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Church: 'We got hit the hardest' By MELISSA MARTIN EAGLE POINT -- There's a mound of dirt where the parsonage used to be and blueprints for a new school have been nixed. It's the price paid for making Highway 62 a safer road to drive. But the minister at St. John Lutheran Church on Alta Vista Road feels the church's share of the cost has been higher than most of the 52 property owners who gave up land for the Highway 62 improvements. "We got hit the hardest," the Rev. Ron Norris said. Six months after Norris and his wife arrived from Ohio to their new parish, they had to move out of the parsonage and into a rented home in Eagle Point. The state bulldozed the 2,600-square-foot building in order to realign Alta Vista Road and Shasta Avenue. "That section of Shasta came extremely close to the parsonage so St. John asked that we buy the parsonage because the impact would be so great," said John Vial, regional manager for the Oregon Department of Transportation. St. John Lutheran was one of 52 property owners forced to sell land when the Oregon Department of Transportation began widening Highway 62 from the Veterans Affairs Domiciliary in White City to Linn Road in Eagle Point. "That's not that many properties for a highway project that long," said Gary Taylor, right-of-way supervisor for Region 3 in Roseburg. The state spent $798,180 in right-of-way costs, buying properties that ranged in size from 700 square feet to 4.9 acres (a wetlands area), Taylor said. The only dwellings involved were two mobile homes and the parsonage. The state paid moving costs for the two families on Nick Young Road and for Norris. The buyout split the church's six-acre parcel in half and razed what had been the ministers' home and the original meeting place when the congregation started 20 years ago. It also could cancel church plans to expand the preschool to other grades. "The school has been a dream of the congregation," Norris says, who serves as chaplain for the Eagle Point Police Department. "It's limiting to us. Now we have less land to work with and build on and the road comes very close to our playground." The church sits above the old Alta Vista intersection, which was a priority for the state because its angle made it dangerous for drivers pulling onto Highway 62, Vial said. A noted accident in recent years killed a mother and her two children, he said. The problem is compounded by heavy traffic and distracted drivers, said David Strand, Eagle Point police chief. "You had an uncontrolled intersection on Alta Vista with people pulling out onto a two-lane road in heavy traffic," Strand said. "When you widen the road to four lanes, put in a traffic control device and reconfigure that stretch of roadway, you cut down on that portion of the danger of driving Highway 62." But Highway 62 remains a dangerous road to drive, he said. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA