[or_cities] Damascus Roads, or There's A New Town In Town

Something that kind of slipped by in the election day circus is that Oregon has a new city now.

Of course, few cities are actually new. What happened is a group of voters approved a city government to be established which then draws a line around a given area and has authority within that area. The last time this happened was in the 1980s, when a group of people in the urban fringe adjoining Salem on the north finally rendered the unending annexation debate academic. Today, Keizer is a city of about 35,000. Keizer existed long before then, an exurban area centering on the intersection of River Road N and Chemawa Road, but it became a "City", which means a government, control over thier own concerns, and clout of some degree on the political landscape of the region.

Now, we have the City of Damascus, Oregon. Damascus is an area with an approximate center at the spot where State Highway 212 and the bitter ends of SE Foster Road and SE Sunnyside Road converge. It's about 20 miles ESE from Portland city center, as the crow flies. It's been a community since before the turn of the 20th Century, but in an effort to secure some control of its own destiny, a majority of the residents have approved the formation of a city of about 3,000 population.

I like studying cities. It's an outgrowth of my fascination of maps and extends to fascination on growth, patterns of settlement and the shape of the city limits, and how town look at themselves and out at the world around them.

There is, at the present, very very few pariculars on what, exactly the City of Damascus is. No map of the proposed corporate territory, nothing. So I'm frustrated right now, but I've not given up.

But if you follow this link, you'll be taken to an AP story on the KATU website that sums it up just as good as anything else I've found.