By Helen Wheatley

Free Press contributor

In all the talk about downtown development money vs. neighborhoods, one of the most important planning issues facing the city has been completely overlooked. What is Seattle doing with its industrial land?

The city council may soon have an opportunity to weigh in on that question. Some time in November, the city will release an Environmental Impact Statement concerning BINMIC, the Ballard Interbay Northend Manufacturing and Industrial Center. One of two industrial zones in the city, BINMIC stretches from Alaska Way to the Hiram Chittenden Locks, roughly following the path of the Burlington Northern railway, hugging both sides of the ship canal.

Ringed by neighborhoods in Queen Anne, Magnolia and Ballard, the fate of BINMIC has important implications for transportation, employment, environmental quality and low income communities in the city. Despite its importance, the planning process concerning BINMIC has gone ahead almost unnoticed.

The first skirmish over BINMIC planning has already occurred. For well over a year, bicycle activists, neighborhood advocates and industry have tussled over the extension of the Burke Gilman Trail along an unused rail corridor to the Locks and Shilshole Marina.

Drawing attention to the issue in Seattle Times editorial last June, David Ortman and bicycling activist Eric Smith argued that "past trail commitments by the City of Seattle are being undermined by a small handful of powerful Ballard industrial land owners." Industries along the rail line such as Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel prevailed in their staunch opposition to the bikers, who will have to make do with a lane on Leary Way.

While Councilmember Richard McIver made much of this "compromise," industry had won the important battle before the debate even started. Seattle's Growth Management Plan advises that industries be given first consideration in such matters, and that's exactly what they got. Perhaps with its new membership, the city council may begin to rethink its approach to balancing industrial and resident needs along the BINMIC corridor.

Industrial Giving
There are many good reasons why the city should support industry in BINMIC. City government likes the tax base. From an environmental standpoint, the alternative to encouraging industry in the city is to allow it to grow on the periphery, where growth is already eating into what little green space is left. Urban industry provides jobs and discourages suburban sprawl.

Besides, land in BINMIC (much of which is fill) is already polluted: about 27 percent of the land sites in the zone have leaking underground storage tanks or either confirmed or suspected contamination sites. New or expanding industries that want to use the land are more likely to help pay for cleanup than anybody else.

Yet there are also reasons for serious concern. Pollution and hazardous waste production do occur in BINMIC. A recent study by the Department of Ecology found significant contamination in the sediments of Salmon Bay. One of the benefits of the BINMIC planning process has been that information about pollution and ground water flow is being systematically compiled for the first time as part of the Environmental Impact assessment. On the other hand, the plan is likely to recommend rezoning and easing environmental standards in order to attract development.

For many traffic-choked Seattleites, transportation issues are more pressing than pollution. Industries in BINMIC argue that they need greater access to transportation. The city is happy to accomodate big developments like the Immunex biotech complex in the southern end of the industrial zone. Immunex will build an access road with the aid of the city and the Port of Seattle, despite neighborhood concerns about increased traffic congestion.

How far is the city willing to go to make BINMIC industry-friendly? The Burke-Gilman controversy may be only the tip of the iceberg. If some BINMIC advocates had their way, streets in the neighborhoods around the industrial zone would be modified to turn them into convenient corridors for trucks aiming for the freeways. Trains would start running down the disused tracks on the North side of the ship canal. Efforts to encourage alternative transport around the city, such as running light rail, would likely suffer the same fate as the bike trail in the face of industry objections. It will be very difficult to reconcile a transportation plan for industry with a transportation plan for the residents of the city.

The main concern of the BINMIC planners right now is to come up with an economic strategy for the industrial zone. For them, the key question is how to balance three different forms of development: high tech, maritime, and light industry. The requirements of one form of industry might conflict with the requirements of another.

Therefore, in theory at least, the city needs to decide on priorities among these three. Its chief mandate is to come up with a way to create 3800 new industrial and manufacturing jobs within BINMIC over the next two decades, while retaining the businesses that are already there.

BINMIC planners, who are almost all industry representatives, need only concern themselves with what can happen within the boundaries of their zone. Not surprisingly, they have framed city-wide issues in terms of benefits to industry. If the city council is not vigilant, the BINMIC plan unveiled in November is likely to be presented as a kind of fait accompli. In the politics of zoning, for instance, there is little indication that anyone but industry has given serious attention to how the boundaries of BINMIC are drawn.

How do the planners think about the concerns of residents surrounding and even within the industrial zone? How can the city be sure that reserving the area for industry is the best choice, given the pressures for residential and retail space? According to Jill Novik of the Neighborhood Planning Office, these kinds of questions are not really within the scope of BINMIC. Residents in and around BINMIC have been excluded from the status of "stakeholders" in the planning process.

However the "stakeholders" may want to define political control over the industrial zone, it is important to look at BINMIC within a larger urban framework. There are environmental justice issues lurking on the fringe of the industrial zone.

Industrial Living
The people who live around BINMIC mostly seem to accept the aesthetic price of living next to industry, including a shameful lack of park space and sharply limited access to the waterfront. The risk of pollution seems to be a given, considering how little attention has been paid to surveying or monitoring what goes on in BINMIC or in the water around it.

And when it comes to repelling the invasion of Big Box Retail, such as the proposed waterfront Fred Meyer store in Ballard, some residents concerned about traffic and preserving small retail stores are glad to team up with the "stakeholder" group Save Our Industrial Lands despite the convenience Freddies might provide to carless residents in Fremont and lower Ballard.

Many who live around BINMIC would probably say that they don't want to live in a place that looks like the suburbs. Some may even be attracted to the industrial aesthetic, not to mention the jobs to be found in the area. But the fact is, most people live next to BINMIC and its surrounding commercial/retail zones for one big reason: it's cheap.

Industry wants to keep out retail because it drives up the price of land. Seattle is committed to helping to keep those land rents down. That's one reason why the focus in BINMIC is exclusively on industry.

It should be obvious that in a city of skyrocketing house prices, the fringe of a low-rent industrial zone is going to be a magnet for low-rent housing. Yet the sort of people who live in an apartment building overlooking the Burlington Northern rail yard tend not to grab the attention of City Hall the way that well-heeled folk in Sand Point can.

The proposed BINMIC plan unveiled in November will be of an order of magnitude that far exceeds the question of creating a homeless shelter in a particular neighborhood. Perhaps providing a taste of struggles to come, Queen Anne residents squawked out of fear that the $450 million Immunex development might add congestion and threaten their views of Elliott Bay. After a sustained effort to block the project, the mobilized residents wrung the promise of an acre of parkland out of the biotech giant.

It is hard to imagine that lower-income, less politically-connected residents at the north end of BINMIC will be able to protect their interests even to that degree. Can the city council be expected to grapple with the fact that low income housing will continue to sprout along the fringes of BINMIC? Will it take measures to assure some environmental quality for the folks piling up in the urban firewall of apartments and condos stacked between factories and single family houses?

For whatever it's worth, the public will have an opportunity to comment on these issues when the BINMIC Planning Committee releases its Environmental Impact Statement in November. There is a draft EIS, issued last June, which is already available to the public. As with any EIS, there will be an appeal period, but that's a game already stacked in favor of the "stakeholders."

Read the EIS and take your concerns straight to the Mayor and the City Council. If this is supposed to be the beginning of a new era down at City Hall, there's no better place to start.

Historian Helen Wheatley is living the good life in Ballard.

The site is located in a swampy area between Ebey and Steamboat sloughs. As much as four million tons of commercial waste was dumped at the site between 1964 and 1979. Dumping, which was legal at that time, caused chemicals and heavy metals to seep from the site into Puget Sound and surrounding wetlands. The landfill was designated a Superfund site in 1995. (Seattle Times 9/9/97)

Call for Submissions Enviroblurbs encourages submissions from readers for this column. Send any interesting items and their source to 1463 E. Republican St. #178 Seattle WA 98112 or e-mail denburg@u.washington.edu

---

[Home] [This Issue's Directory] [WFP Index] [WFP Back Issues] [E-Mail WFP]

---

Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.