Highway 66 looks innocuous enough on a roadmap, just a thin black line squiggling east from Medford before making a straight shot into the Klamath Basin. It's only when you're lumbering around the s-curves in a crowded motor home with McDonald's in your belly that the squiggles can pose difficulty.

Thus at least one of us on the Oregon Business Plan Bus Tour, with intrepid U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden riding shotgun, AOI's Harvey Mathews at the wheel and various important people bouncing around the back, pulled into Klamath Falls just a little green.

But with the gracious welcome of K Falls business, education and community leaders, everyone settled in comfortably for an exchange with OBP entourage and spearheads Wyden, Duncan Wyse and Bill Thorndike.

The August roadshow brought to K Falls and a handful of towns around the state an update from the OBP on its 11 initiatives and elicited a report from local folks on the health and well-being of their businesses.

Overall, problems voiced were more common than different. All over the state, as companies are under increasing pressure to deliver, there's a screaming need for skilled workers, expeditious regulatory processes, land to grow, and help dealing with health care costs that threaten to, as the senator put it, "gobble up everything" before decade's end.

One issue caught the OBP team off guard for its apparent magnitude: drug use. I'd call it Oregon's dirty little secret, except business owners all over seem to know it well, reporting in some cases as many as eight of 10 job applicants unable to pass a drug test. (I asked one Newport businessman if his company does drug testing. No, he said, thank goodness -- we need the workers.)

Other than the drug problem, which had Sen. Wyden scribbling notes to himself, issues that surfaced are the very same the OBP has taken on since its inception (heath care isn't yet one of the 11 initiatives but is being studied). If there was wariness two years ago when 1,300 people gathered for the plan's launch, the model is proving itself. As Wyse says, "There's something about writing down a set of initiatives and getting folks to work on them that leads to results."

There's still some convincing to be done, as a few feisty voices made clear. The plan's focus on the traded sector rankles some, and one guy in K Falls speculated warily that the support of high tech comes at the cost of agriculture.

But check out for yourself (at www.oregonbusinessplan.org) the initiatives on which there's been movement: PERS reform, funding for roads and bridges, land availability, investment in research (see the launch of Research Oregon in this issue), a plan for our forests, a brand campaign to market ourselves to the world. What's not to like?

The beauty is that we all get to play. If you missed the bus, mark your calendar for the big gathering at the Oregon Convention Center in December. And there's the next December and the next. This effort is not going away.

There's surely room for improvement. But as a smart person said to me recently, let's not let the desire for the perfect interfere with the opportunity for good. We can't afford to.

If you have comments about any articles you've read in Oregon Business magazine, e-mail us at feedback@oregonbusiness.com.

Copyright 2004 Oregon Business magazine