From the Oct 2 – Oct 8, 2003 issue

News

Unsound Move

Despite Funding Uncertainty, Sound Transit Expels Businesses

by Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit's bulldozers continued to rumble around a test shaft for a light rail tunnel on Beacon Hill last week, despite growing uncertainty about the fate of a $500 million federal grant needed to pay for the project. An aide to U.S. Representative Ernest Istook, the Oklahoma Republican who's holding Sound Transit's funding hostage in a congressional subcommittee, says Istook won't release the funding until the agency addresses several specific concerns. But agency spokesperson Geoff Patrick says Sound Transit will move full speed ahead on Beacon Hill regardless of whether the feds release the funding, explaining, "Once you establish a schedule, you generally keep it." For Beacon Hill residents, Sound Transit's officiousness will mean the loss of half the neighborhood's struggling business district, when four businesses--two restaurants, an accounting firm, and a hair salon--are boarded up starting Tuesday, September 30, to make way for construction staging for the Beacon Hill light rail station.

Republican King County Council member Rob McKenna--"the major architect" of Istook's strategy, according to Democratic county council member Dwight Pelz--calls the agency's policy "a big risk" to both Sound Transit and the neighborhood. "They're desperately trying to stay on the schedule they've set even though the funding is not assured, and it could really blow up in their faces," McKenna says.

Obviously, a major construction project like light rail is going to displace businesses. Still, McKenna is right to point out the potential pitfalls of evicting businesses prematurely. Jackie Lum, president of the North Beacon Hill Chamber of Commerce, points out that if the feds don't come through with the $500 million, "it's conceivable that [Sound Transit will] defer construction of the Beacon Hill station because it happens to be one of the most expensive stations" on the route.

That's exactly what business owners like Dan Ko, whose wonderfully divey South China Restaurant has anchored the neighborhood for nearly five decades, have been warning Sound Transit of since 2001, when the transit agency first put businesses on notice that they'd have to leave. In November, Ko will pack up everything he can carry and move his operation to Bellevue, where he'll work to rebuild the Beacon Hill hangout using $50,000 in relocation money from Sound Transit. The cash doesn't come close, Ko says, to funding the restaurant's cross-lake move. Ko notes that Sound Transit came up with $50 million to help displaced businesses in the Rainier Valley, but wouldn't extend the fund's reach to include establishments in Beacon Hill. "At the time that fund was created, there wasn't even talk that we were being displaced. Then it turns out we're being displaced first," Ko says. "If we were included [in the fund], I wouldn't feel so bad that they're shoving us around." Of the four businesses that are being displaced, two will stay on Beacon Hill; a third, King's Barbecue, will move to the International District.

Meanwhile, some businesses that remain on Beacon Avenue are wondering how the struggling district can survive another blow. For years, a vacant Wells Fargo building was a scar among the Beacon Avenue storefronts, attracting crime and marring the ambiance of the district. Now four more vacant buildings are poised to take its place.

Lenny Rose, who owns the Hilltop Red Apple across the street from the proposed light rail station, says, "[Losing four more businesses] is going to have a big impact on us, because the business community down here is so small already. Hell, they're taking half of it away. What will we have left?" And because construction on the Beacon Hill station won't begin until next spring at the earliest, neighbors worry that the block of boarded-up buildings will attract the kind of criminal element already prevalent in what area residents call the Jungle, a tangle of vegetation along I-5 below Beacon Hill. "I think we're looking at a minimum of five or six months" before construction begins, says Lum. "Our concern is, if the houses and buildings are going to be vacant, let's not leave them vacant for any length of time beyond what's absolutely necessary."

How long the businesses will stay boarded up is anyone's guess; for its part, Sound Transit has promised to start construction as soon as it gets the nod from the feds.

barnett@thestranger.com