Cities Deal With Boeing Growth -- South King County Governments Must Balance Expansion's Benefits, Minuses

KENT

South King County and Pierce County are a major focus of The Boeing Co.'s expansion in the Puget Sound region.

More than $1.3 billion of the nearly $3 billion in Boeing buildings under construction, or being planned in the region, are in Renton, SeaTac, Auburn and Frederickson.

The wave of Boeing construction leaves cities with the job of balancing the benefits Boeing brings - mainly tax dollars, jobs and economic stimulus for other local businesses - with the extra traffic, impacts on city services and aesthetic considerations the projects produce.

But city officials in Renton, SeaTac and Auburn praise Boeing for its cooperation in planning. The company has a reputation for working closely with planners on mitigating impacts on roads and other city utilities.

"You can't have expansion without dealing with transportation issues, and we don't always agree with Boeing," says Auburn Mayor Robert Roegner.

"But Boeing has consistently been a pretty good corporate partner. They have always gone that extra step to maintain good relations."

In SeaTac, for instance, Boeing will stagger the three shifts for its $100 million spare-parts facility, so that traffic comes at off-peak hours.

The company also encourages its employees to take advantage of car pooling, says Michael Knapp, SeaTac's director of planning.

"Boeing has been really good to work with, because they recognize the impacts and have worked hard in finding solutions in moving people to their sites," Knapp says.

Boeing may be sensitive to the Seattle region's growing traffic problem because it has affected their business. The spare-parts distribution center in SeaTac, now under construction, is being built because of increasing delivery delays for emergency spare parts.

Right now, those parts have to be shipped from three Boeing warehouses in Kent, Renton and Auburn and trucked over increasingly clogged freeways to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The new 720,000-square-foot facility, to be completed in early 1993, will consolidate those parts within three miles of Sea-Tac and help Boeing make good on its delivery schedule promises, company officials say.

Of all the new Boeing projects in South King County, traffic may be the biggest problem at the Longacres development. Boeing is planning a reported $750 million, three-phase office-building project that could contain some 3 million square feet, including Boeing's corporate headquarters.

Renton city officials say it could be the biggest building project ever undertaken in the city, one which will probably require Boeing to rebuild Southwest 16th and Southwest 27th Streets, as well as Oaksdale Avenue Southwest, all access roads to the site.

Boeing will pay for the environmental-impact review of the project, which could take up to six months, says Lenora Blauman, Renton's planning director.

The project could also impact wetlands in the area, and the city is now reviewing which wetlands policies will most likely apply to the project.

City officials in Renton, SeaTac and Auburn could not project how much those cities will receive in property taxes from the new Boeing facilities, but they look forward to the extra revenues. Renton has an employee-licensing fee it charges businesses of $55 a year per employee.

How much more it collects from Boeing's Longacres project will depend on how many workers are brought in from outside areas, rather than shifted from other facilities now in Renton.

In addition to property taxes and employee-licensing fees, the projects in South King County and Pierce County could generate some $106 million in sales taxes for the state. The 8.5 percent tax is levied on total construction costs, according to the Department of Revenue.

Not many new jobs will be created by the building projects in South King County and Pierce County, unless Boeing goes ahead with its preliminary plans to build another 4.5 million square feet of space at its 500-acre Pierce County site near Frederickson. Most of the new projects are designed to consolidate or modernize operations.

For instance, Boeing employees will be moving from facilities near Boeing Field in Seattle to the new facilities in the fabrication division in Auburn.

Aside from Longacres and the SeaTac distribution center, Boeing is developing other projects in South King County and Pierce County:

-- Auburn: The fabrication division, where some 10,500 are now employed, is the site of more than $325 million in Boeing expansions. These include a 150,000-square-foot office building for training being built by Quadrant for Boeing. Construction on the $10 million building, located near the fabrication factory, started last week.

Also being built here are a $235 million sheet-metal center, a $26 million spare-parts manufacturing facility, a $43 million welded-duct center, a $9 million tooling building and two other facilities for chemical storage and training.

-- Frederickson: Work has already started on a $132 million, 950,000-square-foot plant where wing components will be produced for the 777 and other wide-body jets. The plant will employ between 300 and 400 workers and will be done by next year.