After a marathon meeting late last month and a workshop this week, the Centralia City Council is closing in on a final decision on its ongoing warehouse moratorium.
Port of Centralia staff believe the decision could be worth more than $4 million in local property tax revenue.
Members of the Centralia City Council gathered in the council chambers Tuesday evening, an hour and a half ahead of their regularly scheduled meeting, to discuss the future of warehouse development in Centralia.
The special meeting, which also welcomed both members of the Centralia Port Commission, was intended to, as Mayor Chris Brewer said, “level the playing field.”
“That way, we all have all the information that we have here on council from our city staff and any subject matter expert present regarding the moratorium decision that we hope to make next week at our public meeting,” Brewer said.
Altogether, the informational workshop covered potential changes and impacts to land use, transportation and traffic, local tax revenue and jobs while providing some clarification to previous discussions and claims.
One of the most impactful new tidbits of information were numbers around expected local tax revenues from planned warehouse developments.
Port of Centralia Executive Director Amy Graber presented her estimates for local tax and utility fee revenue expected from proposed warehouse development by Logistics Property Company (LPC), which differed from the city’s own projections in some ways.
According to Graber, her estimates were based on an overall estimate of the new property values after the proposed buildings are complete while the city estimates are based on values included in a building permit for the first building.
“When you look at what a property is going to be assessed at in the future, you need to look at the land, the improvements to the land, and the building,” Graber said. “So, if you're just looking at the building permit, you're not taking in everything.”
Port officials also invited both Lewis County Assessor Ross Nielson and Lewis County levy specialist Brandon Rogers to a port meeting the following day where they confirmed the methods used by Graber and the plausibility of the numbers she provided.
Information provided by the port estimated that LPC would pay roughly $4.2 million in annual property taxes if it was able to build its entire planned development. That revenue would split between the many taxing districts with roughly $964,000 going to the city of Centralia yearly.
LPC is responsible for the large warehouse under construction along the northern part of Harrison Avenue and hopes to build additional warehouses in the area that could total more than 4 million square feet.
During the meeting, Centralia Deputy Mayor Kelly Smith Johnston cited estimates from both the port and city on revenue expectations and pointed out that estimates are very imprecise without a tenant. Changes in equipment and structures can change property values and tax revenues, meaning taxes paid can depend greatly on the tenant.
An estimate from city staff shows that the city would collect roughly $28,000 in annual property tax on the first LPC building, assuming it was annexed into the city.
The port did not provide an estimate of the city property tax revenue for the single building, but did offer a projection for property tax revenue on the entire planned LPC buildout, assuming the property is annexed into the city limits. The port would expect the city to collect roughly $964,000 in annual property tax revenue on the roughly 4 million square feet of warehouse development.
The port took it a step further by calculating the expected annual property tax revenue for all of the other relevant taxing districts. Graber predicts $4.2 million in yearly property tax revenue across the taxing districts, with that sum split between the city and county as well as the school, fire, port and library districts.
The port estimates that the additional property tax revenue from LPC could reduce local property tax levies for Centralia property owners by up to $0.22 per $1,000 of assessed value.
Smith Johnston described two potential impacts, stating that the additional property tax paid by LPC could lower the property tax paid by other landowners for the city to collect the same overall levy sum. She added that the city could also move to keep the same rates in place but collect a larger levy sum.
“New properties that are added to our valuation essentially will have one of two impacts, but not both,” Smith Johnston said.
In some other notable developments, this time concerning traffic, Smith Johnston responded to early claims that the city could enforce a new truck route and force industrial traffic northward to Exit 88 at Grand Mound rather than Harrison Avenue and surrounding roadways. According to Smith Johnston, city staff do not believe that to be accurate.
“There's been some ideas of well, ‘maybe the truck route could just be like Gallagher north and not south,’ but that's a corridor that's used for a whole variety of reasons, not just the industrial,” Smith Johnston said. “And so we just can't eliminate that.”
She added that even if the city could change the truck route that staff had found that it would not be feasible to enforce the truck route. City staff are apparently also skeptical that other traffic mitigation efforts included in the port’s development proposal would do enough to reduce industrial traffic on the Harrison corridor.
If that is true, major infrastructure improvements expected to affect traffic would be a long way out.
Additional development of the essential infrastructure to address traffic in the area is ongoing, but major developments such as a west side bridge are years away from completion in the best case scenario. A potential north Lewis County Interstate 5 interchange is still unplanned and unsupported by the state, and the federal government and has no potential timeline.
The city is currently working on adaptive traffic signals for the Harrison Avenue corridor and is soon to finish the extension of North Scheuber Road. It expects to take on the next step of the project connecting the road to Harrison Avenue through Galvin Road next year, with construction expected to start in late summer or early fall 2027.
Assuming all goes well with engineering and funding, the city would start construction on the new bridge over the Chehalis River, connecting North Scheuber and South Scheuber, in 2030 at the earliest.
The city council did not signal how the consolidated information concerning the warehouse development would impact their decision during the Tuesday workshop. According to Smith Johnston and Brewer, the information was intended to help the council make an official decision during a special council meeting scheduled for Tuesday, July 21, at 6 p.m. at Centralia City Hall.
During that meeting, the council expects to decide once and for all whether it will lift the moratorium.
If the council chooses to do so, it would also decide officially if it will accept an offer made by the port and Lewis County late last month, or propose a counter offer. If it chooses not to lift the moratorium, the council would decide on codifying a limit on large warehouses and potentially large buildings, within the city limits.
The Tuesday workshop, in preparation of what council members refer to as a “legacy decision,” included presentations from Smith Johnston, Centralia City Engineer Patty Page and additional information from both city and port staff.
For previous reporting by The Chronicle on the council's decision process, visit https://tinyurl.com/48hfupp8.
