The city of Sumner: An award-winning recipe in progress

Shelly Schlumpf / for the Sumner Downtown Association

It occurred to me recently that downtown associations are similar to recipes for your favorite foods. If you want a great cake, flour or eggs alone won’t do the trick. Similarly, if you want a vibrant healthy downtown, money or association members alone won’t create a well-rounded community. Though in each instance, those ingredients are essential.

In Sumner we are very fortunate to have great partnerships that serve as ingredients for improving an already tasty downtown recipe. Our recent Smart Communities Award from the governor’s office was a validation of the partnership between the city and the Sumner Downtown Association for work on the Town Center Implementation Project, which included a historic preservation ordinance, city-wide branding campaign and recruitment for downtown economic development.

But just like it takes more than two ingredients to make a great cake, it takes more than the city and our downtown association to make a great community. And Sumner is chock full of other “ingredients” such as partnerships with local developers like Heyer and Morris and Investco, who design their downtown projects with an eye on retaining Sumner’s unique and historic charm. Or the Old Cannery Furniture Warehouse, which sponsors our annual downtown Bridge Lighting and fireworks event that now draws more than 2,000 people to Main Street the day after Thanksgiving.

We are fortunate to have banks, car and tractor dealerships, hardware and home and garden shops, restaurants, retail and professional services, not to mention more than 100 residents who volunteer their time and money to create a vibrant downtown. These are all critical ingredients in Sumner’s unique recipe.

And now with gas prices creeping up toward $5 a gallon, Sumner is also well-positioned for new business recruitment and residential desirability with the Sound Transit station in our downtown core.

While commuter parking may currently seem like an unwanted ingredient to the recipe, partnerships are in progress to address this issue and hopefully change an unsavory ingredient to something akin to icing on the cake. And if you throw in county and state partnerships with an eye on tourism, you begin to get an idea of the ingredients currently utilized in the recipe we call Sumner.

And as with any great recipe, if you keep it all to yourself nobody knows you have a great recipe. That’s where a downtown association comes in handy. We sponsor and promote events which draw visitors and residents to the downtown to enjoy all the “ingredients.”

So while Sumner may hold the title of Rhubarb Pie Capital of the World, it’s really only one ingredient in our tasty recipe.

If you’re looking for a city that’s a little sweet, somewhat traditional, looks toward the future and invokes a sense of nostalgia when you sample it, be sure to Spend Some Time in Sumner. It’s an award-winning recipe in progress.