City votes to keep Battersby building
Published 4:27 pm Thursday, April 30, 2009
By Kevin Hanson, The Courier-Herald
The city of Enumclaw will retain the former Industrial Skills building on Battersby Avenue, allow a pair of temporary tenants and then look for permanent residents for the massive building it inherited this year.
City Council members decided the fate of the building last week, after studying the issue for a couple of weeks and waiting for the results of a formal appraisal of the property. That appraisal showed the building carries a market value of about $1.8 million.
Making four separate motions during their Sept. 22 meeting, council members decided to:
€ retain ownership of the building, rather than putting it up for sale;
€ lease office and warehouse space at the front of the building to The Enumclaw Courier-Herald;
€ allow the annual haunted house, which involves high school students and raises money for students, to use a portion of the building for the coming year only; and
€ limit its temporary tenants to the newspaper and haunted house, refraining from any other short-term arrangements.
The Courier-Herald will operate out of the Battersby building for most of a year, while newspaper owners replace the current building at the corner of Cole Street and Myrtle Avenue. All departments of the newspaper operation will be moved within a couple of weeks.
The Haunted House, spearheaded by Stan Osborn and operating under the auspices of the city's Parks and Recreation Department, will be operating out of its third location in three years. Osborn had initially asked the council to provide a portion of the building permanently, but received authorization for one year only.
The city acquired ownership of the Battersby property years ago, when public money was used to purchase the building, with the understanding it would house an operation beneficial to those with mental and/or physical disabilities. The arrangement worked fine for years, as the city served as legal owner and Industrial Skills made a token lease payment of $10 per year. Industrial Skills ran into funding trouble, however, and eventually abandoned the property, leaving the city as the outright owner.
In other action at their most recent meeting, members of the Enumclaw City Council: announced the annual residential neighborhood clean up will be the week of Oct. 13-17; reminded the public of the first Enumclaw Salmon Festival, scheduled for Oct. 18; and took the first step toward accepting a state grant that will held fund a one-mile stretch of paved trail (see separate story).
Kevin Hanson can be reached at khanson@cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/courierherald
