News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
The City of Sisters is having a tough time figuring out how best to travel from one end of town to another over the next couple of decades.
A citizens committee has recommended a couplet running on Hood and Main avenues, leaving Cascade Avenue open for local traffic. The plan has a total cost of about $2 million.
But that plan doesn’t please everybody. City Councilor Brad Boyd was elected last spring in part on the strength of his opposition to a couplet. He is proposing an alternative route or local bypass starting west of Tollgate and cutting through the woods south of Sisters.
That idea is strictly conceptual at this point and cost estimates vary widely.
Now the city may look into yet another idea: modification of Hood and Main avenues to accommodate traffic flow without making each street one-way — what Mayor Dave Elliott called “a couplet that’s not a couplet.”
Such modifications could take advantage of the Forest Service’s plan to vacate its offices at the west end of Main Avenue and could involve a pair of traffic signals at the east and west ends of town.
It’s unclear whether such a plan would have any impact on traffic.
According to City Manager Eileen Stein, the question is, “Would this buy us any time?”
She said the answer to that question would be the focus of a new study.
The city council, at a Thursday, August 4 workshop, gave Stein the green light to look into having the Oregon Department of Transportation conduct the study with the city contracting with a private consultant to review ODOT’s assumptions and conclusions.
The councilors agreed that the review would be necessary because many in the community believe ODOT has its own agenda when it comes to managing traffic through Sisters and citizens would not have confidence in a study that did not have an independent review.
ODOT would do the study at no charge; the review would cost $2,500. It would cost about $10,000 for the city to conduct its own study.
That may be necessary if if the timeline for an ODOT study is too long. The city must get on the Oregon STIP (Statewide Traffic Improvement Plan) funding list if it hopes to get funding for any traffic project by 2009.
“Whatever we do, we need to get queued up in the money line,” said Councilor Lon Kellstrom.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
Reader Comments(0)