Tacoma’s shot at keeping Russell Investments in Tacoma just got a whole lot better.
Heirs of Pete Sauro, the man who started Sauro’s Cleanerama in downtown Tacoma in 1961, have agreed to sell the former dry cleaner site to the City of Tacoma.
“We have an agreement in principle,” City Manager Eric Anderson said Tuesday. Anderson would not disclose any of the terms. He plans to brief the City Council in a private session, then put the agreement on the council’s Sept. 24 agenda.
The deal for the 15,000-square-foot pit – and the city’s commitment to clean up a four-block, underground plume of Sauro’s old dry cleaning fluid – starts a complex domino effect of good things.
First, it allows German billionaire Erivan Haub to follow through on his option to purchase the U.S. Postal Service parking lot at South 14th and A streets. Haub needs that lot, combined with his adjacent properties, to offer enough space for a possible future headquarters for Russell Investments. Russell’s board expects to decide by the end of the year on a location for a new headquarters where it can consolidate its 1,100 local associates.
Haub held off purchasing the lot where the downtown post office parks its fleet of delivery trucks because an environmental analysis showed pollution from Sauro’s Cleanerama had seeped under the lot.
Second, once Haub closes on that lot, the U.S. Postal Service will have the cash it needs to close on a 1.5-acre site it has under control at 502 54th Ave. E. in Fife.
The Postal Service wants to start construction there in May on a 7,800-square-foot carrier annex to serve parts of South King County and north Pierce County and move its truck fleet out of downtown Tacoma, said Randy Alder, real estate specialist for the Postal Service’s Asset Management Division.
Third, you can expect to soon see a solicitation from the Postal Service for buyers for the historic 1909 federal building at 1102 A. St., Alder said.
A post office station could remain in the building or move to a storefront nearby.
“It’s a historic building, which means it is tricky to do an adaptive reuse there,” Alder said.
Fourth, the state Department of Ecology stands ready to quickly issue a cleanup order that would allow Tacoma to start digging out the contaminated soils in and around the former dry cleaners.
“I already have it drafted,” said Marv Coleman, DOE project manager. “It’s just been sitting there. We could have it in place in a few days.”
A city environmental consultant, in a recent analysis, estimated the cleanup cost at $2.07 million to excavate 11,000 tons of contaminated soils and truck the most dangerous 3,100 tons to a hazardous waste landfill in Oregon.
We can’t ultimately judge the deal until we find the details. Did the city pay anything for the property? Or did Sauro’s heirs have to pay the city to take it – and the entire clean-up liability – off their hands?
But the City of Tacoma, Anderson and project manager Ellie Walkowiak deserve credit for shepherding the complex deal to closure, under civic pressure, before time ran out on Haub’s Russell bid.
Imagine if they failed to secure the property, Haub lost the post office lot, the post office didn’t move to Fife to make way for redevelopment and Russell Investment’s leadership decided to move to Seattle.
Plenty of fingers would have pointed at City Hall for lack of leadership. That can’t happen now – although taxpayers will want to know how much they’ll have to pay. The City Council can temper any backlash by asserting that anything it spends now to jump-start the cleanup can partly be recouped by the future sale of the downtown corner.
“This is very good news,” said Bruce Kendall, CEO of the Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County and coordinator of the effort to keep Russell in Tacoma.
“If we didn’t have this resolution, there’s no way we could have developed that site for Russell,” said Mike Hickey, principal at Neil Walter Co., who brokered the post office lot sale and located the Fife site for the Postal Service.
“The city has really stepped up,” said Alder of the Postal Service. “If they can pull this off (next week) you’ve got to give them a lot of credit.”
Yes, we do. But also give credit to the heirs of Pete Sauro, including his daughter Betty Schindele. Sauro died in May 2002, two days short of his 83rd birthday. He had closed the business in 2000. His heirs had every right to hang on to the property, hope to clean it up for less money and try to sell it years from now. They didn’t.
At the time of her father’s death, Schindele told a reporter: “Even up to the day he died, he talked about the shop. … When we first closed it, I couldn’t drive him near it because he couldn’t stand to see it. It broke his heart it wasn’t there any more. That was Dad’s corner.”
Dad’s corner should have turned into a valuable inheritance. Due to years disposing of dry cleaning fluid into a hole in the ground under the Cleanerama, the cost to clean up the mess was greater than the value of the raw land. Sometimes the standard business practices of days gone by come back to haunt you.
In the end, though, if Russell Investments chooses this location for its future headquarters and we fete the political and civic leaders who contributed, let’s make sure to remember Pete Sauro and his family for helping to make it happen.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
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