In just one month, Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to be handed a report describing the good, the bad and the best of four Snohomish County sites competing to become the state’s newest four-year public university.
The document also will be given to state lawmakers who are expected to choose the final one in their 2008 session that starts Jan. 18.
The prize is a University of Washington campus and the job market and prestige it brings to a community. More than $285 million could be invested into building a university, according to one state study.
The four finalists include two sites in Everett and one each in Lake Stevens and Marysville.
Experts are down to “the nitty-gritty infrastructure part of the evaluation,” estimating how much it would take to improve access and build on each site, said Deb Merle, Gregoire’s higher education adviser.
Each of the final four sites is different from one another, ranging from urban to suburban and big to small. Each site also faces obstacles — addressing contamination in Everett, moving a gas line in Marysville — but backers are confident they can be easily overcome.
As for a frontrunner?
“Honest to God, we don’t know,” Merle said. “There are so many factors to be considered. We don’t know how it is going to end. It is kind of nice to be in the position to have people fighting to get us in their back yard. There are four good choices.”
More than 750 people have attended four town hall meetings in Snohomish, Island and Skagit counties to discuss the university proposals, and two more sessions for public testimony are set for Lake Stevens and Marysville later this month.
Here’s a look at the final four sites:
Everett Station:
The city’s No. 1 choice
Mass transit, check. Nearby housing, recreation and jobs, check. A landmark public building that could hold classes tomorrow, check.
Everett’s No. 1 choice for a new UW campus is about 31 acres of public land near Everett Station.
There’s also room for future expansion, if the state can buy nearby land that is privately owned. In all, more than 130 acres near Everett Station have the proper zoning for a university and dormitory-style housing.
“Any of the sites could work,” Everett City Council President Brenda Stonecipher said. “But I view that site as the plug-and-play site.”
City-owned warehouses and maintenance yards take up about half of the public land straddling the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway mainline tracks east of downtown. Everett Steel Co. and Scuttlebutt Brewery are also among a group of industrial businesses in the shadow of Everett Station.
In spite of the industrial backdrop, the district has been slated for redevelopment for years.
Nearly six years ago, Everett Station opened. With its copper-tiled roof, brick walls and four-story windows that fill the 64,000-square-foot building with light, Everett Station is now one of the city’s most recognizable buildings.
The Everett Station is a busy transportation hub for Sound Transit’s commuter rail, a passenger station for Amtrak and a crossroads for rail, bus, taxi and airport shuttles.
It’s a short walk to the Comcast Arena at Everett Events Center and close to Boeing, Providence Health, Snohomish County PUD and other major employers such as Fluke, an electrical meter manufacturer; Verizon, a communications company; and Intermec, an aerospace firm.
The proposed campus also brushes up against the city’s riverfront project, a massive redevelopment project where a movie theater, restaurants and shops are being planned.
By 2001, the 10-acre portion where Everett Station sits was cleaned up to “residential standard,” said Pat McClain, Everett’s government affairs director. Part of the land was contaminated with oil, diesel and lead.
Five parcels on the remaining land are also on the state’s confirmed and suspected contaminated sites list. No one knows for sure the cost of cleaning up the sites. Even so, initial tests of have not sounded any alarms, said Larry Altose, a Department of Ecology spokesman.
— David Chircop
Marysville: Plenty of land ready for growth
If Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall has his way, land just north of 152nd Avenue will not be strawberry fields forever.
From a gravel parking lot, Kendall looks across a two-lane country road to the straight rows of berry bushes that touch the southern edge of a site that could become home to a UW campus.
The 349 acres of vacant, privately owned land were annexed into the city about a year ago, but have long been part of Marysville’s long-term plans. It’s by far the largest tract in the running for the UW, and land nearby can also be developed.
“We figure there are 10,000 to 12,000 jobs out there,” Kendall said. “That’s how we will keep the folks here instead of putting them on the freeway.”
Most of the land was once used for agriculture but is sparsely used for grazing during the summer now.
It’s zoned for light industry and commercial use, which would make building a campus and supporting industries nearby “really simple,” Kendall said. Water and sewer utilities are already on the property.
Land to the west is zoned for commercial and to the east it’s light industrial. There is military housing and industrial land to the north and light industrial and homes to the south.
Boosters call the site UW Tri-Counties, saying it’s closer and can best serve students from Skagit and much of Island counties. Marysville rated high in a year-old state study for commute time.
The site is about five minutes from I-5 off the 172nd Street exit at Smokey Point, but even that time could be shortened.
Road improvements are planned to improve I-5 access. A new 156th Street overpass that would lead straight to the college is under design and a stretch of Smokey Point Boulevard leading to the west side of the site is being widened from two to five lanes.
One challenge with the property is the need to remove a natural-gas line, but that can easily be done, Kendall said.
The plan for the UW campus includes an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math and opportunities to gain job experience nearby. The Marysville site could offer students that chance at the nearby Arlington Airport industrial park, a planned Tulalip Tribes business and industrial park and in the cities of Everett and Marysville, Kendall said.
The land was part of a proposal to build a NASCAR track in 2004 and its days as a bucolic patch appear numbered.
Kendall imagines the UW surrounded by biotech and engineering firms and aerospace and software companies.
“These berry fields are going to be gone,” Kendall said. “It’s the end of a century and it’s just a different product when you think about it.”
— Eric Stevick
Lake Stevens: Campus would transform the site
Waist-high grass sways in the breeze. Through the clouds, the Everett skyline and Highway 2 are visible in the distance. Blackberry bushes and thick clumps of brush dot the west end of the potential UW branch campus. Wetlands and a small forest occupy the east end.
All that could change.
The cities of Lake Stevens and Snohomish want the state to transform the rural 97.5 acres into the newest UW branch. The campus would completely reshape the nearly vacant land into a bustling, education center.
“Why not Lake Stevens?” Lake Stevens Mayor Vern Little asked. “We just thought it would be a great opportunity to give the kids in the north and east part of Snohomish County an opportunity — and yet we’re still not too far from the west side.”
Three miles from I-5, the site stretches along 20th Street NE from Cavaleros Road almost to 87th Avenue SE. The campus would be accessible from Highway 2. Site backers also envision an entrance near Highway 9, which runs north and south through the county.
The drive from I-5 takes five minutes without traffic. During rush hour, however, traffic sometimes comes to a standstill on Highway 2. Opponents of the site say the campus would just add to the congestion.
State Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens, doesn’t think traffic will be much of an issue. Students and teachers will be driving against the flow, he said. Plus planned improvements on Highway 9 and 20th Street NE should make the drive even easier, he added.
Around a dozen public and private landowners hold the deeds to the site. The land sits within Lake Steven’s Urban Growth Area and the city plans to annex it soon, Little said.
The site is zoned residential, but with a special permit colleges can be built in residential areas and backers of the site say zoning won’t be a problem.
Once used for farming, the land has been mostly vacant, with just a few homes, for years. The land is adjacent to the new Cavelero Mid High School, and proponents say UW classes could be held in the school during off-hours on a temporary basis while the college is under construction.
Mick Howard owns a home across the street from the site. While he has some reservations about traffic, overall, he thinks a college would be good for Lake Stevens.
“Having a campus adds a real nice element to the whole community,” said Howard, who works out of his home as an executive headhunter. “I don’t know if prestige is the right word, but it’s probably pretty close.”
Backers haven’t settled on a name for the site, but they like UW North, UW Snohomish and UW Lake Stevens.
— Kaitlin Manry
Riverside Point: Site is near I-5; needs cleanup
If the state chooses to build a campus for the UW at Riverside Point, students and faculty would be just three minutes from I-5, tucked between the railroad tracks and a bend in the Snohomish River.
But the land is not pristine. The site is a former sawmill and has some contaminated soil.
“I think all the sites will have their challenges,” said Pat McClain, Everett’s governmental affairs director. The bottom line for the state, he said, will be total cost.
The 90 acres of wide, flat riverfront land was home to a log yard and sawmill from 1907 to 1984, but is now almost completely vacant.
In 2005, the city paid Kimberly Clark $10.5 million for 65 acres; it has the option of buying another 25 acres the company still uses to store wood chip piles.
As part of the sale, the city and Kimberly Clark agreed to share the costs of a voluntary cleanup. It will cost an estimated $600,000 to dig up and remove 300 dump trucks of contaminants, and work is planned within the next year, McClain said. Costs would rise if more cleanup is required.
The chemicals on the property include petroleum-based solvents in the groundwater and pentachlorophenol or PCP, a pesticide to deter fungi and termites. The city plans to remove the contaminated soils, including 30 truck loads of heavy oils and 32 dump trucks of PCP.
More challenging would be removal of an estimated 1,100 trucks of lower levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons spread around the site, said Jing Liu of the state Department of Ecology. The city said the areas can be covered with dirt or paved for parking and meet state environmental standards.
The riverside property is a serene location for a campus. “People could envision a very handsome campus,” McClain said. Affordable housing for students is nearby.
The site is east of the Riverside neighborhood, and across the river from the city’s sewage lagoons. The city has spent $40 million controlling odors at the lagoons, capping mechanical treatment structures and diverting more sewage indoors.
A college campus would put more traffic on Everett Avenue, where the city plans to spend $10 million to span the railroad tracks and connect to the riverside property.
More traffic is worrisome, said M.J. Donovan-Creamer, former chairwoman of the neighborhood association.
“There’s pluses and negatives to this whole thing, but more pluses than negatives,” she said. “We need a university here in Everett, period. Riverside is so progressive, we roll with the punches and we usually make it work.”
— Jeff Switzer
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