March 26, 2009
By The Daily Insider

Battle Ground will be an named an All-American City by 2012, Mayor Mike Ciraulo told an enthusiastic audience of nearly 300 north county residents and visiting dignitaries Wednesday evening in the city's new community center, near the site of the former Clark County fair.

The title of the mayor's speech was "Past, Present and Future," but apart from illustrated headlines of how this city of about 18,000 got to 2009, the emphasis was on the future.

Often drawing applause, Ciraulo told the partisan crowd: We will build a War Memorial. We are developing a partnership with Clark County-and other cities in the county. The highway to the 1-5 freeway, now named the Battle Ground Highway will be four lanes by 2013. We will have a branch of Clark College in Battle Ground by 2014. We will have an aquatics facility as well as a water reclamation facility by 2015. We will have a medical campus by 2017. Local Battle Ground industry will become global by 2018. We will have 3,100 acres of world-class parks and trails surrounding the city by 2020. By 2025, there will be a beltway from Ridgefield to Battle Ground, connecting Battle Ground to Camas on the Columbia River.

"Nothing is beyond our reach the mayor said.

A dozen years ago Battle Ground took on the city-manager form of government. Both past city managers, David Mercier, now city manager of Spokane Valley, and Eric Holmes, now Vancouver's director of economic development, gave insights into the city's recent past. City manager Dennis Osborn opened the State of the City Address. Also in the audience were Bill Ganley, currently a city councilmember, and the city's first council-manager mayor and its second mayor John Idsigna.