November 14, 2004 in City

Track backers, residents collide

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Richard Roesler/ photo

Much of the proposed NASCAR racetrack site is pasture, strawberry fields and open space. It would be by far the biggest racetrack in a six-state region.
(Full-size photo)

MARYSVILLE, Wash. – For Bill and Lynda Craft, five acres of pasture and home are like a living album of family memories.

The couple bought the land 24 years ago, fleeing shoulder-to-shoulder life in a cramped suburban cul-de-sac north of Seattle.

They saved up, built a house, moved and were soon surrounded by rural clutter – dogs, old pickups, tools in the yard. Most of their five kids grew up there, raising pigs, chickens and goats near the century-old dairy barn. Each fall, they’d watch the snow advance down the slopes of the nearby Cascade foothills. On summer evenings, the setting sun would cast a golden glow over the surrounding pastures and strawberry fields.

“It’s just part of us,” said Lynda Craft.

So they were more than a little surprised last April when they discovered that city and county officials were offering up their property – as well as 845 nearby acres – to a Florida corporation that wants to build the Northwest’s first NASCAR track.

“We found out our land was going to be parking,” said Lynda Craft.

NASCAR’s search for a Northwest home has become a big fight. Neighbors like the Crafts fear the noise and traffic and crowds. Local boosters argue that a $300 million track would be a badly needed cash magnet – and would leave hundreds of acres of green open space.

The company eyeing Marysville is Florida’s International Speedway Corp., a corporate descendant of the company that built the Daytona International Speedway in the late 1950s. The company owns 12 major tracks around the country, with storied names familiar to any racing fan: Florida’s Talladega Superspeedway, for example, and New York’s Watkins Glen International.

About a year ago, the company quietly made it known that it wants to build a track in the Northwest. According to a Snohomish County task force assembled to study the proposal, the speedway company wanted a site no more than 45 minutes from Seattle, and as close as possible to Interstate 5, the main north-south freeway through the Puget Sound region. (The company did not respond to requests for an interview.) Marysville is about 35 miles north of Seattle.

The new speedway would be the only major regional racetrack across a six-state area: Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. NASCAR fans, a local economic study predicts, would eagerly drive in from Spokane, Montana, North Idaho and Canada.

“You can’t capture the scale on television,” said NASCAR devotee John Karnoski, a diabetes researcher from Edmonds. “In person, you can really appreciate how fast they’re going.”

Seeing the dollar potential – ISC’s revenues last year were a record $575 million – community boosters in Snohomish, Kitsap and Thurston counties rushed to pitch their own sites. But two months ago, the speedway company tapped Marysville as the preferred site for the 75,000-seat, ¾-mile long high-banked track. City and county officials are offering up 850 acres, including Bill and Lynda Crafts’ land.

“As time went on,” local officials wrote in a letter to the company last April, “your vision for this project became our vision.”

Track or no, it’s clear that the land won’t hold onto its pastoral flavor for much longer. There are still cornfields and a livestock auction and a few old farmhouses surrounded by rusting field equipment. But strip-mall growth is fast encroaching: Nearby are newly built banks, gas stations, fast food eateries and a Safeway. There’s a Schuck’s auto parts store, a steakhouse, a Rite Aid and a sprawling auto mall boasting a giant inflatable turkey.

“You’re not going to stop it. It’s coming. It’s growth,” said Kim Gudgel, a Marysville community college teacher and NASCAR fan.

Without the track, he and other proponents say, that growth will be things like a big-box Costco store and densely packed housing subdivisions. The speedway, they argue, is the area’s best bet to control that growth, and preserve wide expanses of open space. The oval track would only take up about 200 acres on the site; most of the rest would be parking on grass.

With the ISC planning only three major race weekends a year, Marysville chief administrative officer Mary Swenson said, all that turf would be ideal for ballfields, trails and picnic areas.

“This is a chance to master-plan the site and enhance the creeks, which are now largely ditches,” she said.

And then there’s the cash. A local economic study concluded that the track would spawn up to 1,846 jobs, with up to $121 million in new spending statewide.

Darrell Chapman, president of the Snohomish County Labor Council, says track building – a two-year project – would create 3,000 construction jobs at union-level prevailing wages, with health care and pension benefits. All 63 AFL-CIO unions in Snohomish County have endorsed the project.

“People are desperate,” Chapman said. “We need to put these people to work.”

Some state lawmakers are skeptical, particularly since they know they may soon be asked to approve tax-paid bonds to help pay for the track. At a recent hearing, Rep. Velma Veloria, D-Seattle, asked how many of the track jobs would be full-time, year-round work.

About 50, Swenson responded.

Veloria was stunned.

“For the year?” she stammered. “Just 50?”

Proponents, however, argue that the track would add diversity to a county economy that relies heavily on Boeing. Dollars would also ripple throughout the state. Fans would need hotel rooms, gas and rental cars. They would likely visit the state’s other attractions en route.

“We all said this is the chance of a lifetime to attract a major motorsports facility to our state,” said Deborah Knutson, president of the county economic development corporation.

“It’s like having a Super Bowl every year,” said Gudgel, who wore his Dodge Motorsports jacket against the chill outside a recent night hearing at the Marysville high school.

The sign resting against his shoulder read “Back the track.”

Fifty yards away in the darkness was an old man with a different sign. “New location? Try Eastern Washington!” it read.

Fred Shelton is 83, and has lived for a decade in a mobile home park that sits on a corner of the proposed site.

The engine noise would be terrible, Shelton said, and traffic on nearby I-5 is already a nightmare.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said. A child stood next to him, holding a sign reading, “Save my grandpa’s house.”

A heavyset NASCAR fan brushed past.

“You people are gonna lose, you know,” he told the small group of anti-track picketers.

“The hell we are,” Shelton shouted after him.

Local homeowners are scared that their summers will be filled with the muted roar of stock car engines and the smell of burnt rubber.

“On race weekends, traffic will make us prisoners in our own community,” said Jack Shouman, a nearby homeowner. He and other foes worry that the facility, like other NASCAR tracks, will be used for much more than three races a year. They predict it will be used for driving schools, filming commercials, “ride alongs” for racing journalists and other large events.

One of the newest clusters of homes is “the Berry Farm,” named after the strawberry fields that once grew where the subdivision’s asphalt, concrete and sod sit today. It’s a dense island of suburbia, filled with tiny yards, new SUVs, scraggly young trees, and kids on bicycles.

One of those homes belongs to Cindy Church, a 51-year-old phone company worker. She went to small-town car races as a youngster, she said.

“But going to a track is a great deal different from living right next to a track,” she said.

“You can’t leave,” said her mother and housemate, 76-year-old Hazel Church.

They worry that a track would destroy the value of their home, bought in June. The oval track, residents figure, would be about 900 yards away.

“As far as we knew, it was just going to be strawberry fields across the street,” said a neighbor, 74-year-old Donald Riley.

A key unanswered question about the project is how it will be paid for. According to Knutson, International Speedway Corp. subsidiary Great Western Sports has proposed paying $50 million toward the $300 million racetrack. To come up with the remaining $250 million, track proponents have floated the idea of issuing local government bonds, and using property taxes and fan user fees to pay off those bonds.

The state would also be asked to pay for millions of dollars in transportation work to get those fans to and from the track. Those costs are expected to be about $68 million, although much of the work will be needed whether the track is built or not, according to an Everett transportation consultant hired by Marysville.

Such costs have Ernie Fosse rolling his eyes. Fosse, a Microsoft contractor, helped found the main group fighting the NASCAR track: “SCAR” – Snohomish County Citizens Against a Racetrack.

At Wednesday night’s hearing, he called the entire project “foolhardy” and appealed to lawmakers not to allow any government funding for the track.

“Are those of you from Eastern Washington prepared to give up (transportation) projects you fought for for years in order for Snohomish County to build a playground?” he asked.

The profits would go to Florida, he said, and track revenues would be about the same as an average Costco store: $100 million a year in sales.

“But Costco pays its own construction costs,” he said. “Costco doesn’t demand that you give back its taxes so it can pay its mortgage.”

His appeal fell on some sympathetic ears. State Sen. Joyce Mulliken, R-Ephrata, said that proponents have to do a better sales job if lawmakers are going to OK financing.

“Do I think they (lawmakers) are going to want to jump off a cliff for this? No,” she said. “It’s too big an investment.”

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