Arnie and Pauline Hall tucked into a late lunch Wednesday at the Sunbreak Cafe, a downtown restaurant they have frequented for 11 years.

“It’s one of the nicest places in the city,” Arnie Hall said between bites of sandwich. “When we have company come from out of town, this is one of the places we take them.”

Puyallup’s Bonnie Wegner and her pals, Rhonda Miller of Bonney Lake and M.J. Garlick of Puyallup, like to ride up on their bicycles, have a bite, then hit the Interurban Trail.

“It’s a place that we can come year after year and thoroughly enjoy. It’s a place where you come and you know the people of this community. Those kinds of public gathering places are hard to find,” Wegner said.

But these are worrisome times for the restaurant’s patrons.

On Monday, City Council members approved a purchase and sales agreement that calls for the city to transfer the publicly-owned parking lots east and north of the Sunbreak Cafe to the Stratford Company, a development firm. In exchange, Stratford would get the north half of the Crites-Huff block south of the Sunbreak block. The agreement calls for the city to pay Stratford $507,595, the net difference between the purchase price of the parcels.

If Stratford accepts the agreement, its effect would be to consolidate the city’s parcels and Stratford’s parcels on their respective blocks, allowing the city to amass property that would one day become part of the four-block Auburn Junction project proposed by Alpert International.

The agreement also would allow Stratford to proceed with its own development plans, which call for an apartment building where the big parking lot that serves the Sunbreak Cafe is today. Stratford also owns the Outlet and Charlie Wong buildings on the north half of the Sunbreak block and has an option to buy the Marvel Grocery building. It will develop that half of the block into a retail-condominium mix.

But Alverson said that as the parking goes, so goes his restaurant. He said he is willing to sell to Stratford, but they only want his land, and he would be forced to eat the cost of his building and the improvements he has made. He said he simply cannot afford the anticipated $800,000 loss.

“I’ll be driven out of business,” Alverson said.

Alverson said the downtown needs to have open space, trees and public parking.

“You replace the beautiful parking lot that we have with a multi-story, cheap apartment building that destroys the heart and soul of downtown Auburn. It breaks my heart. More than 1,000 people have signed a petition that says it breaks their hearts, too,” Alverson said.

Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis said that if Alverson chooses to remain where he is and not sell to Stratford, the city has assured him 13 parking spaces on the Crites-Huff block immediately south of the restaurant. Alverson insists that is not the case.

“They’re going to turn the whole (Crites-Huff) block over to Alpert. There’s no parking for me,” Alverson said.

The Stratford Company did not return calls for this article.

But Lewis said that Stratford will want to move swiftly to accept the purchase and sale agreement so it can begin submitting development plans to the city and obtain permits in time to begin construction before the end of the year.

Councilwoman Sue Singer said that should Stratford accept, another significant downtown development project will get started this year, along with Auburn Regional Medical Center’s Cancer Care Center and garage and the annex building east of City Hall, tentatively set to begin within weeks of the ARMC project.

The city also owns the Gambini block on South Division, the current home of the Auburn-Area Chamber of Commerce.

“We are going to see a lot going on in downtown Auburn, and we hope to see more,” Singer said. “With the exchange of the properties, we have put together large pieces, more attractive piece of property for the future, which is what we have been trying to do for years. Other cities have had large parcels handed to them, for example Kent and Renton. We have had to work really hard to cobble together pieces of property to bring development to downtown Auburn.”

Council member Gene Cerino said that if the city fails to modernize the downtown, residents will not use it.

“The only way that we can bring the citizens that we have brought in by annexation into the city of Auburn to actually use it is to create the structures down here for them to come. There’s got to be the restaurants, there’s got to be the entertainment facilities, there’s got to be the shops, and they are just not going to be there unless we act,” Cerino said.

Councilmember Virginia Haugen, a frequent critic of the city’s development plans, cast the lone no vote.

“I’ll be voting no on this because I spent about six months I suppose, probably more, reviewing and studying urban renewal projects and the pros and cons and why some of them fail,” Haugen told fellow council members. “I think we’re in over our heads. I thank members of Council for your hard work. It’s been a been a long road. Good luck.”

Back at the Sunbreak there is concern.

“What the city sees is canyon walls. They want to replace the open space, public parking and the trees with canyon walls. It’s not a place to live or do business. If the Sunbreak Cafe cannot survive in downtown Auburn, nobody can survive,” Alverson said.

“We need the green,” Wegner said. “Without it, we may as well find a patch of earth to crawl in. The simplest thing in the world is to take a big chainsaw and chop down trees that have been growing 50 to 100 years.”

“The bottom line is this is an icon in this town,” said Auburn attorney Carlos Sosa during a lunch-break at the restaurant. “It’s been the best-known breakfast place for years. My wife and I came here when we first started dating. It’s a great establishment, a local business. It’s exactly what a city should be promoting. Instead, they are trying to do everything they can to make it difficult for him to do business. And in the name of what?”

Lewis had an answer.

“There has been a strong call the last few years to get projects started in the downtown,” Lewis said. “This allows additional projects to start on Main Street this year. That will benefit people with shops, restaurants, businesses and residential units that they have talked loudly about for the last 15 years or more.”