Let facts, not fiction, rule on NASCAR plan
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, May 15, 2004
Fear of the unknown can take on a life of its own, sparking a firestorm of fiction.
Some of that is happening in response to the proposal to locate a NASCAR auto-racing track in the Smokey Point area between Marysville and Arlington. Fears of everything from noise to crime to plunging property values are swirling, especially among homeowners in the Gleneagle development northeast of the preferred site.
The speed with which the proposal was put together, necessary in order to compete with other sites in Washington and Oregon, left a vacuum of information that’s been easy to exploit. Now, fortunately, officials from the City of Marysville and Snohomish County, as well as local business leaders, are working quickly to replace fiction with fact.
They’ll soon be holding public meetings where the potential impacts, positive and negative, of a racing facility can be discussed, and where citizens can voice concerns and ask questions. In preparation, they’ve been conducting a fact-finding project that recently took some of them to Fontana, Calif., for a NASCAR race.
What they found helped to dispel many fears, and reinforce the benefits a NASCAR facility would bring.
Noise, they found, wasn’t much of an issue. A half-mile from the track, the race sounded like a distant freeway, said Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall. Four miles from the track, houses priced at $1 million and up are being built. Officials in Fontana and nearby Ontario said the economic growth generated by the track has been triple what they anticipated.
Those officials said the biggest challenge they’ve faced, traffic before and after major events, is real but manageable. Picture the backups before and after a Husky football game. The addition of new roads in the Smokey Point area, including a new I-5 interchange, would result in better traffic flow every day of the year.
One fact has been clear since this proposal was made last month: The preferred site, east of I-5, was already slated for development. It is not going to remain open space. If a track doesn’t go there, housing or industrial developments, with all their blacktop, will. A race track would require much less asphalt; parking lots would be grass, making them available for use as sports fields most of the time. This would be a tremendous community asset, and a catalyst for clean economic development.
If this proposal moves ahead, an environmental impact statement and public hearings will be required. Findings will be based on fact, not fiction. The less of the latter, the better.
