We're disappointed that Corvallis voters turned down the proposal to create an urban renewal district for the downtown area. In our view, we've missed out on a real opportunity.

But we're not particularly surprised: From the beginning, proponents of the district were fighting an uphill battle.

For starters, the proposal wasn't particularly easy to understand. The whole notion of tax-increment funding, which would have paid for downtown improvements over the next couple of decades, is a tough one to grasp.

And, ironically, it didn't help the proposal's chances that downtown Corvallis seems to be in reasonably good shape right now.

But this proposal never was about current conditions: It was about trying to find ways to ensure that downtown Corvallis stays in good shape. It was about giving us tools to respond to the 21st century needs that downtown will face.

That, however, highlighted another of the problems district proponents faced: Opponents worried that the proposal didn't come with a specific list of projects that would have been bankrolled with the estimated $36 million the district would have collected over its life.

But creating a list like that would have been irresponsible. The needs of downtown today aren't necessarily the needs that it will face in a decade or two. It would have been foolhardy to lock in projects that could have been irrelevant in 10 years' time. Nevertheless, the lack of specific projects made some voters uneasy.

The plan faced a number of other objections as well: Because additional tax money created from rising property values in the district would have been earmarked just for projects within the district, other tax jurisdictions in the county would have foregone that additional money. But that wouldn't have applied to the Corvallis School District; state law requires the state to backfill almost all of the money forsaken by school districts because of urban renewal.

One irony of this is that it means tax money paid by Corvallis citizens will continue to subsidize the more than 80 active urban renewal districts around the state. In other words, in a small way, you're already paying for urban renewal. Just not in Corvallis.

We could go on. The upshot is that voting for the district required a leap of faith - and opponents were able to sow enough doubt on a variety of fronts to make the leap seem questionable to the 5,000 citizens who voted against the proposal.

The failure of the proposal doesn't mean that downtown Corvallis will fold up and blow away: Even opponents of the district generally agreed that downtown is truly the heart of the city. And it's not as if downtown is left without a blueprint. The past couple of years have seen the adoption of a strategic plan for downtown's future, and the creation of a Downtown Commission charged with finding ways to put that plan into place.

In fact, many of the items that the commission will be working on sound awfully similar to the general list of projects that were being proposed by proponents of the urban renewal district - streetscape improvements, redevelopment efforts, parking projects and so forth.

The big catch now, of course, is that we don't have a way to pay for those projects. And that's where losing this opportunity really stings.

Related

• 55 percent vote against plan to raise $36 million