Business View Magazine | October 2020

310 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2020 Gateway into the Oregon Wine Country, which is a vast area immediately south of us. It’s a part of the food and wine culture that helps to foster our very high quality of life and is attractive to new businesses and residents.” “Employers look to Sherwood because their employees very much want to live here,” Mays notes. City Manager, Joseph Gall, agrees: “We have consistently been ranked as one of the top small cities, not only in Oregon, but across the country in terms of quality of life,” he asserts. “People move here because it’s a safe city; we’re consistently in the top five safest cities in Oregon and we’re very proud of that. And our school system is one of the better ones in the state, as well.” Making downtown a destination where people want to live, work, and play has also helped make Sherwood a preferred place to open a business and raise a family. “Ten years ago, we invested heavily in our downtown area,” Mays reports. “We redid all the streets, sidewalks, installed street lights, replaced and undergrounded all the utilities, to make it a walkable downtown. It attracts locally-owned and run businesses – restaurants, bars, and retail, and there’s opportunity for more investment. We have lots of festivals and events throughout the year that utilize these fantastic streets. And with things that we’ve done to improve safety during this pandemic, it’s still a busy place. We also have a fairly extensive trail network through very wide stream corridors and we’re expanding that. This fall and winter, we’ll be building the next phase, which is the Cedar Creek Trail. That will be a wonderful addition of a couple of miles. Eventually, we’ll link to our National Wildlife Refuge that we helped establish on the northern border of the city.” The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge is one of only a handful of urban national wildlife refuges in the country. Situated within the floodplain of the Tualatin River, the Refuge comprises less than one percent of the 712-square-mile watershed. Yet, due to its