The low-slung shooting houses at the Bend Trap Club poke up from a field of winter dry grass just beyond an abrupt L-shaped curve on Brosterhous Road.

Until a few years ago, the curve marked the boundary between the city of Bend’s expanding urban area and the larger rural lots in Deschutes County.

Today, the Bend Trap Club is an island surrounded by a small but ever-growing sea of suburban rooftops. More importantly, the 40-acre trap club stands as one of the last and largest undeveloped parcels in the city of Bend.

But in Bend’s booming real estate market, it seems that everything has its price, even the 97-year-old trap club.

The club is working on a deal that will allow it to move its regular shoots from the home on Brosterhous, where it has resided since 1932, to a 633-acre site in land-abundant Crook County.

With the profits from the land sale, the club plans to build some 200 RV parking spaces and campsites at the Crook County site and double the number of trap fields while adding or expanding other shooting sports. Guests without RVs will have an option to stay in yurts.

The upgrade in the new location, which is located about 15 miles west of Prineville, will allow the club to hold regional shoots that attract as many as 400 to 500 participants and their families.

After extending roads, power to service the site and building a wastewater system to serve the new location, the club, according to board members will still have $600,000 left to invest.

The deal, which has been negotiated in several different forms over the past three years, underscores the value of real estate amid Bend’s booming housing market.

LACK OF SUPPLY

Last year Bend issued more than 2,200 building permits – a record for the city – and an amount that surpassed the number issued by Portland, Seattle or San Diego in 2004.

Those working in real estate say the combination of strong demand and limited supply has inflated land prices and home values in Bend.

”It’s truly amazing what is happening,” said Kay Lucas, principal broker at Brooks Resources Realty in Bend.

Traditionally, developers might release 25 to 30 lots in a new subdivision for purchase, which would be absorbed by the market over about 18 months, Lucas said. But over the last five years, said Lucas, that window of time has shortened to a matter of weeks or sometimes days.

Home sites in one of Brooks most recent developments on Awbrey Butte sold out in 72 hours despite the fact Brooks had raised the asking price in each of the project’s three phases. In each phase, buyers bid up the actual sale price. Less than six months after the last sale some of the buyers have put lots back on the market with no improvements at hefty markups.

One lot that sold for just under $140,000 in November is now available for purchase at $208,000, said Lucas.

Emboldened by Bend’s appetite for new homes, developers are bidding up Bend’s few remaining undeveloped parcels that are zoned for residential housing.

The trap club property is the exception. The club locked in a deal two years ago to sell its property to Tumalo-based developer Gary Blake for $3.2 million – about $80,000 per acre.

In the meantime, the going rate for such property has ballooned to closer to $200,000 an acre, said Dana Bratton, of Bratton Appraisal group in Bend.

Late last year the Bend Metro Park and Recreation District netted about $2.2 million from the sale of a roughly 13-acre property off Butler Market in northeast Bend – about $171,000 per acre.

Steve Scott, the real estate agent who handled the sale, said he recently sold another roughly one-acre property in Bend for $260,000.

”The number one thing that causes this increase in value that as

significant as this, is the lack of supply,” Scott said.

Until the city adds more land, the price is only going to go up, he added.

”The competitiveness is going to get worse because there are fewer and fewer parcels with more developers because of the (lack of supply),” he said.

Trap club members are aware of the rapid rise in real estate values. It’s one of several aspects of the move that has caused friction in the club.

Members who oppose the deal with Blake question whether the club is getting a fair shake for their land when other properties are selling for double the price.

Blake declined to be interviewed for this story.

Some of those members don’t share the leadership’s grand visions for the club in Crook County and have fought the move. Members say the tug of war over the club’s future has strained friendships in a collegial club where generations of shooters have mixed freely for decades.

”It’s a really sad thing that has happened here in a way that I’ve never seen done at a gun club,” said Delmar Jeske, 73, who has been shooting trap in Oregon for more than 40 years including 14 years at the Bend club.

THE ELECTION

In late January, the issues came to a head at the annual meeting where club members elect board officers. Opponents of the move to Crook County packed into the clubhouse in an effort to gain control of the board only to be outvoted.

A faction led by club President Dano Saarinen garnered enough absentee votes to fill all six open seats, essentially sealing the move to Crook County. Several members who were at the meeting said later that it was the first time in the club’s history that a board used mail-votes to elect officers. Among those elected to the board was Saarinen’s wife.

”The whole thing was really a nasty vote,” said Duane Endicott, semi-retired plumber in Redmond and of four officers that quit the board last year because of disagreement over the relocation.

Endicott said he won’t make the 45-minute drive to Crook County to shoot at the new site with the exception of a few events. But Endicott, whose father shot at the Bend Trap Club in the 1950s, said his biggest regret is how the internal struggle has hurt the club members and its image in the relative close-knit community of shooters in the state.

”Trap shooting is a gentleman’s sport. When we see stuff like this it degrades the sport in its entirety,” said Endicott.

In an interview Thursday at the trap club, where he was working a regular shooting event for members, Saarinen defended the club’s move and board’s handling of the deal.

”My goal all along is that the club should run more like a business,” said Saarinen, who has been a member for seven years and president since 2003.

Unlike some of the older shooters, Saarinen shoots both trap and one of the newer versions of the sport, sporting clays. He wants to add skeet shooting another related sport to the mix at the new location. Saarinen scoffs at the notion that the club can stay where it is for several more years while land values balloon in Bend and then move to a new location.

The club already tried unsuccessfully to locate closer to Bend on a piece of property owned by the Tumalo Irrigation District, where developer Blake is a board member.

That effort fell apart when neighbors got wind of the deal and lobbied the county commission to reject a proposal to create a firearms training facility designation in the county code. Saarinen said the club was told privately by the county that any location that suited its needs was already designated as critical wildlife habitat.

”If we wait another five or six years there won’t be anywhere in Crook County for us to go,” said Saarinen.

Environmentalists will lock shooters out of public and private in lands sooner than most people think, Saarinen said. He points to the effort to list the sage grouse as an endangered species and the ongoing push to create a roughly 37,000-acre Badlands wilderness area outside of Bend as indicators.

Staying at the present location is not an option either, Saarinen said.

A new housing development adjacent to the club forced the club to halt shooting on its western most trap field. Plans for public trails and the prospect of additional housing development on a neighboring property at the far end of the trap field will add to existing safety concerns at the club, he said.

Besides, Saarinen said, the majority of the club supports the move to a new location.

More than 90 percent of the members voted in favor of relocating two years ago, he pointed out. But that was when the new location was 10 miles outside of Bend not 30 miles.

A second vote on the Crook County move drew less support but still gained a majority of the club members with 86 in favor and 62 against.

Those who are still fighting the move are a small but vocal minority of the 200 members, Saarinen said.

”We have a small group, quite frankly 15 percent, who are trying to bend the entire membership to their will,” Saarinen said.

Asked about the proxy votes in the recent election, Saaranen snatches a stack of membership cards from a nearby shelf. Opponents of the move used the cards to sign up new members on the eve of the board elections in a failed board coup that sought to oust him as president, Saarinen said.

By contrast the absentee ballots went out only to existing club members, albeit only those who supported the move, Saarinen said.

He disagrees with members who say the club is underselling the Brosterhous property. While the club has assets, it doesn’t have the kind of cash it takes to acquire a new property and develop it for a shooting range while continuing to operate in its current location.

The deal with Blake allows the club to hang onto its current site until it’s ready to move, which he estimates will likely be a year from now.

When the club negotiated the purchase price with Blake it had an appraisal done on the current site. The appraiser put the land value at $66,000 per acre, Saarinen said. The board secured a deal for $80,000 per acre.

In addition, the club included a provision that caps its liability for environmental clean-up at $230,000. Saarinen said the club estimates the cost could run as high as $860,000 to clean up 65-plus years of lead and steel shot that hasn’t been picked up by the club during its periodic sweeps of the site.

Some members may not like the sale price, said Saarinen, but the club has an obligation to honor its deal with Blake regardless of what the market has done.

”We made a deal with Gary Blake. We set a price on the property. We have a legal obligation; a contractual obligation,” Saarinen said. Eric Flowers can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at eflowers@bendbulletin.com.