NASCAR went nowhere fast

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, November 23, 2004

One day after the abrupt end to negotiations that could have brought a NASCAR track to Marysville, the two sides reflected on how the talks broke down.

Snohomish County and Marysville officials who tried to broker the deal described their counterparts at International Speedway Corp. as friendly but unwilling to budge on money issues.

“Part of me thinks they didn’t think we were going to walk away from the table,” County Executive Aaron Reardon said.

With a phone call to ISC on Monday morning, Reardon and Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall did walk away.

The proposal was to build a seven-eighths-mile track on 850 acres near Smokey Point. It would have cost an estimated $250 million, plus $85 million in transportation improvements.

ISC offered to pay $50 million. Despite pressure over the past several weeks from Reardon and Kendall to increase the company’s contribution, ISC never did.

“It got to a point where, frankly, we weren’t making any headway,” Reardon said.

John Graham, vice president of business affairs for ISC, said the deal fell apart because of high costs at the Marysville site. It didn’t make economic sense for ISC shareholders, and it didn’t make sense for taxpayers, either, he said.

“We felt that Snohomish County and Marysville worked with us to the greatest extent they could,” Graham said.

The NASCAR-affiliated company is still optimistic that a more affordable site can be found in Washington or Oregon, Graham said.

“We are not going to rule out any site at this point,” he said, adding that no specific sites are in line yet.

Reardon said he insisted that ISC make a commitment to the Marysville site before negotiations could begin. Otherwise, ISC might have too much leverage by using alternate sites as a backup.

That commitment was made Sept. 27. Negotiations started soon after.

Reardon’s point man for the project, Paul Roberts, added that time was a key factor. He wanted to have all the answers lined up before the start of the 2005 legislative session Jan. 10.

“We told them, ‘Don’t back us into a corner,’” Roberts said. “We didn’t want to look like we were running down the street trying to put our clothes on.”

Getting answers from ISC was slow going, Roberts and Kendall said. For example, Roberts asked ISC to give him a detailed site plan to flesh out the conceptual plan he had. He never got one.

That may be because ISC didn’t like the answers it was getting.

“In our study of that site, the more we got into it, the more evidence surfaced that the costs to prepare the site to support a speedway were going to be greater than we originally anticipated,” Graham said.

For example, dealing with drainage and other soil concerns would have been expensive because of the site’s high water table.

The other sticking point for local officials was NASCAR’s policy of only entering into one-year contracts with racetracks for its most popular racing series, the Nextel Cup. They wanted a longer commitment.

The busted deal has thrown a wrench into the Snohomish County Economic Development Council’s holiday party plans. The council, which backed the track proposal, had planned on having Graham speak at its annual meeting and year-end celebration in December.

The invitation’s still good, said EDC president Deborah Knutson.

“We’ve got a call into them,” she said. “That’s probably not their highest priority.”

Herald writer Bryan Corliss contributed to this report.

Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.