Business View Magazine | December 2018

314 315 creating multi-family housing near, or in, our down- town area.This type of development would be ideal for attracting the millennial generation to the core to live.” Positioned near the intersection of Interstate 84 and Interstate 82, Hermiston is strategically located as a transportation center and gateway to Oregon’s favorable sales-tax climate. Seattle, Portland, Spo- kane, and Boise are all within three to four hours, and the major east-west and north-south freeways give access to markets in Montana, Utah, California, and British Columbia.Hermiston is also home to the Union Pacific Railroad switching facility and just eight miles from a refrigerator cargo dock on the Columbia River.A redundant fiber optic communi- cations systemwith connectivity to telecommuni- cations hubs in Portland,Oregon and Seattle,Wash- ington allows Hermiston businesses to harness the full power of the web with confidence. Business development in the downtown is also HERMISTON, OREGON a priority.The Hermiston Urban Renewal Agency (HURA) was formed by City Council in August 2013, for the purpose of revitalizing the core area.As part of that effort, Hermiston offers a Facade Grant program as a tool to incentivize downtown property owners to improve the appearance of their build- ings by offering up to $10,000 in grant money, per property, to qualifying projects. On the environmental front, a project undertaken a fewyears ago in Hermiston has become a model of innovation for other communities.At the time, the city needed to update its wastewater treatment plant to address new requirements from the state. After much study, it came to a solution that sends its wastewater into an Irrigation District canal; allowing the District to reuse the water for irrigating fields.That project has garnered the City a great deal of attention from a sustainability and water reuse standpoint.Hermiston is the first community in Oregon to successfully implement this kind of