MILTON, Wash. — Michael Deckert enjoys taking a ride through Edgewood on his bike, even if it’s a little wet out. But, he said, he remembers when Edgewood was a quieter town in 1992.
“You and I could have a conversation here 30 years ago without waiting for traffic to go by,” he said.
Now Deckert and other Edgewood residents are preparing for even more activity as the city prepares to build a warehouse and industrial park. The project is expected to take up over 1 million square feet and have up to four buildings of about 60 feet tall.
The Edgewood project is just one of almost half a dozen warehouse projects scheduled for King and Pierce counties.
This month, construction is scheduled to begin on the warehouse space in Puyallup on Canyon Road East. It’s expected to take up 95,000 square feet. The project’s developer also plans to build another two warehouses in Frederickson.
In unincorporated Pierce County near Puyallup, an industrial park facility is being planned that will take up as much as 2.6 million square feet of building area, and include seven warehouse buildings.
This comes as four warehouses are being planned for the city of Milton, and Tacoma moves forward on building a mega-warehouse within the city.
Economist Paul Turek said the projects are a sign of the times — and they may be a good one.
“It tends to be indicative of a healthy of more vibrant area and economy that goes along with it,” he explained. “It shows that there has been population growth, which usually follows economic growth, and that tends to give rise to more economic development and projects of that nature.”
However, local residents like Cameron Severns said the consequences of these projects can’t be ignored.
“Folks that do live near these warehouses are going to experience some serious noise pollution, especially during the day,” he said. “The other issue is, of course, the greenhouse gas emissions, big trucks, lots and lots of trucks coming in and out affects the local greenhouse gas emissions, and we wanna keep reducing those, we don’t want those to keep increasing.”
Molly Tack-Hooper, supervising senior attorney of Earthjustice’s Northwest Office, also points out that the potential benefits of added jobs may not be worth the negative impact, especially when it comes to how the warehouses operate.
“These warehouses are highly automated,” Tack-Hooper said. “It’s a lot of robots moving things around, so the job increases are not actually there. The jobs associated with warehouses are decreasing as technology gets better in these warehouses and gets more automated.”
In the end, Deckert said these kinds of problems are inevitable for places like Edgewood, as are the costs of development.
“It’s probably going to be a good thing in the long run, but it’s just going to facilitate more growth and more noise,” he said. “Who’d want it? I don’t have answers."