We Must Move Now Or Expect Future Decay

Doug Sutherland has been to a place where the economic sun doesn’t shine.

We knew it as Tacoma.

Sutherland was mayor there.

In Spokane the other day, the former mayor recalled that 20 years ago his city could fit into every stand-up comedian’s routine.

Tacoma: I didn’t see it but I smelled it.

Tacoma: Where they put the Velveeta in the gourmet food section.

Portrait of a loser: Harold Stassen driving an Edsel down the streets of Tacoma.

Tacoma is a loser no more.

Once downtown closed up, once the close-in neighborhoods became infamous for their crime, once the tax base had eroded to a point where the city couldn’t pave the streets, people in Tacoma said, “We gotta fix this.”

And they did.

The fix-up formula involved three key elements:

A wealthy family (the Weyerhaeusers) pledged millions of their own money for a major redevelopment;

Elected officials applied for millions of dollars in federal and state grants to help finance the project;

A new public-private partnership was forged to help spread the risk and the benefits of among other things, a downtown hotel and parking garage.

In Tacoma, it worked. Doug Sutherland was there to see it.

So, he was invited to Spokane last week to hold some hands here and let people know that a big project designed to save a city can be pulled off. Sutherland, a Rogers High School graduate, had this message for Spokane: Don’t wait until things get as bad as they did in Tacoma.

“In Tacoma, it has taken 20 years and hundreds of millions of local, state and federal dollars, but the city has been saved,” Sutherland said. “It takes a very long time to repair damage once it has been done.”

Now county executive for Pierce County, Sutherland noted that Spokane has a chance to miss the worst of what happened in Tacoma.

“You have an opportunity here that we didn’t have,” Sutherland said. It is the opportunity to save the retail core before it craters.

“You have a family (the Cowles) that has stepped forward and is willing to make a major commitment to your city,” he said.

“You have people who wholeheartedly believe in your downtown,” he explained.

“And you seem to have a City Council that understands the benefits that will come to all if they take a courageous political decision to move ahead.”

Sure there will be people who will try to knock Spokane’s redevelopment plan down. Why help out a rich family? Why help out a rich company like Nordstrom? Doug Sutherland faced these things, too.

For him, the answers were clear in Tacoma and are obvious in Spokane as well.

The Cowles family, which also owns The Spokesman-Review, is putting at least $45 million of their own resources into the project. Sutherland asked, what other family or bank would do that?

Sure, Nordstrom is getting a good deal. But the former mayor noted, “If you don’t have the retail core, including the plum of Nordstrom, the result will be a steep decline in property tax collections and sales tax collections. Everybody loses.”

Conversely, if the project goes, the city of Spokane gains what appears to be an additional $2.5 million in property tax revenues, plus other gains in sales tax from a revitalized shopping district.

“And in Tacoma,” Sutherland said, in a reference to NorthTown owner Dave Sabey’s opposition to the downtown plan, “the Tacoma Mall continued to improve on its investments as the downtown continued to improve. Everybody won.”

Sutherland outlines a vision for Spokane that appears obvious to someone on the outside.

To him, Spokane is poised to become a city with one of the most vibrant successful urban centers in the country.

It can do it without having to go through the terrible cycle of hitting rock bottom.

Private developers are putting up the majority of the money and paying off the federal loans.

“As I see it,” Sutherland said, “this is the best thing Spokane has on its horizon. It will send a signal that Spokane is ready to take a step into the next century.This is one of the lightning rods for the city. It’s just critically important.

If Sutherland had one regret about what has happened in Tacoma, it is that the redevelopment there started too late to allow much retailing to return downtown.

“Retailing is absolutely critical to the success of other kinds of projects in the urban core,” he said.

Keeping shopping downtown, in fact, will drive much of what else can happen in Spokane, including redevelopment of the Davenport Hotel, adding more downtown housing, and keeping the close-in residential neighborhoods from decay.

The ex-mayor laid it out clearly for all to see.

Either a city seizes the opportunities before it, or a city slides back.

Spokane hangs right there, right now, and the comedians don’t have Tacoma to kick around anymore.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.