There’s a 37,000-square-foot building on Redwood Highway that cost $50 million to build, sold for $9 million, and sat completely empty for nearly four years. You’ve driven past it. You probably have opinions about it. So do I:
What He Was Building
Travis Boersma wasn’t trying to build a casino. He was trying to save horse racing in Oregon and give Grants Pass something it has never had — a destination that would put this town on the map. When Portland Meadows closed in 2019, he stepped in with his own money, revived Grants Pass Downs, and designed the Flying Lark as the economic engine to make it viable. The centerpiece: 225 Historic Horse Racing machines, the exact same technology Portland Meadows had operated legally, with full Racing Commission approval, for four consecutive years.
He helped shape state legislation to support it. He reached out to tribal leaders as early as fall 2020. He brought tribal representatives to tour the construction site in 2021. He hired 165 people before the building was finished.
The opposition did their homework too, just quietly, and earlier.
The Timing
Oregon’s tribes had commissioned a detailed economic impact study, calculating exactly how much casino revenue the Flying Lark would cost them, before Boersma filed his formal license application in October 2021. That kind of study takes months. The building was already complete when six tribal leaders wrote formally to Governor Brown that same October, raising concerns about the HHR application.
No state agency had produced a written position on the central legal question, whether HHR machines at this scale constituted a casino under the Oregon Constitution, before the money was spent and the employees were hired.
What followed was swift. The Governor directed the Racing Commission to seek a DOJ legal opinion. That opinion arrived in February 2022: 225 machines in a dedicated gaming space constituted a casino, violating the Oregon Constitution. The Racing Commission denied the license unanimously, and in the same meeting, unanimously passed a resolution disagreeing with their own denial. The commission’s chair said from the podium: “I don’t understand the DOJ opinion and cannot provide any legal advice although I am a lawyer, but we will do what we are told.”
A regulator, on the record, stating he complied under political pressure rather than legal conviction. Boersma had no path forward. He gave the building to Josephine County in February 2023.
What Was Missing
There was a formal process here. Applications were filed, letters were written, legal petitions submitted. The process existed.
What it never required was a documented position from every party with the power to kill this deal, stated in writing, before construction began.
In real estate, when a project’s viability depends entirely on someone else’s approval, that approval gets established on paper before a dollar moves. Not assumed from precedent. Not inferred from political goodwill. Not based on the fact that it worked somewhere else before. Written down, signed, and specific about what happens if circumstances change. That discipline exists precisely because enthusiasm and ambiguity are expensive, and the bill always comes due.
The Racing Commission had approved identical HHR technology at Portland Meadows in 2014. That approval was on the books. What was never on the books was any formal mechanism requiring the commission, the Governor’s office, or the tribes to declare their legal positions before a private developer broke ground on a facility whose entire business model depended on their sign-off.
Boersma had meetings, tours, and legislative precedent. What he didn’t have was a single written commitment from any state authority confirming the ground beneath him was solid. The formal process never required that question to be answered before the money was spent. And so it wasn’t.
The Josephine County commissioners approved the project. The Racing Commission accepted the application and advanced it for over a year without resolution. The Governor’s office knew of tribal concerns by October 2021 and issued no formal guidance until the building was complete and 165 people were employed. Every one of those parties had the authority to force the legal question into the open before construction began. None of them did.
Enthusiasm and political goodwill moved $50 million. Legal reality arrived later.
What Grants Pass Got
The county listed the building at $14.9 million. It sold in December 2024 for $9 million to River Valley Church, with the majority of funding coming from outside ministry partners whose identities have never been publicly disclosed. The church announced they would complete their move by spring 2025.
On March 3, 2026, nearly a year past that deadline, the church posted on Facebook: “WELCOME HOME! A celebration of our new Grants Pass location. What a special first weekend.” The building that was designed to be an economic engine for Grants Pass is now a 37,000-square-foot auditorium, prominent on one of the city’s most trafficked corridors, generating no tax revenue and no economic activity for the surrounding community.
The $9 million from the sale sits in a county fairgrounds permanent fund. The stated plan is a 5,000-seat amphitheater. The only concrete public benefit from a $50 million private investment was the cash from selling the wreckage at a $40 million loss. Grants Pass didn’t get a destination. It got a building fund.
Still Open
The DOJ opinion that ended the Flying Lark was never tested in court. It was never resolved by legislation. The 2013 law creating the HHR carve-out is still on the books. The Racing Commission’s own chair made clear the vote was compliance, not conviction, and noted there was “a high likelihood this matter does not conclude here.” It didn’t conclude. It was just set aside.
Travis Boersma invested $50 million of his own money into his hometown, got outmaneuvered at every level of state government, gave the building away, and watched Dutch Bros relocate its headquarters to Arizona. Whether those things are connected is something only he knows.
What I know is this: the question that killed the Flying Lark was never formally asked until the money made the answer unbearable. Every party with authority to put that question on the table early chose not to, and a $50 million private investment died in the gap between what everyone assumed and what nobody wrote down.
In any deal I’m involved in, that gap gets closed before the first dollar moves. On a project of this scale, in this regulatory environment, that question on paper was the only thing standing between a thriving venue and an empty building.
Jamie Eldrett is a real estate broker and founder of Frontier Properties, based in Grants Pass, Oregon.
Frontier Properties 
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