Casino news source: Oregon Live - http://www.oregonlive.com
Spirit Mountain Casino grows, but not highway
Oregon 18 - Folks worry about more traffic on a stretch of road that carries 14,000 vehicles a day Sunday, March 25, 2007WADE NKRUMAH
Val Adamson has spent much of his life dealing with the mayhem on Oregon 18.
"I've seen virtually everything that's happened on this road since the '50s," said Adamson, owner of the family's funeral business in Sheridan. "I've seen the traffic go up and down. I've seen the truck volume go up and down."
Unable to shake memories of a June head-on crash that killed two motorcyclists, Adamson wonders about the future of an 18-mile section of the busy two-lane highway, which links the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast, and the biggest-yet expansion of Spirit Mountain Casino.
Already Oregon's most popular visitor attraction, the casino has broken ground on a $70 million, 120,000-square-foot convention center that is expected to bring thousands of more customers -- and even more traffic to the highway.
Spirit Mountain, owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and the highway are tightly linked. The casino, Polk County's largest employer, with 1,500 workers, already gets 3 million visitors a year.
The highway, a well-traveled route to and from the coast for Portland and Willamette Valley residents, is the last leg to the casino for thousands of gamblers arriving by car, motor home and buses.
The stretch of Oregon 18 that includes the casino is traveled by nearly 14,000 vehicles a day. A busy summer weekend at the casino generates an average 8,500 vehicles a day, said Siobhan Taylor, public affairs director for Confederated Tribes. About 40 percent are vehicles that stopped at the casino en route to another destination, she said.
Safety corridors
There are 13 "safety corridors" in Oregon, part of a state Transportation Department program targeting mostly busy, rural or suburban highways where fatal and serious crashes exceed the statewide average for similar highways.
Spirit Mountain is at the west edge of a safety corridor created in 1996, a year after the casino opened.
All the corridors carry stiffer penalties for traffic violations. The most dangerous get extra money for small road projects, better signs and more police patrols. But when crashes, serious injuries and deaths decrease, those corridors lose that funding, which is redirected to more dangerous corridors.
Such is the case with Oregon 18.
The Oregon 18 corridor received no extra money the past four years. Six others -- with the highest fatal and serious injury crash rates -- this year will get up to $18,000 each for extra police patrols.
"Highway 18 has done very well over the last several years," said Anne Holder, a program manager in the transportation safety division of the Oregon Department of Transportation. But, Holder said, the highway keeps its safety designation because a 5.18-mile section at the east end of the corridor between McMinnville and Sheridan has excessive accidents and deaths.
Traffic enforcement
Lt. Marlene West, who has been at the Oregon State Police's McMinnville office for seven years, says more crashes and deaths on Oregon 18 at least partly can be traced to decreases in troopers since the 1970s and '80s, when the McMinnville office had 20. It now has six.
"You look at what's happened in the interim," West said. "It's still a rural, two-lane highway, but with far more people using it. That's how accidents happen."
In 1996-99, there were 22 traffic deaths -- 16 of them in the stretch that includes the casino -- in the Oregon 18 safety corridor. From 2000 through 2005, there were six deaths -- all but one in the stretch that includes the casino.
And that's why Adamson's biggest concern is how much longer ODOT officials will keep the safety corridor designation for Oregon 18, and less about how Spirit Mountain's expansion will affect traffic on the highway.
"It isn't perfect, but it's safer," Adamson said of the state program.
ODOT evaluates the status of each safety corridor yearly.
From 1990 -- six years before the Oregon 18 safety corridor was created -- to 2005, the number of crashes in the corridor generally has remained constant, even as the average number of vehicles traveling the highway each day almost doubled to 13,743.
"The fatal and serious injury crash rate is the only thing that the safety corridor data really focuses on," Holder said. "We don't focus on the crash rate itself. We don't focus on the fatality rate. We focus on the fatal and serious injury crash rate."
Ideally, West would like to add six more patrol officers, which would let her have 24-hour coverage of the roads.
"Right now, we're not proactive at all," she said.
The Confederated Tribes contributes $459,000 yearly to directly help monitor traffic along Oregon 18. The money covers salaries of seven full-time Polk County deputies based in a substation in Grand Ronde. The funding, which started with five deputies in 1997, provides patrols for the highway and basic service in Grand Ronde.
Adamson, who has lived nearly 50 years in Sheridan, recalls countless fatal crashes on the highway, which convince him the safety corridor designation must stay in place.
"Knowing the people, knowing the families and all that. That's when it really brings it home to you," Adamson said. "It's not just an anonymous --go pick up some poor soul that didn't survive an accident and get them back to where they need to go. You've got to come back and deal with it, and the family and the people here in town.
"No one thing is going to be the end of all of the problems, other than a divided highway and four lanes," he said. "And that's still not going to stop the stupid people from killing themselves. It just kind of helps keep them from killing other people."
David Austin of The Oregonian staff contributed to this report. Wade Nkrumah: 503-294-7627; wadenkrumah@ news.oregonian.com |
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