The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Reactions from Madras

With just a year and a half until Deer Ridge Correctional Institution opens, it's too late for Madras to turn back now.

That hasn't stopped Madras residents from debating the prison's impact. Skeptics, like 84-year-old widow Margaret King and hairdresser Karen Madrigal, still doubt Deer Ridge will deliver the promised turnaround. They fear crime will accompany its 1,884 inmates.

Former Mayor Rick Allen and other backers see the prison as a key employer in a fast-approaching Madras renaissance. For them, Deer Ridge is part of a 10-year-long effort to release Madras from its status as the seat of Central Oregon's poorest county. It is a chance to raise the standard of living for residents. The prison, they argue, will help Madras profit from its natural advantages and finally find a path to success.

Hopes and fears

Six ladies at the Jefferson County Senior Center represented both sides of the issue during an impromptu debate last month, while waiting to be called to the lunch line.

"I think (the prison) will probably change our town quite a bit," said Marguerite Olson, 88, who came to Madras from the Boise Valley in 1950. "We've got a little town now and I think in time we'll be a bit more cosmopolitan."

Another woman chimed in, wondering if the prison employees would live in Madras.

"In the 1950s, we had three women's clothing stores and a men's clothing store," she said. "Now we don't have any of that. Why would anybody come here if we don't have anything?"

"They say there's going to be some (new) shops," said 88-year-old Esther Stevenson, a Madras resident since 1961. "Progress."

"Progress? I call it regress," said King. "I just liked this town the way it was when we came down here."

The debate ended unsettled, as the center’s host asked diners to give their attention to the pre-lunch entertainment: a four-minute play written and performed by seniors about a sorority reunion party.

Of course, the women of the Methodist Table weren’t the first Madras residents to wonder about what a prison would do to the town. When the Department of Corrections proposed putting a prison in Madras in the early 1990s, community leaders asked the same questions.

Jefferson County was desperate for new jobs at the time to reverse a prolonged economic slump — per capita income lagged more than $5,000 behind the state average. But local leaders wanted to know how other prison towns viewed their penitentiaries.

To find the answers, a group of seven local politicians and city officials and one hairdresser, who was an outspoken prison opponent, chartered a plane and went to see some prison towns for themselves.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t getting into something that was going to cause us more negatives than positives,” said Allen, the former mayor, Jefferson County commissioner and primary mover behind most of the happenings there for the past 15 years.

They traveled to Baker City, Ontario and Pendleton, the three Eastern Oregon communities that hosted prisons at the time, and came away with the feeling that most people in those communities thought the prisons had been a good thing, said Janet Brown, a trip participant and then-county commissioner.

“They didn’t feel threatened, they weren’t afraid of the facilities,” Brown said. “A lot of (people) were opposed to the citing of the facility before, but after (prisons) were in operation they felt they had helped the community.”

Madrigal, a hairdresser, was invited to go along because she was one of the early opponents of the prison.

“My biggest concern was the people following the inmates,” said Madrigal, now 40 and living in Bend with her 16-year-old daughter. “That’s the idea in my head, that they’re low-income people, and I thought we had enough low-income people in Madras.”

The trip initially changed her mind, Madrigal said, but today she’s still ambivalent about the prison.

How will it help Madras, Madrigal said a few weeks ago, if most employees decide to live in Redmond or Culver or even Terrebonne? After all, Madrigal, a lifelong Madras resident, moved to Bend so her daughter could go to better schools, she said.

“I don’t think it’s going to be as economically good for us, because people are not going to live there,” Madrigal said. “And it makes me feel sad to say that about the town I grew up in.”

Big stakes

City officials from Ontario and Umatilla both said their biggest mistake was failing to persuade more prison employees to choose their communities.

In Ontario, they blamed the Idaho border and restrictive land use laws that prevented developers from putting up new houses to accommodate the workers.

“The bad part was, we didn’t have a lot of subdivisions ready to go,” when Snake River Correctional Institution opened, said Larry Wilson with Coldwell Banker Malheur Realty. “I think 50 to 60 percent (of employees) went out across the river (to Idaho) because we didn’t have the housing.”

Now, 58 percent of employees at Snake River Correctional Institution live in Idaho, according to prison Superintendent Jean Hill.

In Umatilla, locals said, it was the lack of amenities like restaurants and stores that kept many workers from choosing their town.

Housing, at least, won’t be a problem in Madras, where about 541 homes are scheduled to come online before the prison opens, according to city planners. That’s nearly enough houses to accommodate the expected demand of 557 new homes the Department of Corrections predicted a need for in its economic impact study for Deer Ridge.

That number doesn’t include houses in Madras Land Development Co.’s 1,300-unit East Hills development, scheduled to have a first phase ready by late 2007.

The prison helped persuade uncertain developers that Madras was worth investing in, said Bill Bellamy, a Madras real estate agent and Jefferson County commissioner.

“It’s the one thing that pushed people over the edge,” Bellamy said. “The minute they said the prison’s a go and stuck the shovels in the ground, that’s when all the developers jumped in.”

Madras homes are the right price for corrections officers, said Allen. The median price of a single-family home in the first three months of 2006 was $154,900, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors, while corrections officers earn $30,000 to $42,000 annually. Redmond’s median home price was $238,000.

The next round of developments in Madras will start in the low $200,000 range, said Mike Ahern, a Madras real estate agent. Jefferson County’s economy is “wildly healthy,” said Ahern, a former county commissioner and current commission candidate, but he thinks the prison can still help the region.

“You’re not going to catch me saying, ‘Oh no, I wish we didn’t have a prison,’” Ahern said. “I just think it adds a strength to the economic base.”

Allen agreed the prison will help Madras. But he also said if he knew then that Madras’ economy would take off as it has, his strategy for wooing the prison would’ve been different.

“I would say probably not with the same zeal,” Allen said. “I would say when we originally went that route, certainly we wouldn’t have guessed that we would have this kind of growth.”

Postponed promises

The city’s future could’ve looked much different if Deer Ridge had opened when originally planned, Allen said. The Department of Corrections moved the groundbreaking date back at least three separate times, first to 2000, then 2002 before construction finally began in late 2005.

“Emotionally, this was tough for the community,” Allen said. “A lot of people said it was never going to come.”

It was tough financially, too. Local governments made big infrastructure investments, hoping more people would add to the tax base and defray the costs, said school and city officials.

To prepare for the 2001 prison opening, voters passed a $15.8 million bond that paid to expand Madras High School and remodel the buildings that are now Buff Elementary School.

When the Department of Corrections pushed back the prison’s opening — delaying the arrival of prison employees and their families — the Jefferson County School District found itself paying for space it didn’t need, said former Jefferson County School District Superintendent Keith Johnson.

“This community cared enough about schools to prepare for growth,” said Johnson last year. “The state pulled this little trick on us and left us holding the bag.”

While governments built up housing and infrastructure to prepare for growth, social service agencies haven’t kept pace, according to Jefferson County and nonprofit officials. Limited funding simply doesn’t allow agencies to stay ahead of growth, said Diane Seyl, Director of the county Health and Human Services Department.

“One of the issues with a tax base is that the taxes are collected after the people move in,” Seyl said. “You’re never really ahead, you’re always playing catch up.”

The city of Madras thought it was avoiding that problem when it built an $8 million wastewater treatment plant in 2001, timed to coincide with the prison’s opening. As of late last year, it was operating at 10 percent of capacity, said City Manager Mike Morgan.

Those investments may have caused some short-term pain, but former mayor Allen believes the city is better prepared for the prison now than it was in 2001. During the delay, local voters passed a levy for a new aquatic center and the city strengthened building codes and updated water and sewer buy-in charges.

“The best thing that ever happened to us was that three-year delay,” Allen said. “We wouldn’t have Madras Land Development Company, wouldn’t have a new swimming pool, wouldn’t have the (high school) built.”

Even Madrigal said she thinks the improvements will help Madras’ prospects for the future.

“I think that what will save Madras is the fact that they’ve been doing some beautification projects. They’ve been building some nicer homes and they’re closer to Portland.”

Simple math

As Madrigal and other Madras residents see it, the prison’s success is a sort of mathematical formula. It’s how many prison workers move to Madras, minus the number of inmate families.

In other words, will the economic boost outweigh the social cost? Will the workers really live there? And will Madras turn out differently than Ontario and Umatilla and other rural towns that welcomed prisons as economic saviors only to find that things never really changed?

As Madrigal put it: “I can’t re-ally see where the coming of a prison cleaned up Umatilla any.”

Rick Allen thinks Madras will be the exception. A decade or more into the future, Allen sees a town that will look quite a bit different from the northern outpost of Central Oregon that for years has held the region’s highest poverty rate.

Allen sees a host of new subdivisions ringing the 5,500-person city’s downtown, filled with middle-class workers who can’t afford to live in Bend or Redmond or early retirees from Portland looking to grab a piece of Central Oregon lifestyle for a fraction of the cost. Lake Billy Chinook will attract newcomers who prefer water sports over exclusive destination resorts. And skiers who value variety over proximity will appreciate the 68- mile drive to either Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort or Hoodoo Ski Area.

The growth won’t be driven by the prison, either, according to Allen and Roger Lee, director of Economic Development for Central Oregon.

Although Madras leaders have predicted the town’s resurgence since the mid-1990s, only to see growth rates hover around 2 percent, Lee said that’s about to change.

“I’m going to say it’s a year to two years behind in Madras,” Lee said. “If you look at the private sector investment community, they really believe it’s so.”

In Allen’s vision, the new people will double the town’s population and attract new stores — from downtown restaurants and boutiques to big-box chains — that make the city even more livable than its neighbors to the south.

“Those looking for a smaller town with less traffic, less congestion and a small environment” will choose Madras, Allen said.

It’s a vision endorsed by Central Oregon’s biggest developers, including Brooks Resources and Eagle Crest, who are jointly developing the 800-acre East Hills subdivision.

“Madras is a logical alternative for folks who are not finding the (homes) they’re looking for in Redmond, or Bend or Prineville for that matter,” said Stuart Woolley, executive vice president of Eagle Crest. “You’re likely to see a similar mix of year-round residents, vacation home purchasers and pre-retirement purchasers.”

The group’s Portland-based planner, Madras native Doug Macy, agreed.

“It’ll definitely distinguish Madras as a sort of more middle class, more affordable for retirees community,” Macy said. “It’s always going to be a little more modest of a place. It’s not going to attract as many people or as much money.”

Amid all that, thousands of new houses, an 18-hole golf course and a revitalized downtown, the 1,800-inmate Deer Ridge Correctional Institution will be almost an afterthought. “It’s just out there,” Allen said. “What you will have is the workers and the employees out there in the community.”

Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com