Paradise - Tom Anderson, McMinnville

Honorable Members of the House:

I am writing to you about a piece of legislation that is very important to me. My fondest childhood memories are from my family’s summer trips to Camp Sherman. Every summer, my parents took my brother and sisters and me to the Metolius River where we camped or rented a cabin. I don’t own any property there, but I have been returning ever since for 30 years to camp, hike, fish, and ride my bike.

The Metolius and Camp Sherman are unique because the area is an incredibly beautiful natural wonderland where there is a perfect balance between accessibility and a quiet experience in a part of nature that, if you’ve ever been there I think you would agree, is paradise. I was shocked to learn that Jefferson County has decided to permit the development of destination resorts in the Metolius Basin with thousands and thousands of houses, golf courses, etc. I am not against development, but the Metolius River Basin is one of the greatest natural treasures in this state; it is the wrong place to build destination resorts because that would forever ruin the special character of this unique place, with overcrowding, traffic, noise, and pollution. You can walk across the tree-studded little parking lot of the general store to the wooden bridge at Camp Sherman and fed the huge trout swimming below it. That bridge could not accommodate the 33,600 additional daily car trips the proposed destination resort would bring. The Jefferson County Planning department uses the Institute of Transportation Trip Generation Manual to assign 9.6 trips per day to each house and if 3500 houses are built in a destination resort (as in one currently proposed), that will generate 33,600 vehicle trips per day on the Camp Sherman road. What will that cost in road maintenance and expansion, traffic, pollution, and carbon emissions? Someone actually has to pay these costs and that someone is Oregon citizens and taxpayers.

The sleepy little village of Camp Sherman would be changed forever into something more like downtown Sisters where it is hard to even cross the road. I cringe to think of what the crowds would do to the banks of the river.

I am writing to ask that you give energetic support to SB 30 and preserve one of Oregon’s greatest natural treasures for generations to come.

Sincerely,
Thomas H. Anderson
Law Offices of Thomas H. Anderson, P.C.
McMinnville, Oregon