The tiny Washington town of La Center is hoping to attract some of the traffic that is suddenly pouring into the Ilani Casino Resort, which the Cowlitz Indian Reservation opened earlier this year.
The town, which has a population of about 3,200, is about two miles from the casino, near the Interstate 5 off-ramp. The town’s mayor, Greg Thornton, is hoping to do something to attract people to the town who used to come there from the Portland metro area for its four cardrooms.
The cardrooms are either dead or dying due to the opening of the Ilani. Since it opened two have closed. Without them La Center loses a significant portion of city revenue: it used to exact a 10 percent tax from the cardrooms, which netted the city about $3.1 million a year, or 75 percent of its operating budget. The cardrooms also employed nearly 700 area residents.
Mayor Thornton hopes to get a sewer out to city land that is adjacent to Interstate 5 so that development can take place there.
Recently he told the Columbian: “Once we get the sewer out here, then this will all be shovel-ready for development.” The “here” Thornton refers to is 150 acres at the western edge of the city and which was annexed in 2011. The idea is to develop retail, dining, green space and residential units, all with a view of some of the state’s most spectacular mountains.
Thornton added, “Conceptually, it’s a place where people can live and work and really have a lot of amenities.” The 150 acres are the subject of a master plan. Things are moving quickly. Last month city crews began laying a $5 million sewer line to the property. One hundred percent of the work is being paid for by a grant from the Cowlitz tribe. The line will link the property to the wastewater treatment plant in the downtown. The work is expected to be done 120 days after it commenced, sometime this fall.
The city council has also created new zoning laws and ended a moratorium on building permits.
“Now that the moratorium has been lifted, developers, if they are interested in looking at this, can come to the city, talk with our planner and start the process for applications,” Thornton told the Columbian. He sees La Center as a destination for recreation and entertainment, with the city providing complementary services to the casino.
The city is trying to encourage small to medium-sized businesses, and discourage larger ones.
Mike Bomar president of the Columbia River Economic Development Council, a private-public partnership, says of the land’s potential: “I think a few of the advantages are its proximity to I-5. That’s helpful for moving products up and down the corridor,” he said. “You’re also close enough to an urban environment, and you have the space to manufacture in a light industrial layout. Certainly it’s that combination of logistics and talent attraction that’s going to make that piece (of land) interesting.”
The land is also near the Columbia River, so businesses that serve recreation there could also be included in the mix of businesses that will be encouraged.
Since the first of the year La Center’s cardroom receipts went from $1.6 million to $1.1 million, a decrease of 30 percent. Thornton doesn’t sound optimistic about the future of the remaining card rooms: “It’s too early to tell for sure, but we had, at one time, four cardrooms. And now the city has two cardrooms. It’s hard to imagine that two cardrooms can consistently do what four cardrooms have done in the past. So I do expect that trend to diminish,” he said.
