Small college chooses new location in Everett

Published 11:33 pm Wednesday, August 29, 2007

EVERETT — A small Christian college aiming to move to Everett next year will occupy a different part of downtown than originally planned.

Trinity Lutheran College of Issaquah has agreed to lease and eventually purchase for $13.5 million the five-story Port Gardner Building at the corner of California Street and Wetmore Avenue. The deal also includes the parking garage across the street and connecting skybridge.

The independent, four-year college of 125 students expects to spend $3.5 million to remodel the building in time to start classes in fall 2008. The remodeling cost is included in the $13.5 million deal, president John Stamm said.

The college also is looking to lease apartments with 60 to 75 beds for first-year students within a three-block radius of the building, he said.

The college’s earlier plan was to buy two buildings at Colby Avenue and Wall Street, including the former Cogswell College, and to build two new buildings in the adjoining parking lot as well.

Trinity Lutheran would have held about three-quarters of the block bordered by Wall Street and Colby, Pacific and Hoyt avenues. But Stamm said school officials decided the Port Gardner building offered more room for the buck.

Stamm didn’t say how much the college would have spent on the Colby property, but “it would have been significantly more than our board would want to consent to,” he said.

The college is selling its 40.5-acre wooded campus in Issaquah to The City Church of Kirkland for $23.5 million.

“We want to be in an urban environment,” Stamm said. “We want to be more connected to the community.” Plus, he said, “students want cool stuff.”

Over the past few years, the college has looked at property from Tacoma to Marysville, he said. Everett was perfect, providing the benefits of a city without the chaos of downtown Seattle, “in an environment that’s really quite congenial,” he said.

Trinity Lutheran plans to begin remodeling the 66,000-square-foot Port Gardner Building in November, with the help of Integrus Architecture of Seattle and Kirtley-Cole Associates, Inc., an Everett construction firm.

The college hopes to increase enrollment to about 200, Stamm said. The liberal-arts college, which offers degrees in 10 majors, started in downtown Seattle in 1944 as an arm of the Minneapolis-based Lutheran Bible Institute. The college moved to north Seattle in the 1950s and to Issaquah in 1979.

If the college’s move to Everett is completed as planned, it could be one of two colleges starting classes in Snohomish County next year. The University of Washington is considering nine sites in Snohomish County for a new branch campus.