CARLSBORG — Residents such as Scott Frederick and Jim White are among those who are highly skeptical of Clallam County’s plans to find financing to construct a multimillion-dollar sewage-treatment plant in Carlsborg.
“We don’t want the sewer system because we know we can’t afford it,” said Frederick, a resident for five years on Smithfield Drive, part of Carlsborg’s designated urban growth area.
His neighbor, Jim White, a retiree living on Bennetts Place, agreed.
“Nobody asked if the citizens wanted anything,” White said, adding that he would prefer an improvement district that left the industrial park business owners, not the residents, paying for a new sewer system.
The county plans to build a Class A wastewater-treatment and water-reuse system for the unincorporated community of roughly 900 residents west of the Dungeness River.
North on Carlsborg Road, Gabby’s drive-through restaurant owner Brian Magner, who has lived in Carlsborg much of his life, clinched his fists while his face turned red when he described his frustration over the sewer proposal — the cost to residents that no Clallam County official has yet specified.
“The residents have already spoken,” Magner said, recommending against an urban growth area for the rural village west of Sequim.
“There are alternatives,” Magner said, advocating a cluster system that would allow sewage treatment onsite at the industrial park to the east of northeast of his home and business.
Residents should be kept out of what will mostly benefit industries and their future growth, which Magner firmly believes will ultimately destroy Carlsborg’s rural character forever.
And once the system is in, the urban growth area likely would be expanded to include even more rural residential reaches of Carlsborg, another resident said.
Harmon Allison, who has farmed 5 acres of vegetables and fruit trees since he retired as an engineer to Mill Road, said he anticipates that day, even though his property is barely outside the urban growth designated for sewage service on the opposite side of Mill Road.
The east urban growth area boundary line runs north and south down Mill Road between U.S. Highway 101 and Runnion Road, at the southern end of the Carlsborg business and industrial park. It can be seen through buffer-zone-free chain-link fence by homeowners living on the park’s edge.
“What’s to stop them from coming over here in the future?” Allison asked.
“They’re going to have to get more money,” he said, to keep the sewer system in operation, a proposal most recently estimated at $15.6 million.
Business and commercial land owners in Carlsborg praised a recent state Growth Management Act hearings board’s decision to lift an order that prevented them from expanding their companies.
They say they now have the opportunity to expand their businesses.
County financial incentives will help advance a plan to construct a sewage-treatment plant to replace growth-limiting septic systems that threaten to pollute the natural water supply under the community.
“We could do more volume,” said Ken Osborne, who co-owns with Ronn Dilling the Red Carpet Car Wash, 231 Valley Center Place, just south of U.S. Highway 101 through Carlsborg.
He said the car wash, now on a septic system, recycles its wash water until it begins to smell.
A sewage system would allow treatment that would reduce the odor that comes from reuse of water that washes hundreds of vehicles each week, he said.
However, Bryan Frazier, director of the grass-roots Citizens for the Preservation of Carlsborg, said he was surprised by the decision because he believes it runs against the original intent of the state Growth Management Act.
A state Growth Management Hearings Board on June 4 dismissed its 2008 finding of noncompliance and invalidity for the Carlsborg urban growth area that prevented business from expanding.
“It’s been very frustrating going through the whole planning process” since the state Growth Management Act passed the Legislature in 1990, primarily over the past five years, said Mark D. Smith, who owns about 10 acres of commercial property in Carlsborg.
Smith is a member of Clallam County’s Carlsborg Community Advisory Council, which Magner quit after he grew frustrated with the council’s position.
“It’s now looking very positive because it won’t cost the property owners that much” to hook up to a sewage-treatment system with low-interest loan incentives, Smith said.
The Western Washington Growth Management Hearings Board cited the urban growth area’s lack of planning for a sewer in its original finding of noncompliance and invalidity.
The county won an appeal of the growth board ruling in court, bringing a Carlsborg sewer system proposal closer to reality.
Smith said the county commissioners will use the county’s Opportunity Fund to help business owners hook up to the proposed sewer system.
Business owners in the Carlsborg Industrial Park further north of Highway 101 said they saw a better future ahead with the state validity order in place and a sewer system one more step ahead.
Don Butler, owner of High Energy Metals with 10 employees working out of its industrial park business location, was one of them.
“It’s an opportunity for us to expand our business,” Butler said of the company that specializes in explosive bonding of metals.
Butler said even with the state’s validity decision, there was some uncertainty about the plan going forward, with the county comprehensive plan up for review in 2016.
“If the county doesn’t follow through on plans for the sewer, the state can come back and say there’s another invalidity order,” Butler said.
Otherwise, he said, “it’s all great news for Carlsborg and the county.”
The decision in effect gives property owners in Carlsborg their property rights back, he said.
A-M Systems President Arthur Green said the invalidity order had interfered with developing a vision for the future.
“It made it tough for somebody to plan 10 or 20 years down the road,” he said.
“The main thing is I want to know that my employees and I have a building to use for decades to come and that this location can be where I can continue my company,” Green said of the company based in the industrial park with 25 employees.
He has an adjacent lot that would allow him to expand A-M Systems, a medical equipment manufacturer.
“It is good news,” he said. “The county still has to come up with the whole sewer plan.”
The Clallam County Public Utility District will own and operate the sewer system after it is built.
Last year, the project received a $10 million loan from the state Public Works Trust Fund.
The loan will be repaid over 30 years at a 0.5 percent interest rate from the county’s Opportunity Fund, which comes from a portion of state sales tax revenue.
Although connection costs and monthly fees are still unknown, the county’s financing plan negates the need for the Clallam PUD to form a local utility district to assess property owners and allows a more flexible, efficient sewer system to better meet the specific needs of individual property owners, PUD officials said.
Frazier said the state Growth Management Hearings Board decision “basically lets the county go forward with piecemeal development and the infill to make Carlsborg look like an urban area instead of a rural area, which it is.”
“This causes urban sprawl,” Frazier added.
The county’s intent, he said, is “to move forward with the sewer system, sidestepping the law” as it applies to residential property owners.
He was critical of the sewer plan because it has no cost estimates for future users, and no boundaries have been set for a local improvement district.
“This UGA, we feel, has been in violation of the law since its inception,” Frazier said.
He used a 2006 aerial photo of Carlsborg as an example, questioning whether the rural burg then resembled anything urban.
“We don’t think that it does. We don’t see how they could justify designating Carlsborg as a UGA based on this photo,” he said.
