The Confluence: Joining Forces Is In Their Nature
412 SW Second Street...
Construction is still underway at 412 SE Second Street in downtown, but things are coming together in more ways than one.
The Confluence, a new community-focused building, has been taking shape. The vision behind the project stretches beyond the timber. The goal is to create a permanent home where organizations can collaborate, community members can gather, and most importantly, downtown gains another destination for people to spend time in the city’s core. Which we desperately need.
According to The Confluence, the project was created around a simple idea: “Joining forces is in our nature.” Rather than operating separately, four local environmental organizations will share a single facility, allowing them to work more closely together while reducing costs and increasing their collective impact. Sound familiar?
This is one of the same ideologies pitched by the city for the new $200 million Civic Campus proposal. Currently, municipal departments are spread across several older buildings. By bringing them together into a single Civic Campus, the city hopes to make it easier for residents to access services, improve workplace safety and efficiency, and replace aging, seismically vulnerable facilities.
Not everyone agrees. Especially with the price tag. More on that later.
The Confluence includes four partner organizations. Cascade Pacific Resource Conservation & Development, Greenbelt Land Trust, Corvallis Environmental Center, and Mary’s River Watershed Council.
As the project’s partners explain, “Co-locating and sharing resources increases the social and environmental impact of our network beyond what we could accomplish as individual organizations, like tributaries flow together to create larger rivers with greater momentum.”
One of the more commendable aspects of the project is how intentionally local the construction has been.
Project leaders say approximately 75% of the building materials have been sourced, grown, or processed within 30 miles of the site downtown, while 80% of the construction labor has been provided by workers who live within two miles of downtown.
Additional sustainability goals include recycling or reusing nearly all construction waste, incorporating solar panels, using low-flow plumbing fixtures, and avoiding solvent-based exterior coatings.
Although The Confluence will serve as headquarters for the four nonprofit partners, the building is also designed with the community in mind. Project organizers envision it becoming a place where meetings, educational programs, community conversations, and public gatherings can take place.
For downtown, projects like this are important.
Every community event, workshop, meeting, or gathering brings people onto the sidewalks. That kind of foot traffic will help what many business owners have been working to rebuild in recent years.
We have invested significantly in infrastructure, from the new Van Buren Bridge to streetscape improvements and public spaces. Buildings like this complement those investments by creating places where people actually want to spend time.
This article was written by Brian Lindensmith., a contributor to The Corvallis Inquirer. Feel free to send us your stories or articles to publish at: editor@corvallisnow.com
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This is way better than that civic campus!!