Published December 2004

NASCAR: It’s wrong
project for county

Imagine for a moment an enticing scenario: the excitement of a major, national entertainment business announcing it wants to build a large, multimillion-dollar facility in your community. Its presence would bring tens of thousands of visitors and millions of dollars in revenue each year, not to mention nationally televised coverage of its events and publicity for the area.

Pretty attractive offer. Hard to resist. A great economic development opportunity.

It’s understandable anyone would want to take a second — and even a third — look at such an offer, always bearing in mind that often-proven adage, “If it looks and sounds too good to be true, it usually is.”

Now that local government officials, residents and others have had several months to evaluate that attractive offer from the International Speedway Corp., owner and scheduler of the nationally popular NASCAR races, it’s apparent this is one of those offers that should be suspect.

On closer inspection, the ISC’s proposal for building a $250 million, 75,000-seat racetrack on an 850-acre site north of Marysville has crippling flaws that are likely to become fatal flaws. The anticipated success of the proposal is based on far too many intangible assumptions. Its public-private financing plan places an undue burden on the residents of Snohomish County.

Consider, for instance, if some other private corporation was intent on developing the same site for some other purpose than the racetrack. Suppose it was proposing office parks, shopping centers or subdivisions already allowed by current zoning.

Presented much more quietly, no doubt, than the ISC’s highly publicized site competition between several Northwest locations in two states, the proposal of this less-visible companywould begin working its way through planning and permitting channels. In the course of moving the development along, the corporation would need to launch environmental studies for the site, turn in building permit designs for approval and discuss its plans to finance the project.

Being a major project, it would be discussed and dissected in public hearings. There would be negotiations over wetlands mitigation. And, the developer’s costs for street and infrastructure improvements on and around the site would be negotiated. (A balking developer might be reminded that even the Boeing Co. paid tens of millions of dollars to help build SR 526 to ease the strain on local road networks from the tens of thousands of workers heading to its 747 assembly plant when it was built in the mid-1960s.)

In contrast, the ISC has taken none of those normal project processing steps required of new developments. Instead, the ISC plan was unveiled at several public meetings with local government officials and supporters presenting the project proposal rather than representatives of the ISC. The “dangling carrot” strategy has worked well. Various communities submitted their own plans for what seemed like a great economic development opportunity. The “winner” chosen by the ISC was Marysville.

Now the “winners” are carrying the torch for the developer. As they unveiled the proposed plan, however, more and more troubling details became evident, including:

• It would attract tens of thousands of people to the area, but only two or three times a year.
• Permanent employment would total about 50 people.
• It would tie up 850 acres that would normally become home to hundreds of residents who would support local grocery stores, home improvement businesses and auto dealers.
• It would preclude using the large site for a four-year university campus being discussed by the county.
• It would greatly reduce the amount of available land for office and industrial parks that could employ hundreds of skilled workers who would contribute year around to the local economy.
• In an area that appears to be primarily rural open space, an independent research study by The Herald determined there are 6,000 homes and 17,000 residents within close proximity to the site.
• Located just south of the airport’s runway and flight patterns, the racetrack is almost totally within the nearby Arlington Airport’s air traffic safety zone, in violation of state and federal restrictions.
• The proposed site is above an aquifer, has a high water table and includes wetlands protected by law.
• On the few weekends when the facility would be open, it would create massive traffic gridlock as 30,000 to 40,000 vehicles arrived and departed.
• To even handle that “peak” traffic for the facility a few times a year, some $85 million in federal, state and local funds would have to be found to upgrade the road network in the vicinity — but the corporation has not offered to pay for any of those costs.
• That expense would be in addition to financing the construction of the $250 million facility with a portion of sales tax revenues to pay off public bonds — because the ISC has only offered to contribute $50 million, asking the public through the state Legislature to finance the remaining $200 million, a financing proposal that raises legal questions.

There are also many other issues: no promises of a regular NEXTEL race that would help assure the financial success of the track, noise from the races, the impact on home values and whether businesses really would be attracted to space around the site.

The chance of a private corporation approaching Snohomish County and the state of Washington and successfully selling that kind of proposal would be — or should be — zero. Yet that is the approach the ISC is using to market its racetrack proposal.

The ISC’s NASCAR track proposed for the site north of Marysville does not deserve community support, state support or this journal’s support.

It is clearly the wrong project, on the wrong site, with the wrong financing plan.

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