ARLINGTON – NASCAR’s big-league stock car races might roar within a couple of miles of Dennis Stohr’s Marysville neighborhood, but the prospect of noise doesn’t concern him.
“I have two trains going by daily,” he said. “They have to hit the whistle. I love the train sounds.”
Stohr also loves the sound and spectacle of NASCAR.
He joined about 30 people supporting Fans United for NASCAR at a “Back the Track” rally Thursday evening at Shotze’s, a bar and grill just south of the Arlington Airport near where a new racetrack has been proposed.
Marysville is competing with several other sites in Washington and Oregon to attract the International Speedway Corp. of Daytona Beach, Fla., to build a 75,000-seat racetrack.
Stohr, a 61-year-old retired U.S. Postal Service employee, wore a shirt with a vivid collage of stock cars, American flags and checkered flags that reflected the prevailing sentiment in the room.
“I’m a NASCAR fan, big-time,” he said.
Jean Bareiss, 53, of Everett, took exception to people characterizing NASCAR fans as “rednecks and drunks.”
“I might be a redneck, but I’m not a drunk,” she said.
She did not understand why many nearby residents oppose the track.
“I have great respect for the people who want to see this place stay the same way,” Bareiss said. However, “It’s going to be developed one way or the other.”
The rally was organized by Gigi Burke, a local businesswoman who started Fans United for NASCAR. She said response to the track idea from race fans and other residents in the region has encouraged her.
“We wanted to give them the opportunity to pull together, to create some enthusiasm,” she said.
Burke and other organizers of the group have been lobbying hard for the track, visiting city officials throughout the county.
At the next table sat Bill Kazala. He owns land that might end up within the track area. He would love to sell it to International Speedway. But either way, he said, his land is zoned “airport industrial” and he is confident he will sell it eventually.
“I just think there’s more positive sides to the issue than negative,” Kazala said.
He said many of his neighbors disagree. But to him, the area has already lost the quiet, rural atmosphere that originally drew him to raise a family here.
“Them days are gone,” he said.
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