2004, The Daily Herald Company
MARYSVILLE – Catrena Garces, 37, moved with her husband into their new $165,000 home in the Berry Farm subdivision in north Marysville last year. She was drawn there by her parents, who live a few miles away.
“We were really excited being able to have affordable housing,” she said. “We moved up from California just to be close to them.”
Five months after she bought her home, Snohomish County officials started lobbying to build a NASCAR stock-car track in the strawberry fields just north of her home.
The news alarmed Garces and many of her neighbors.
“You don’t expect to have NASCAR literally across the street,” she said.
She’s not alone.
A computer analysis by The Herald found that the proposed racetrack would be a neighbor to thousands of people living in and around Marysville and Arlington.
More than 17,000 people live within a roughly two-mile area around the track site. That’s more than 6,000 homes, U.S. Census records show.
The area might still look rural, but since 1995, Snohomish County has approved 835 permits for new homes and apartments within two miles of the track site, an analysis of county building records found.
Those numbers explain why opposition to the track has been strong. Snohomish County Citizens Against a Racetrack, or SCAR, gathered more than 1,000 signatures opposing the track earlier this year, mostly from Marysville and Arlington.
The number of homes near the track caught Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall, a track supporter, off guard.
“That’s very, very surprising,” he said.
More backyards nearby means potentially more people who share SCAR’s concerns. The group has raised questions about track noise, traffic congestion and public costs of the proposed 75,000-seat, 600-acre track.While he understands the worries, Kendall said he still hopes to persuade the majority of people that those concerns can be addressed.”I still think our goal is education,” Kendall said.
Growth no accident
The Herald used computers and mapping software to identify the population and development activity within a two-mile radius of where the racetrack may be built. A two-mile zone was used based on the results of noise-monitoring with a decibel meter and interviews conducted by The Herald during a visit earlier this year to the NASCAR track in Joliet, Ill. People living more than two miles away from the Joliet track didn’t complain much about noise.
It’s no accident that so many homes are within two miles of the proposed Snohomish County NASCAR track.
Since the county’s growth management plans were completed in 1995, the area has been targeted to handle Marysville’s northward expansion.
The 835 new building permits since 1995 were just the beginning wave of growth there.
Unlike other agricultural areas farther north in the Stillaguamish Valley that were specifically set aside for farming, the farms of north Marysville were designated to be urbanized in coming decades.
They were hemmed in between Marysville and Arlington, anyway, planners determined. The state’s growth management law forced local officials to steer development between existing cities instead of sprawling outward.
The cities of Marysville and Arlington have issued hundreds of building permits of their own since annexing land near the track. For example, the 294-home Berry Farm subdivision where Garces lives is inside Marysville’s city limits. Census and other data show more than 6,000 homes within two miles of the track.
Squeezing the balloon
Locating a 600-acre track in north Marysville might seem like squeezing the growth balloon. Where else would new homes go?
Kendall points out, though, that Marysville already had planned to emphasize commercial and industrial development there. The city wants to diversify its tax base and reduce its reliance on residential property taxes. Local schools already are stuffed with students from the housing boom of the 1990s.
“To put houses out there right now would not be a real logical move on our part,” Kendall said. “That area has to be our economic base because I don’t have any place else to put it.”
That idea is going to be a tough sell in north Marysville if the anchor tenant is a racetrack. Keith Warman, 44, whose girlfriend lives in the Berry Farm subdivision, echoed a common sentiment among those who live closest to the track site.
“If the City Council of Marysville wants NASCAR, have them put it in their backyard, not ours,” Warman said.
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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