News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters' real estate market may have slowed down and construction has backed off from the fevered pitch of a year ago, but developers are planning some major commercial endeavors in Sisters.
A three-story hotel is in the early planning stages, located in the Pine Meadow Ranch development on Hood Avenue. The property owner is Celia Hung, who owns Sisters KOA Campground. Van Lom Architects is the applicant.
Portland Developer Willamette Planning Group, LLC has filed a land-use application for a retail/residential development on 10 acres on Larch Street on the north side of Sisters.
According to city planning director Eric Porter, neither application has been deemed complete yet.
The application for the 98-room boutique hotel came in on April 4, just ahead of a critical April 5 deadline.
The PMR development came into the city under a 1998 agreement that exempted it from Sisters' city codes and allowed development under Deschutes County Code requirements. That exemption allows a hotel to be 45 feet tall at the midpoint of a pitched roof.
City code would allow only a 30-foot-tall structure.
Under the county code, the city would have no say regarding how the hotel is oriented on the property.
The application is far from ready for consideration, Porter noted.
"They gave us a very skeletal application with a lot of gaps in it," Porter said.
Among other items, the city will require an amended traffic study and a sewer capacity analysis, because earlier analysis was based on a 50-room hotel.
"There's a pretty comprehensive list of items that are requested that are completeness issues," Porter said.
The applicants have six months, from April 4 until the beginning of October to complete the application. Porter emphasized that the developer can't make major changes to the concept. "Substantial changes" can be rejected and considered a new application. A new application would fall under city code.
"They're really locked into the plan they came in with on April 4," Porter said.
The planner said he has mixed reactions to the application.
"The idea of a boutique hotel intrigues me; I think an upscale hotel is appropriate for Sisters," he said.
However, he is concerned that the scale of the proposed structure might be visually incompatible with the rest of Sisters, and there are concerns about fire protection in such a tall building.
Porter has also reviewed an application for a development called Black Butte Crossing on Larch Street.
The application proposes a mix of residential units with 32,000 square feet of retail space. Porter said the types of residential units have not been determined; the developer is conducting market research.
"It will be built in either two or four phases," Porter said.
Porter expects the application to be completed and brought before the Sisters Urban Area Planning Commission in September or October.
Porter said the developer has been receptive to certain changes the planning staff has already suggested, mainly dealing with traffic.
"We didn't want a lot of accesses onto Locust Street because that is a collector," he said.
The developer has already changed access points.
The new development would add to a substantial square-foot increase in Sisters' available retail space. The new shopping center adjoining the Ray's Food Place under construction at the west end of town hosts 20,000 square feet of retail space. Additional retail space is projected in a development on the former site of the Sisters Chevron station at the corner of Oak Street and Cascade Avenue.
All of this activity is in contrast to a steep falloff in residential construction.
Last year, Sisters' planning department issued 68 permits for single-family residential construction. This year so far, the department has issued seven. Three of those, however, came in this month, indicating some pickup in residential construction action.
"We're beginning to show signs of life, so to speak," Porter said.
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.
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