Using public input, the Pendleton City Council established four goals for the period of 2021-2022 — increasing the amount of housing for all income levels, expanding Pendleton’s economy, fixing our infrastructure and improving communications.

I want to talk about how we intend to measure success for expanding Pendleton’s economy.

The first thing we want to measure is the strength of airport revenues. In 2016, the first year of the unmanned aerial systems test range, the airport had revenues of $372,000. Our revenues grew to $954,000 last year and we are predicting $1.1 million in the current fiscal year. The airport is debt free and received money from the 2020 CARES Act to build another two hangars, fix taxi ways, build new UAS test pads, renovate the terminal building and buy new heavy equipment such as a snow plow and a front-end loader.

The next thing we measure is the growth of the value of single-family homes. This will tell us if property taxes are rising and lets us know if Pendleton is keeping up with statewide trends in housing values. In 2017-18, home values increased 6%. They grew by 4.5% in 2018-19 and by another 17% last year. We expect home values to increase by another 25% in 2021-2022.

We also look at new commercial-industrial permit values, which shows us the amount of new construction taking place. In 2019, we had $5.7 million in new permits, which grew to $8.9 million in 2020, and in the first half of 2021 the new permits totaled $9.9 million.

We try to monitor the number of unfilled jobs by polling our 12 largest employers. As of April, 2021, there were more than 500 jobs standing open in Pendleton. The need for a larger workforce is one of the reasons we are working so hard to get more affordable housing units built within our city limits. We want to reduce this number of unfilled jobs over the next couple of years.

Business license revenues are an indicator of economic activity. By the first day of September (before Round-Up), we were at $164,601, which is more than we collected in all of 2020, and about equal to what we collected in 2019.

Why did we choose these five things to measure?

Mainly because we can get accurate numbers for them without tasking the city staff to spend hundreds of hours searching for information. We think we can get a decent snapshot of our local economy if we measure these five areas and combine them with the number of new housing units. The Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Association also keep numbers on how businesses are doing and we will watch those economic indicators as well.

So far, 2021 is shaping up to be a very encouraging year for Pendleton’s general economy.

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