After nearly a decade of permitting, appeals, moratoriums, protests and lawsuits, local environmentalists and industry have come to an agreement that will halt a long-planned asphalt plant that was to be built in rural King County on the shore of the Cedar River.
Lakeside Industries, which owns about a dozen asphalt plants in Western Washington, bought the site east of Renton in 2016, with plans to build an asphalt plant. The company received permitting approval in 2022.
But neighbors and a local community group have argued for years that it was folly to allow a heavy industrial plant to operate so close to a river that the county has spent millions of dollars restoring, trying to entice native salmon to return.
They complained the plant would bring truck traffic, noise, dust, light pollution and potential leaks.
On Thursday, the company and the community struck a deal.
Under the deal, announced by Metropolitan King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, Lakeside will not build an asphalt plant on the site, but will instead move to build a warehouse, with far less truck traffic and no manufacturing. And the community group, Save the Cedar River, has agreed to support the project and not oppose Lakeside’s new permit application.
“Given the alternatives, this is a far better use of the property, and a big win for the community,” said Dunn, who represents the area on the County Council, in a prepared statement. “Rather than rock crushers, truck traffic, noise, dust, and odors, this plan will provide benign warehouse space and avoid the impacts of an asphalt plant on the greater community.”
The site was a coal mine in the 1920s, then a county-owned maintenance facility for decades and, before Lakeside bought it, a landscaping supply company.
Bob Baker, the leader of Save the Cedar River, said the agreement is a “great conclusion for all parties.
“There will be no asphalt plant, Lakeside Industries can finally utilize their property and King County can put this chapter to rest,” Baker said in a statement.
The saga began in 2008, when a little-noticed zoning change was slipped into a giant piece of county legislation. The change, made as part of the county’s comprehensive plan update, shifted the parcel’s zoning from rural to industrial. Eight years later, Lakeside bought the site for $9.5 million and soon announced plans for an asphalt plant.
Save the Cedar River protested. Dunn passed a moratorium to delay construction. Save the Cedar River appealed the company’s permit approval. They filed a lawsuit. They lost at every legal step.
Dunn said the years of delay ultimately helped halt the project and that “for a variety of reasons” Lakeside decided to go in a different direction.
“It is to their credit that they came to the table, they stayed at the table,” he said of the company. “They have a conscience.”
Mike Lee, CEO of Lakeside Industries, said they see the new deal as a “win-win” for the community and the company.
“Lakeside is a third-generation, family-owned, local company,” Lee said in a prepared statement. “We want to be good neighbors in the communities in which we operate, and finding a creative solution balancing Lakeside’s needs, our obligations to our employees, and the concerns of the community, is a success that took all parties working together.”
A traffic study had found that the asphalt plant would have required 460 truck trips each weekday on rural Highway169. Traffic to the new warehouse, both sides agreed, would be “substantially lower.”
