Developer looks to future in Sisters

Bill Willitts is hard at work creating the FivePine development at the east end of Sisters.

The development around Sisters Athletic Club and his wife Zoe’s business, Shibui Spa, will eventually include a conference center and restaurant and other amenities in a tree-studded setting.

That’s plenty to work on for now, but Willitts is looking toward the long-term future. He now owns a 20-acre parcel that used to be part of the Lazy Z ranch adjacent to FivePine and he is a partner with several other Sisters investors in another 64 acres of former Lazy Z land.

“Our plan is just to hold it and see what develops and see if someday it might be able to come into the UGB (Urban Growth Boundary),” he told The Nugget.

Willitts said the purchase satisfied an immediate need — a trail easement to take walkers and hikers from FivePine onto public lands. Aside from that, the future is unclear. Except that Sisters is growing and Willitts and the other partners anticipate that the city will eventually want to rezone that land for residential and/or commercial purposes.

“That’s the gamble,” he said. “It may be a not-in-my lifetime proposition.”

However, Willitts noted, Sisters’ growth “is accelerating much faster than we thought in terms of building out our inventory.”

In any case, Sisters is a long way from seeing more houses on the property. It’s still zoned as farmland and Willitts said he believes it has as many houses on it as are allowed.

There are other uses for the land.

Willitts confirmed that he has discussed the possibility of using the land to dispose of effluent from an expanded municipal wastewater plant. That could only happen, he said, if the level of treatment was boosted up to Level IV, which is the cleanest level possible.

Willitts also noted that the purchasers also own the water rights that came with the land — a valuable commodity. The City of Sisters itself needs to acquire water rights to expand its infrastructure and other developments need to provide water as well, leaving the partners in a seller’s market.

“Water is going to become a bottleneck (for future development),” Willitts said. “Again, not in my lifetime, but down the road.”

In the meantime, Willitts said the property is being cleaned up. Piles of dead limbs are being left to season and will be burned next fall.

Curt Kallberg, one of the partners, told The Nugget that burnable materials from a pile of old house debris left behind the white house on the south side of Highway 20 will be separated out and the rest of the materials hauled off to a waste dump in Prineville.

And the pastures will remain green open space on the outskirts of Sisters, probably for years. But those pastures are waiting to someday soak up the growth of a community that seems to attract new residents every day.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

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.

• Email: editor@nuggetnews.com
• Phone: 5415499941