Finding Common Goals is Key to Salem Mayor’s Success
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When it comes to Salem, Janet Taylor knows what she’s talking about.
The lifelong resident is a graduate of North Salem High and Chemeketa Community College, so she knows the schools. Along with her husband, she owned and operated Taylor Metal Products, so she knows the business community. As a neighborhood association member, she knows community concerns.
And as mayor, it’s her job to tie all that together and guide the city forward.
Taylor currently is serving her third term as mayor. After taking office in 2003, she says one of her first acts was to look at the city’s history to gauge its future possibilities. With more than a half century of residency behind her, that was fairly easy to do.
“As Salem has grown and gotten more national exposure, we’ve become a much more urban city than we used to be,” Taylor says. “But we have certainly retained the quality of our neighborhoods, which is very important to us. There are a lot of diverse groups here, and my job has been to bring them all together.”
As a former business owner, Taylor says she wants to ensure growth by being pro-business, and has worked to streamline the city’s permitting process, tax structure and other costs that can be detrimental to business development. That said, she also has worked to ensure smart growth, not just random recruiting and retention to boost the tax base.
Taylor can point to several major achievements during her time in office, most notably the construction of a new, $32 million conference center, the landing of a $50 million grant to build a Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center and the city’s successful recruitment of Delta Airlines to provide commercial air service in 2007.
The licensed pilot says that her part in landing Delta has been one of her most satisfying moments as mayor. Delta had laid down some stiff conditions, including raising $500,000 in three weeks, before the airline would commit. Salem came through in a big way.
“Our chamber of commerce took that challenge and raised the travel bank money, and the city put in some marketing dollars,” Taylor recalls. “We also had a $500,000 small-airport grant from the federal government, so we took those pieces and made a presentation to them in Atlanta, and we got that service.”
Delta’s arrival marked the first commercial air service to the city since 1994, which Taylor says already is making a difference in business recruitment and retention. And with ongoing talks with the airline about additional flights, the gamble has paid off.
Putting people together to make things happen is what Taylor says her chief accomplishment in office is, and what she hopes to be remembered for when she eventually steps down.
“If I’m going to have a legacy, I hope that it is bringing diverse groups of people together to achieve common goals,” she says. “Because I was a businesswoman, and involved in the community’s economic development for a long time, I had a lot of relationships and was able to get people together to accomplish a lot of things.”
Story by Joe Morris
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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