If you would like to watch the team’s presentation on Wednesday, April 19th, you can view the live streaming on www.facebook.com/AmericasBestCommunities. Tualatin will be presenting at 12:50 p.m. (PST), and the awards ceremony will be streaming at 4 p.m. (PST).

Livestream schedule in local Denver time (Mountain Time Zone)
Pacific Time
9:00     (10:00 am) – Huntington, West Virginia
9:25     (10:25 am) – Madison, Indiana
9:50     (10:50 am) – Statesboro, Georgia
10:15   (11:15 am) – Chisago Lakes Area, Minnesota
[break] 12:00   (1:00 pm) – Lake Havasu City, Arizona
12:25   (1:25 pm) – Arlington/Darrington, Washington
12:50   (1:50 pm) – Tualatin, Oregon
1:15     (2:15 pm) – Valley County/Meadows Valley, Idaho
[break] 4:00     (5:00 pm)  – ABC Awards Ceremony

Tualatin Team Heads to Denver for America’s Best Communities Grand Prize Ceremony

Sponsored by Frontier Communications, DISH Network, CoBank and The Weather Channel, America’s Best Communities has provided funding for new solutions for revitalization
 
Tualatin hopes to bring home competition’s $3 million grand prize at April 19 event

Tualatin, OR; April 14, 2017—In just a few days, local leaders from Tualatin, Oregon will be in Denver, Colorado with hopes of returning home with the top prize in the America’s Best Communities competition, a $10 million initiative sponsored by Frontier Communications, DISH Network, CoBank and The Weather Channel to revitalize small towns and rural communities across the country.

For almost three years, a local team has been working toward this moment. The Tualatin Team developed a comprehensive Community Revitalization Plan which seeks to connect the community with the skills needed to obtain living wage jobs in Tualatin, and they’ve taken great strides to implement it through partnerships with the City, Tigard-Tualatin School District, the Tualatin Chamber, South Metro-Salem STEM Partnership, Mask and Mirror Community Theatre, Tualatin Tomorrow Advisory Committee and other local and regional partners.

Throughout the competition, the community has won a total of $150,000 in grant funding from the program’s sponsors to create its strategy and put it to work. In addition to the competition funding, the community has raised nearly $40,000 to support the implementation of the plan and partners have donated thousands of hours of volunteer time in bringing the plan to life.

“The ABC Competition has truly launched catalytic change in our community. ABC is now a part of our brand, our vocabulary, and our culture.  We have always been a community of partnerships, collaboration, and shared responsibility, but it took the bright shining light of the ABC competition to catalyze and then galvanize our efforts in this common cause,” said Mayor Lou Ogden. “We have worked hard to make it this far in the competition, and no matter what happens in Denver, our community our community has already won.”

In addition to Mayor Lou Ogden, John Bartholomew of Mask & Mirror Community Theatre/Tualatin Tomorrow Advisory Committee and Jerianne Thompson, Tualatin Library Manager, will be representing Tualatin at the America’s Best Communities Grand Prize Ceremony April 19 in Denver.

The top community will be awarded $3 million, second place will win $2 million, and third will receive $1 million.

When they launched the America’s Best Communities competition in September 2014, Frontier Communications, DISH, CoBank and The Weather Channel challenged small towns and cities to envision a stronger future and build a strategy to achieve revitalization and growth.

More than 350 communities entered the competition, and now only eight community teams remain. In Denver, each community will present the strategies they’ve developed to revive their local economies, and the top three — which will be determined by their progress in implementing those strategies and the potential for sustained revitalization — will be awarded grand-prize funding to accelerate their communities’ growth.

In addition to Tualatin, Oregon, the other finalists are:
•    Chisago Lakes Area, Minnesota
•    Darrington/Arlington, Washington
•    Huntington, West Virginia
•    Lake Havasu City, Arizona
•    Madison, Indiana
•    Statesboro, Georgia
•    Valley County, Idaho

For more on the competition, visit www.americasbestcommunities.com. For more information about Tualatin’s Community Revitalization Plan, visit www.tualatinabc.org.