Clean, new life envisioned for old South Park dump

Amid the tangle of streets and freeways that tear through Seattle's South Park neighborhood is a 19.4-acre stretch of vacant ground that is anything but empty.

It's an old city dump.

Long dormant, capped and monitored, the site, owned since the 1930s by King County, is now being measured for a new set of clothes by Issaquah-based South Park Development LLC, a group led by Rob Howie, who already is redeveloping contaminated parcels of Seattle's industrial heartland.

Already to the Howie group's credit is the cleanup of a South Park site heavily contaminated with cement-kiln dust that includes a creek draining into the Duwamish Waterway.

The group is also reclaiming acreage at Eighth Avenue South and South 96th Street, where the Fruehauf Trailer Corp. was and a company that specialized in the chemistry of electroplating.

If this latest county deal closes within the year as called for in the sale contract, King County and Executive Ron Sims will be pleased.

Sims sees this chunk of unproductive ground not only transformed into something that can be dunned for a piece of the property tax, but also teed up for a host of wage-paying jobs as it is given a stiff environmental scrub.


		Meryl Schenker / P-I
	Anne Holmes, King County project manager, and Rob Howie stand on the landfill site that a group led by Howie is buying from the county. A city of Seattle transfer station in the background borders the parcel.

"Our agreement with South Park Development achieves all of these goals," Sims said in a news release.

But hold on. According to Howie, this won't be a walk in the park.

As important as the deal itself will be the need to take the neighborhood's temperature, a process set to begin at a public meeting Nov. 30 at the South Park Community Center.

South Park may be at the county's center of heavy industry, but it is nevertheless sprinkled with residential neighborhoods. You find them cuddled between towering stacks of steel containers, warehouse walls of tilt-up concrete and a generous mix of those big machines that do much of the region's heavy lifting.

This latest deal gives Howie's group a year to complete its due diligence, but it already is tickling the county pink.

Anne Holmes, the county's project manager, said the property was purchased piece by piece by King County beginning in the 1930s. Between 1958 and 1978, 40 acres were leased to the city for a refuse dump, then it was closed, capped and handed back to King County.

It has been monitored by the county ever since as one of nine closed-and-capped dumps now under the county's wing.

Of the other eight, she said, the Houghton landfill in Kirkland now sports ball fields; the dump on the Issaquah-Hobart Road east of Issaquah has been given over to model airplanes; the Duvall and Puyallup landfills have received what Holmes called special "vegetative covers"; and the old Vashon Island dump has been capped.

All of which leaves the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill, in the hills east of Renton, as the only active dump left in King County, at least officially.

A study of the South Park site in 1999 determined that the property was safe enough for development, and in 2001 it was given a look by a group that included Seattle-based Benaroya Cos.

In the economic downturn after 9/11, however, Benaroya passed.

"I can tell you there are some pretty serious challenges related to the condition of that property," Benaroya's Mark Nemirow said this week.

Indeed, the new buyers say no one yet knows how much methane gas remains in the dump's decomposing detritus after all these years.

And as critical as the methane, Howie said, is the unknown rest of what lies below.

Thus the announced $1.6 million sale price may be no bargain even when compared with the prices of uncompromised, comparable land that might, on this finite industrial plain, go for as much as $10.5 million.

Howie said his group will rely on consultants to study the site in detail before he and his partners decide what can be built there. He expects a building of some sort will rise one day but sees the challenges.

"Not only will we have to clean it up," Howie said. "But a landfill will always be settling, so anything you build have to be put on piles. That's true for gas and water mains, too, or settling will cause them to break.

"And you never know when you put a piling down what you'll run into. A big thing of concrete? You just don't know. And all of it is your cost of construction plus the carrying costs because it all takes time."

As a consequence, Howie has added a secondary phrase to that old real estate standby, "location, location, location."

Developing abused land, he said, takes "patience, patience, patience."