Last year marked the opening of the first building by Mill Creek resident Rolf Trautmann in the long-talked-about Mill Creek Town Center project, the three-story Mill Creek Court office building, but 2004 figures to be the year Town Center truly goes from concept to reality.
The first such sign may come later this month, as Red Jacobsen’s Park Place Center, a mixed-use development with a variety of restaurants and offices, opens after months of delays. Once Park Place Center opens, construction will begin on Creekside Village, another Jacobsen development.
Creekside Village will be near Park Place Center on Main Street and will be a five-building complex with underground and surface parking. The development will also have community amenities like an outdoor creekside stage and grassy amphitheater.
The big sign will come later this year, as construction on the project’s south end proceeds. That development will be anchored by the opening of Central Market, the newest store in a Bainbridge Island-based regional grocery chain.
“You’ll see a lot of construction next year,” Mill Creek city manager Bob Stowe said in November. “We expect the south phase of Town Center to be completed by next winter.”
In the meantime, the city, working in partnership with Town Center developers, hope to lure a mix of national and local retailers to the development.
“The city’s overall goal is to have quality retailers that people will want to shop,” Stowe said.
Mayor Terry Ryan, a member of the city’s Town Center Retail Strategy Committee, said he expects plenty of announcements next year as to “anchor” retailers, larger retailers that serve as a larger draw for shoppers. That’s a role Central Market fills, Ryan said.
“That creates trips, and that’s what you need to bring in tenants,” Ryan said, adding that negotiations with several national retailers are ongoing.
“It’ll really make a difference in our town,” Ryan said about Town Center. “The city will have a central identity, which is something we don’t really have right now.”
Residents, meanwhile, will likely have a direct say in one part of Town Center’s development: Whether or not to put a proposed community center there. The city is still considering putting forth a ballot measure later this year seeking the electorate’s blessing to build a community center within Town Center.
The center may become one of the year’s most controversial issues. Already, the City Council has disagreed on some aspects of the project, such as where to locate it. Some have favored the intial proposal of having it on Main Street, right in the heart of Town Center, while others believed it should be in Town Center, but not on Main Street.
Council member John Hudgins, meanwhile, argued that the center should be located elsewhere in the city.
“We promised the voters a community center a number of years ago, and we’re no closer to it now than we were two years ago, and it’s too expensive,” Hudgins said of the project, which current estimates place at $8 million. “I don’t think we’ve held up our end of the bargain.”
Much will depend on the results of a study being conducted by a consultant, Ballard King, about the community center. Once that report is released, and it is expected to be this month, the city and Council will be able to determine the scope of the project, and perhaps even whether or not to put it to voters this year.
One thing residents can look forward too in 2004 is the completion of the two-year project to widen the Bothell-Everett Highway to five lanes. Work is expected to be completed on that project in September.
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