The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde recently an undisclosed sum to buy the 31-acre Multnomah Greyhound Park in Wood Village, Oregon, and wants a plan for the closed racetrack.
The tribe says it has no plans for the racetrack and is open to suggestions, which could include gaming operations, so long as they don’t interfere with the Grand Ronde’s Spirit Mountain Casino.
“We’ll look at all the options we’ve got on the table for it, and look at Wood Village, but we can’t just build a big, huge casino there and have an empty building at Spirit Mountain,” Tribal Chairman Reyn Leno told The Portland Tribune.
The tribe is working on a business plan that would include the former racetrack in some capacity and aims to diversify the tribe’s economic interests and base, tribal officials said.
Wood Village is located within the tribe’s treaty-enforced territory and just outside of Portland, making the former racetrack a potentially lucrative commercial operation of some sort.
The tribe’s Spirit Mountain Casino is located 60 miles away from Portland, which is the largest city in Oregon.
Private developers in 2005 floated a proposal to build Oregon’s only non-tribal casino at the racetrack, but that project fell through when state voters rejected the idea in 2012.
Although the tribe did not say how much it paid for the former dog-racing track, an April listing indicated an asking price of $11.2 million, but the tribe likely paid less.
