Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 4, April 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Getting ready for Costco

By JAMES BUSH

How do you mitigate the traffic impacts from a 144,000- square-foot Costco Wholesale store with parking for 760 vehicles?

Close the street.

The City of Seattle is studying the effects of blocking off portions of N. 125th Street and N. 128th Street in its environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed retail warehouse at 12220 Aurora Avenue N.

Residents of the Haller Lake neighborhood immediately east of the proposed store say cut-through traffic from those two streets is already a major problem and the thousands of daily car trips to and from the store would make things worse.

Most neighbors testifying at the Feb. 26 scoping meeting for the Costco project EIS supported the closure plan. "I think the blocking off of 125th and 128th is the only thing that's going to salvage this neighborhood," said Haller Lake Community Club member Chuck Cady.

Just two blocks east of the proposed Costco is the intersection of N. 125th Street and Densmore Avenue N., a spot neighbor Sandy Schneider described as "the intersection from Hell."

Here, short-cutting motorists from Aurora meet traffic headed down Densmore. Although the street is developed only to residential standards, it serves as an arterial because Haller Lake itself blocks the path of Meridian Avenue N.

"It's an unusual situation," said Scott Kemp, a land use planner for the City's Department of Planning and Development. "As you drive through Haller Lake, you see streets that weren't made for the amount of traffic they're handling."

Blocking off N. 125th and N. 128th streets would force motorists to either use N. 130th Street or N. 115th Street for east-west passage through the neighborhood.

Concrete barricades may not sound appealing to some, but they're preferable to empty promises, said Haller Lake resident Timothy Ehling, who lives along Densmore Avenue.

Both the City (which owns a maintenance facility at N. 125th Street and Stone Avenue N.) and Lincoln Towing (which owns much of the future Costco site) have pledged to fight short-cutting through the neighborhood in the past without accomplishing much, Ehling said.

Lee Ann Cochran, first vice president for Cochran Electric at 12500 Aurora Ave. N., said she doesn't oppose the street closure proposal, as it wouldn't restrict access to her Stone Avenue loading entrance.

Cochran said she is sympathetic to the neighbors: "I wouldn't want all that Costco traffic going through my neighborhood either."

But the support for the closures isn't unanimous.

Dick Raymaker, a resident of the Halcyon mobile home park (one of two mobile home parks just east of the Costco site) testified at the EIS hearing that east-west traffic is already constricted enough due to obstacles including the lake, Northwest Hospital, and the Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery. "I can't understand how anybody could even suggest that they close off any of these streets," he said.

Donna Dobesh, another Halcyon resident, said the park is considering creating another entrance to allow access to the Haller Lake neighborhood if the streets are closed. She said she's unsure if the street closures would help or hurt the neighborhood's worsening traffic situation. "It's going to be a mess no matter how you look at it," she said.

Barbara Eells is no stranger to the impacts that occur when big-box retailers target a neighborhood. A former resident of the Trailer Haven mobile home park, which was displaced by the Office Depot store at N. 130th Street and Aurora Avenue N., she next moved to the nearby National mobile home park which was displaced by the Eagle Hardware project (now Lowe's) at N. 125th Street and Aurora.

Currently, Eells lives in the Bella B mobile home park just across Stone Avenue N. from the proposed Costco. "It's not that we're 'not in my back yard,' it's that this neighborhood has absorbed a lot of development already," she said.

Both Eells and Rick Barrett, a fellow member of the Haller Lake Community Club's Costco project committee, back the street closures.

Although the City will probably consider alternatives beyond simply closing the streets, such as creating one-way streets, Barrett said it's not enough. "A one-way street might solve half the problem," he said. "A full closure is certainly preferable."

Kemp said that the traffic studies (which he called "the real guts" of the EIS) should be available for public review within a month or so. In addition to the two proposed street closures, they will also address the possible extension of Stone Avenue N. south to N. 115th Street and the proposed installation of a mid-block traffic signal on Aurora at the main entrance to Costco.

Although extending Stone Avenue could dramatically improve traffic flow in the neighborhood (and mitigate the negative effects of the two street closures), it's too expensive a project to add to Costco's mitigation bill, said Kemp.

Some neighbors also want the city to ban the warehouse retailer from creating a garage access on Stone Way, which they fear would further encourage short-cutting. "I guarantee you that everyone who comes in the front door is going to go out by this door," said Cady. "That door should not be there, period."