Property Owner Opposes Hermiston’s Gettman Road Project

By Tori Shuller and Phil Wright/East Oregonian

The city of Hermiston is looking to use eminent domain to continue its project to expand West Gettman Road.

The Gettman Road Alternative Transportation Enhancement is a multi-step project to extend the road about 3,850 from Highway 207 through South First Street to Highway 395.

“In my view, that’s the linchpin of the entire project really, is just making that connection between Highway 395 and Highway 207,” Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said.

To make that happen, the city needs to acquire portions of five properties in the area.

The Hermiston City Council in May 2023 approved the necessity for eminent domain on the five properties, allowing the city to start negotiations with the property owners. For each parcel the city has offered an estimate of its worth to the owners.

But only two of the owners have agreed to the city’s offers, placing a halt on the construction efforts for the project.

The city in late June this year filed three pleadings to Umatilla County Circuit Court to exercise eminent domain on the three properties. Eminent domain is a right of a government to take private property for public use.

“We’ve spent the past year or so working with the property owners and making offers and going through the various steps that we need to on that,” Morgan said. “So I have not gotten a response from those last three property owners to resell. So that’s where we’re at now.”

A Property Owner Speaks Out

Kari Christiansen is among the property owners the city is seeking to acquire land from, and she is not interested in selling the land to the project.

“We’re not going to sell it to some contractor that’s going to build 50 homes out there, right?” Christiansen said. “That’s not a thing. We’re farming it. We have crops out there. We got cattle here.”

In addition to running through her farm, the extension would run through others, come near the back porch of one house and force the relocation of pump houses, including one the Oregon State University Extension Service owns.

Christiansen was critical of the city’s lack of notice to her and other property owners. She said she found out about the council’s vote to authorize the use of eminent domain when someone texted her a link to a newspaper article about the action.

“Then I started researching and listening to (a recording of) the council meeting and I went to the next council meeting,” she said. “And stood up and said, ‘I was not notified. Had we been notified, we would have been at the first meeting.’”

She said the city has offered money for her property, but the offer was far too low, especially considering the cost of moving their irrigation system.

“We turned it down,” she said. “But this isn’t about money.”

Rather, she questioned if the city of Hermiston should be spending money on this road instead of where development is occurring, such as the new Amazon data center near the Walmart Distribution Center. Christiansen said development should happen in the right places, but this is not the right place — a rural area near town with roads that don’t even have sidewalks.

“That’s when people start to say this doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
City touts project’s benefits

Highway 207 and South First Street in Hermiston are parallel to each other and run north to south.

The two southernmost roads connecting the streets are Gettman on the southern end and West Highland Avenue about a mile north.

West Highland Avenue is the only one that fully runs through to Highway 395.

When entering Hermiston from the south, the quickest way to get from Highway 207 to South First Street is via Gettman Road.

The extension of Gettman Road, Morgan said, means quicker response times from public safety, an easier route for commuters and less congestion on surrounding streets.

Hermiston Police Chief Jason Edmiston said police try to use the quickest paths they can to respond to calls.

“If there’s more ability to maneuver from one side of the city to the other in case of an emergency, that’s what officers will do,” he said. “If Gettman was an option, police would use it.”

The posted speed limit on Gettman is 35 mph, but that does not stop motorists from speeding down the long, straight road.

“Once the city chip sealed it, they made it even more accessible for speeding,” said Marilee Cottrell, a local who lives near the intersection of Gettman and South First. “We like that it’s quiet here, and we figure the extension is going to make the traffic and speed worse.”

Once extending the West Gettman Road is complete, the city anticipates traffic to slow down along the route.

“People tend to speed a lot more because they feel it’s wide open. It usually changes over time with development,” Morgan said.

The default speed on city streets is 25 mph, and Morgan said he expects city standards to apply to Gettman.

With GRATE in the city’s transportation plan for more than 20 years, Morgan said he is eager to continue the project, despite concerns from residents.

Christiansen said this is not a fight she nor her neighbors wanted, but they are in it.

“Now, I guess we go to court,” she said. “This was not what we wanted to do. It’s not something anybody wants to, and it’s expensive. But I feel like we kind of need to stand up for what we believe in.”