The News Tribune

The City of Tacoma’s plans to rebuild Stadium Way won’t affect McMenamins’ renovation of downtown’s Elks Temple, the company said Tuesday.

“Anything the city’s doing won’t change our plans,” said Renee Rank Ignacio, McMenamins spokeswoman.

The city soon will begin a $13 million renovation of Stadium Way. It was built in the 1920s and is failing. When it’s done, it will be safer in an earthquake as well as feature a resurfaced road, new sidewalks, bike lanes, pedestrian crossings, ornamental lighting and landscaping.

The project will happen in two phases. The first will handle the two end segments (near Stadium High School to the north and the Elks Temple to the south). That’s scheduled to be completed this fall, well before the spring 2013 opening McMenamins has said it’s aiming for.

The city’s Stadium Way project manager said that the city has been working closely with McMenamins’ architect and engineer for more than a year, including an on-site meeting last week to discuss what to do about the sidewalk and a storage tank buried below it.

“We’ve been trying to find out what the sidewalk in front of their building will be like so we can build it as part of our project,” said Mark D’Andrea, the city’s Stadium Way improvement project manager. “We’ve added storm and sanitary connections that they’ve requested. They will also have access to their building for work at all times when Commerce/Stadium is under construction (as all businesses will have), and they also have an entrance on Broadway.”

The Portland-based brewpub operator is in the process of buying the temple annex, the add-on structure attached to the north side of the building, Ignacio said.

The annex initially was going to be demolished to make way for the new mixed-use building on the empty site next door, but those plans fell through.

When that happened, McMenamins had to bring hotel rooms back into the temple. Mike McMenamin said then that the company might have to reconsider the annex.

Ignacio said any delay in renovating the temple could be attributed to completing that transaction, not the city’s plans. She said work likely will begin in August.