What’s next for former Tideflats hockey hub

Documents filed with the city of Tacoma offer new details on plans for the site of a former hockey rink on the Tacoma Tideflats.

The Puget Sound Hockey Center closed this month after 24 years in a warehouse on Stewart Street. Founders Donna and Rob Kaufman learned Sept. 9 that the arena and its hockey players and speed skaters would be kicked out in October.

Donna Kaufman said via email that they are now working to move 300 cubic feet of sand out of the building. The Kaufmans had secured a new facility, the former Pacific Sports Center on South 80th Street, to move into.

The Stewart Street building’s new owner, R41 LLC, paid $2.4 million for the structure. Documents filed Wednesday by R41 with the city of Tacoma ask the city to change the building’s occupancy “for use as marijuana grow and package facility; there will be processing or extraction operations.”

The initial filing was canceled and another submitted in its place, this time without any mention of marijuana. The first filing was submitted out of order, said Tacoma principal planner Shirley Schultz.

The second filing includes more detail, but calls the building’s use an “indoor agricultural operation.”

The document indicates the new owners would like to renovate the building for an indoor agricultural grow. The area where the hockey rink used to be “will be subdivided to provide rooms for the growing, curing and packaging of the agricultural product.”

R41’s officers, Ray Robbin and Arthur Richardson, told The News Tribune last month they hadn’t decided what they would do with the former hockey rink.

Robbin and Richardson are officers in another cannabis business, Emerald Jane’s, which says it grows “handcrafted recreational cannabis” in Seattle.

Liquor and Cannabis Board spokesman Mikhail Carpenter said last month that there was no license application for the Stewart Street warehouse to grow or process marijuana there, but if they have a license at another location “they are able to move locations by submitting a change of location application, and then we investigate the new location.”

State records show no application has been filed with the board to move the existing grow operation to Tacoma or to start a new one here.

The city of Tacoma’s building code regulates marijuana grow operations in much the same way as other indoor agricultural activities, Schultz said.

“In terms of building code, they could be growing tomatoes,” she said.

The area’s zoning allows a cannabis business, Schultz said.

This story was originally published October 24, 2016 at 11:47 AM with the headline "What’s next for former Tideflats hockey hub."