SALEM — As the city’s current five-year economic development plan draws to a close, the Sustainable Opportunity Development (SOD) Center is preparing for the next five years.

SOD Center Executive Director Julie Needs said that while the city’s current economic development plan –which spans the period of 2020-2025 –wasn’t complete yet it had successfully guided growth in the city, and that SOD was already preparing for the city’s economic development needs through 2030.

“We still have some time on the original plan, but we’ve had some great success with having an actionable list that we have used as an action plan,” said Needs.

She said the current plan was comprised of 23 strategies and 77 initiatives recommended to promote economic growth, with the intention to complete at least 75% of those recommendations. With half of 2025 still to go 74% of those strategies have been completed; 17% are currently in progress, and of that 17% Needs said that approximately 10% are “very close to being completed.” Also, 72% of the initiatives have already been completed with a further 17% in process.

“We’ll definitely be over that 75% completion rate before the end of the plan,” said Needs.

Those completed recommendations have translated into 2,527 jobs kept in the city and $107,752,400 in retained payroll, and 261 new jobs and $11,581,440 in new payroll. It has also led to $81,167,450 in private investment in the city since its implementation and a further $42,597,563 in direct economic impact and $119,333,840 in indirect economic impact. Needs said it was that economic growth under the current five-year plan which prompted SOD to begin developing a new plan.

“When you start to look at those numbers, that direct impact, that indirect impact, the private investment that has come in, in that time frame, that the individual recommendations [in the five-year plan] lead to that is incredible, which is why we want to do that new five year plan and why we feel it is important to do a new five-year plan,” said Needs.

Needs also said that it also led to the development and implementation of several significant economic development projects which she felt “wouldn’t have been achieved without that plan” including the creation of the city’s post 1994 CRA and Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area, and of the city’s third-party commercial building department Elevate Building Solutions.

“I remember looking at that recommendation and thinking ‘oh I hope we’re close in five years’ and we’re about to celebrate two years of having a local building department on July 7, so that’s a huge accomplishment,” said Needs.

Needs said that those goals, which were too large to be completed within a five-year period had all been worked toward and learned from and that several would be carried forward to the new plan. The timeline for the new plan is broken into five phases, with the official launch date set for Feb. 26, before then a survey will be launched for stakeholder research which Needs said would be launching within the next few weeks in keeping with the new plan’s emphasis on community outreach and input. She explained that this research would help ensure that decisions were made which met the actual needs and wants of the community and would help to improve community buy-in and trust and asked that the members of city council and the rest of the city’s administration support and promote the survey when it is published.

“We need the people in the community to tell us what they feel. What do you want? How do you want your community to look? What can’t you get in Salem? This is not the SOD Center economic development plan, this is the Salem economic development plan so it’s important to have that participation and input,” said Needs.