Yard Work The City’s Plans To Expand Activities At Its North Foothills Drive Maintenance Yard Has Neighbors Crying Foul

A flume of dust kicks up from a city garbage truck as it rumbles off North Foothills Drive into the city maintenance yard.

Most days, drivers stop and wash the trucks with a brush and pressurized wand. The soiled waste soaks into the ground.

Plastic trash bins and metal Dumpsters are piled eight-feet high in one corner of the yard and long metal piping for the city’s water system stretches across an overgrown field.

Here is the gritty business of city government: garbage, water, sewer, snow plowing, road repair, recycling.

And as those services expand, so too has the number of trucks and workers at the yard, a 30-acre compound that reaches from Marietta to North Foothills and Hamilton east to Perry in the Logan neighborhood.

Neighbors living around the property and others say enough is enough. They say the city complex has a poor record as a neighbor and new efforts to increase the number of city employees by 53 percent to 570 workers should be curbed.

A proposed redevelopment plan would relocate two more city departments - fleet services and transportation, which means more than 200 additional vehicles.

“This is not a neighborhood problem, this is a city problem,” said Jock Swanstrom, an Indian Trail resident who attended a workshop on the redevelopment at Logan Elementary School. “If we have the money I am not opposed to the project. But I am opposed to having it there.”

City officials maintain there are no good fits for the facility. The advantage of the current site are plain: it is already there, and the government owns the property as well as some adjacent homes used as rentals.

Finding another vacant parcel large enough to accommodate the needs would prove difficult, said John Manning, an architect with ALSC, the firm hired to plan the yard’s development.

“Cities across the United States are facing this,” said Dick Raymond, city public works director. “No matter where you put these things, finding a location is difficult.”

Since 1940, the city has used some of this neighborhood as a base for operations. Their role greatly expanded in 1985 when the solid waste department moved to the site. With the ever-expanding role of city government into recycling, battery retrieval, composting and commercial-waste collection, the number of trucks and employees has also grown.

One shed on the yard is strictly devoted to picking batteries out of recyclables and packaging them in 55-gallon drums for transit. Sixty of the drums were capped and ready for shipment on a recent visit.

Refuse drivers are regularly on the property with commercial crews leaving at 11 p.m. and residential trucks hitting the street at 7 a.m. There are showers and lockers for the 120 drivers as well.

The refuse trucks are washed almost daily, but there really is no place to do that. The new plan calls for specialized wash bays that would retain the wastewater, recycling some and discharging the rest into the sewer.

“The cleaner you keep the trucks the longer they’ll last,” said Roger Flint, director of city transfer stations.

Also parked on the yard are seven semi-trucks that carry loads from the Colbert and Spokane Valley transfer stations to the incinerator, as well as 22 curbside recycling trucks.

Old city cars are in one corner awaiting public auction.

Flint said neighborhood flyers opposing the redevelopment make it sound like the city is moving into an empty lot.

“Garbage trucks have been parked here for 35 years,” said Flint.

Residents say that is part of the problem.

Dick Rubins, owner of Metallic Arts, 1027 E. Marietta, said the yard is a magnet for skunks and rats and he can smell the odors from the city trucks in his business.

City officials concede they’ve been bad neighbors and say the new project will improve the area.

In some ways, the city has no choice. The gasoline pumping station on the property will be in violation of federal rules by 1998. The gravel parking lot would not be allowed in a development today and the method of treating wastewater, which soaks into the gravel and can eventually reach the aquifer, would not pass muster of the city’s own planners or the state Department of Ecology.

The redevelopment calls for spending $1 million on concrete paving. New double-walled fuel storage tanks with underground monitoring would be installed along with a new fuel tank and service bay that could pump compressed natural gas for a future fleet of city vehicles that would run more efficiently with less carbon emissions.

Most of the debris and barrels now stored outside would be moved to inside buildings or placed on concrete pads to reduce hazards to the aquifer.

Finally, the trucks and parking areas for employees would be moved back off of Marietta and toward Foothills Drive, a move that would actually reduce the impact on adjacent property, according to Manning.

Still, part of the opposition to the city is intangible and stems from the feeling that the Logan neighborhood is already choking on cars, trucks and congestion from development reaching to the Northpointe shopping center and beyond.

Dick Will, an architect who represents the Logan Business Association, points out the city will be reviewing master plans for five institutions all within Logan borders. There are problems with traffic congestion on Hamilton from new apartments north of Francis Avenue, the Division-Ruby couplet has brought noise from commercial car dealerships and businesses.

The home of Gonzaga University and now the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute, Logan ought to be nurtured, not overwhelmed, said Will.

“Here is the academic center of the city and they’re centralizing a garbage operation here,” he said.

Residents are asking that alternative sites be studied and that the city study satellite garages, even parking the refuse trucks at the trash incinerator outside city limits.

All those options will be explored before the city moves forward with the project, though scattering trucks would increase security costs to all taxpayers. Another neighborhood meeting will likely be held in the fall and then the plan would head for review by the city planning commission.

Other neighborhoods are paying close attention.

“Please don’t push this project into Hillyard,” said Mary Gaddy a Hillyard resident who attended one meeting on the project. “We have enough problems.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo