SEQUIM — Mayor Ken Hays confidently proclaimed Tuesday that Sequim would continue to grow as a commercial center amid harsh economic times.
“I believe that Sequim is going to lead the economic prosperity of our area,” Hays told about 75 attending a Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce luncheon at SunLand Golf & Country Club community center.
Hays’ comment came as a 27,690-square-foot Ross Dress For Less, which sells fashions for women, men and children at discounts, and the 17,784-square-foot Grocery Outlet store, a Berkeley, Calif.-based “extreme-value retailers” of food, beer, wine, toys and personal care products, are being built on a 7.61-acre site between Costco Wholesale and The Home Depot south of West Washington Street.
Walmart Supercenter expansion and remodeling also is under way at the Sequim store off West Washington Street at Priest Road.
A 35,577-square-foot grocery store is being added to the existing Walmart structure, which opened in 2004, and follows the opening of a Walmart Supercenter east of the Port Angeles city limit.
Also being remodeled is the Columbia Bank’s future home, a 5,000-square-foot building formerly owned by First Federal in Sequim Village Plaza.
Design standards
Hays, an architect for 35 years, also said Sequim should hold commercial developers to higher standards of design.
He showed the chamber audience a photograph of the aesthetically attractive Gig Harbor Costco store that looks nothing like the giant box-like fabrication in Sequim.
City Manager Steve Burkett, who joined Hays at the luncheon presentation, said big-box stores were controversial in other cities such as Port Townsend, but they were a sales tax bonanza for Sequim.
Even with such stores, the city is seeing sales tax down 15 percent during a flagging economy, Burkett said.
City construction permits are down 50 percent, he added, with only 19 residential permits issued in 2010, compared with 400 in 2005.
Without the sales tax, the city would have to consider how to raise up to $50 a month from residents to fund city services, he said.
Burkett said the city has no long-term general fund debt, though it would likely take out a loan to finance a new City Hall to replace the existing cramped West Cedar Street municipal headquarters built in the 1970s.
“That may take a vote of the community to see if they want to take on that kind of debt,” Burkett said.
Hays said the new City Hall would consolidate the city’s scattered departments under one roof.
The council is looking at two sites downtown but is not prepared to release the exact locations because of real estate negotiations.
“This current council is committed to a downtown location,” Hays said, adding that the city is looking at two sites and would have the results of its search within a month.
While the city Police Department shares space with the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office in the Sequim Village Plaza, Public Works and Planning is in an old medical clinic building on North Fifth Avenue.
Hays and Burkett said controversial development impact fees would continue to be charged to avoid charging residents for street, water and sewer improvements.
Hays bristled at the suggestion that he was labeled as “anti-growth,” especially since he makes his living in support of commercial and residential development.
He said he supported city flexibility to encourage developers building on large city acreage.
“One of the problems a city like Sequim has, unlike Port Angeles or Seattle, is we’re not built out,” Hays said.
“This is really the issue for Sequim, and I think it’s a tough one.”
Sequim leaders are working to expand the city’s renewable-energy portfolio, seeing it “as a big economic opportunity” and a “responsible thing to do” in light of rising energy prices, not a burden as it was seen in the past, Hays said.
Downtown has plenty of parking, Hays said. It just needs to be better cued to direct motorists to it.
Adopting a transportation master plan is critical to the city, Hays said.
“Traffic is probably the single most quality and condition that defines a city’s quality of life,” the mayor said.
Hays also called for a more “reliable, predictable and consistent” city permitting program.
Sewage treatment
Burkett and Hays said the city’s sewage treatment plant that produces reusable water primarily for irrigation was key to the future of the city’s water conservation efforts.
Water, Burkett said, is “a valuable, limited resource in our region,” and the city water reclamation facility that received an $11 million expansion last year “lets us reuse the water that we already have” and use less water from the Dungeness River and the aquifer.
“The goal here is to do some planning, to build some pipelines” that would lead to better use of the city’s reclaimed water, Burkett said, which can be used for irrigation and some industrial uses but is not purified as public drinking water.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
