Auburn is being discovered after 30 years of work.

In the early 1980s, the Chamber of Commerce and a group that led to the development of the Auburn Downtown Association was working on an economic development effort focusing on Auburn’s downtown. That effort was adopted in full by the City of Auburn in 2001 as the citizens’ 2001 Auburn Downtown Plan.

It was a time when many of the larger businesses already had left a generation earlier. Downtown had turned into a series of antique shops with J.C. Penney’s, Rottles, Nelson’s and Cavanaugh Hardware plus a block of taverns making up the rest.

The Cavanaugh family, to their credit, owned a whole block and had been renting it at below market value to small restaurants and non-profits just to keep the area going, and when J.C. Penney’s closed the downtown declined again.

In the midst of that, Mayor Chuck Booth and a new council came into office in the 1990s and a strong push was made to create another downtown economic development effort in the face of the opening of the SuperMall and the almost complete abandonment of downtown stores.

All across the Puget Sound, cities were being stressed by the tax changes and initiatives that were forcing them to act in new and different ways. In Auburn, that 2001 economic development effort by local citizens culminated into the Auburn Downtown Plan that we are using today. It called for transit oriented development (TOD) with retail and residential components, a place to live and to shop, friendly to the people of our region and the families of the future. It’s a place where people can enjoy the convenience of transit, pedestrian and bicycle trails and other developments of a 21st century downtown.

Sound idea

In the cities along the newly formed Sound Transit route, the idea of transit-oriented development came into being and cities began working to bring residential and commercial development back to the city cores to re-energize their downtowns and provide a new source of tax dollars in the face of decreasing revenues.

Kent and Auburn had new stations on the Sound Transit route and both began their efforts at about the same time with Kent gaining one noticeable advantage in 2001 when they purchased 19.9 contiguous acres of property in the downtown core for $14 million.

With that one risky purchase, Kent leaped ahead in their development effort. But the real estate market suffered a downturn and prices dropped. After several years, the Kent City Council brought a vote forward to sell the land to the eventual developer. In fact, the vote to sell the land to a developer was controversial and delayed as many in that community wanted to delay the sale a year or two until the real estate market recovered.

The vote passed after a long and sometimes bitter public discussion. The mayor signed the agreement to sell the land the very next morning and the work began on both the commercial and the residential phases that we all know now as Kent Station.

It is a bit more challenging in Auburn because we are dealing with more than 26 parcels and 14 owners, many of whom were absentee owners. Regardless, we have made strategic purchases in order to position ourselves to look out for the best interests of the city. All of these things take time.

In 2005, just as those development efforts in Auburn got under way, the Cavanaugh family announced that they had met with a private developer and signed a partnership agreement to build a hotel/condominium project, parking garage and a new hardware store on the full block they owned in the heart of downtown. Condo units went on sale and were sold out within one week. Almost immediately Kent was contacted by the same developer to build a similar development.

Controversy developed quickly when one of the non-profit renters on the Cavanaugh block sued to stay through the end of their lease. The developer settled the matter with the family committed to make monthly payments to that non-profit. They are still being required to pay that non-profit even now.

With that legal issue settled all the buildings on that block, including more than eight businesses were torn down to make room for the new hotel. The brand new parking garage and new Cavanaugh’s Hardware was quickly built and then the developer lost his financing. That began the slow decline of the developments in Auburn and Kent.

During that time, Auburn city officials kept working with the owners of the properties downtown. We sold one block located behind city hall by resolution in January 2005 to Auburn Regional Medical Center. The original agreement included a 25,000-square-foot medical building and a 300-stall parking garage of which the city would get half the stalls per the terms of the agreement. The hospital began to move forward on the project.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit and caused the parent company of the hospital to stop all work here in Auburn and reprioritize their projects. By 2008, the hospital had recovered and their project is now underway. The medical building has expanded from the original 25,000 square feet to 40,000.

On the move

The city had long ago moved to buy up property at the corners of Main and Division to enlarge the city plaza and continued the purchase of the old and decaying bars facing Main St. The Auburn Professional Plaza, with over 90,000 square feet of new buildings, including a new KeyBank facility, will soon replace the run down taverns of old.

Portions of two blocks to the south of City Hall had been purchased by the city and a developer, the Stratford Company, and in August, the city signed an agreement transferring its holding on that block directly across Main Street for all of the developers holding on one block further south. That agreement calls for the Stratford Company to begin a new retail and residential development by March 2009.

But in the midst of all of that, the city had not lost is focus from the citizens’ 2001 Auburn Downtown Plan. That plan called for development of the Downtown Urban Center (DUC) that is recognized by the Puget Sound Regional Council, an area roughly from Highway 18 on the south, Third Street Northeast on the north, stopping just before Auburn High School on the east and the UP railroad tracks on the west.

But to develop that would take a much larger vision, and the city put out a development request several years ago for an overall developer that has resulted in a series of agreements with Alpert International. As a result, a brand new urban village called Auburn Junction will be the catalyst for the overall development of the DUC.

Efforts such as this are never easy and rarely move as quickly as some would like, but rest assured those buildings will go up, first on the hospital block, then the Annex, Stratford’s project next year, and then the first new blocks of Auburn Junction in 2010.

With all of the planning that is under way and with input from so many of our citizens and business over the last 20 years, the building has begun and Auburn’s downtown will again be vibrant for the first time since the early ’70s.

Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis can be reached at 253-931-3041 or plewis@auburnwa.gov