for the long term, we just have to wait this out and protect our assets and community from declining too far. My approach is to take this time to concentrate on our master plan, our long range goals, look at our infrastructure, and get ready for what’s going to come. That ‘boom’ that caught us kind of off guard a few years back, is coming again-Big time. Let’s get in front of it right now.”
For instance, says an enthusiastic Mayor, “What do we do to preserve our down town with its downtown charm, which is the core of our community? What do we do for it to stay and grow, so we don’t end up with a bunch of strip malls on the outside of town? New businesses will come. Where do we want them to establish? Let’s use this time to get ahead of everything. The time is now and our future is extremely bright.”
“WE ARE SO LUCKY HERE”, Mayor Murphy exultantly expressed, “One of the many things so positive is the geography in which we live. The Interstate goes around our town, instead of through it, such as Medford and Roseburg. We’re nestled in a gorgeous valley with a beautiful river running through it; which defines us in a way that other places would love to have. We must protect it. We have to prevent any sort of urban sprawl. We have to make sure it remains for our children and all generations to come, and at the same time, be set for growth. It will come and we’ll be ready.” -Mike Case
Contact:
Mayor Mike Murphy Telephone: (541) 474-6360
City of Grants Pass FAX: (541) 479-0812
101 North/West A Street
Grants Pass, OR 97526