3/27/08 CORRECTION:

In the March 13 issue of North County Outlook, Becky Foster was mistakenly identified as one of the owners of property under consideration for the UW north end campus. Foster does not own any of the property included in the site recommendation document. We apologize for any confusion the error may have caused.

3/13/08

North county leaders ask for new look at UW report

by Beckye Randall

The current session of the Legislature didn’t come to any decisions regarding the proposed University of Washington Snohomish County campus, but local proponents of the Marysville/Smokey Point site are hardly giving up.

“This non-action is actually a good thing,” said Becky Foster, one of the property owners whose land is under consideration. “The Legislature didn’t swallow the NBBJ report. The delay gives us time to correct the report’s errors and ask for a re-evaluation of the top sites’ merits.”

That report, completed at a cost to taxpayers of $1 million, listed the Everett Pacific Station site as the top choice for the branch campus, followed by the Marysville/Smokey Point acreage. The two other final contenders, the Riverside property in Everett and acreage in Lake Stevens’ Cavalero Hill area, have since been determined to be unsuitable for various reasons.

Backers of the north county site point to the study team’s own criteria for choosing a location. The Initial Threshold Criteria document sets a minimum requirement of “25 acres of developable, contiguous land” for consideration. In a matrix that assigned point values to each area of importance, the 25-acre requirement accounted for 30 percent of the property’s score.

When the Pacific Station property was submitted for consideration, it was listed at 26.4 acres. However, it soon became clear that a portion of the land included in that acreage did not belong to the City of Everett. Taking away the parcels owned by Puget Sound Transit, just over 4 acres right in the center of the city’s property, leaves just over 20 acres.

The 360-acre Marysville/Smokey Point site was originally submitted as three separate proposals. In the Additive Threshold Criteria document, in which the top eleven sites were scored, those three properties each scored 47.5 out of a possible 50 points. The Everett Pacific Station site scored 44 points.

The study team recommended the three Marysville sites be considered together due to each property’s individual benefits and their identical scores.

Quoting the scoring document, “the requirement for contiguous property excluded piecemeal offerings of multiple parcels that did not share property boundaries due to ‘missing’ parcels or street rights-of-way.” Looking at the Pacific Station property diagram, the property appears to be broken up by existing streets.

The Marysville acreage, although owned by a number of different sellers, is contiguous.

Foster cites a number of other factors that she claims make the Everett location less desirable. “It’s walking distance from the jail,” she said. “When inmates are released, it’s at midnight. Where are they going to go? The train station.”

According to crime statistics, Foster claims 2,000 incidents involving the police were reported on Smith Street, in the vicinity of the train station, from January 2007 to January 2008.

Other considerations include noise and environmental concerns. “Have you ever smelled a freight train?” asked Foster. “Twenty-seven freight trains come and go from the station every day, and the smell from their exhaust is noxious. Right now, the Everett Transit Station has to be evacuated when a freight train idles in the yard for too long.”

The bottom line, Foster contends, is that NBBJ didn’t do their job. “They used a report about the Marysville properties from 16 years ago, when studies were being done for Naval Station Everett.”

City and county leaders also maintain the information in the team’s final recommendation was outdated and inaccurate, and that the scoring was flawed.

In a February letter signed by mayors of Stanwood, Oak Harbor, Marysville, Arlington, Burlington, Sedro-Woolley and Mount Vernon, along with signatures from County Councilman John Koster and commissioners from Snohomish County and Island County, the governor and legislature were asked to restore the “integrity and focus” of the selection process by appointing a blue ribbon panel to rescore the properties. The panel should be “comprised of legislators with statewide representation,” according to the letter.

Proponents of the Marysville site have mounted an organized, determined front that continues to push for a university location they maintain will better serve students from Snohomish, Island and Skagit counties. 

“We’re a wolverine bunch,” said Foster. “Everett did not count on this.”