SEQUIM – After more than two years, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has received what it needed from the city of Sequim.
In a unanimous vote Monday, the Sequim City Council decided to amend its comprehensive plan, expand Sequim’s urban growth area, or UGA, eastward and create a new “research and development park.”
That park and the expanding UGA belong entirely to Battelle, the company that operates the Pacific Northwest lab’s marine operations facility on Sequim Bay.
Some 70 scientists on the 140-acre campus are working on, among other major projects, how to harness ocean waves and tides for renewable power.
The Sequim marine sciences laboratory is hiring engineers to work on such projects, facilities manager Dwight Hughes said Tuesday. But it can’t expand its staff and endeavors too much unless the city of Sequim provides water and sewer service.
State law, however, prohibits the city from extending those pipes outside the UGA.
In 2007, Battelle, the city and Clallam County embarked on a plan to enlarge the growth zone without allowing residential housing.
This enlargement, specifically for Battelle, required a special land-use designation along with the cooperation of city and county governments.
For the past 27 months, Clallam County and Sequim planners have hammered out the designation of research and development park, something new for this part of the Peninsula.
The designation required a change in the Sequim Comprehensive Plan, the document that provides guidelines for the next 20 years of development.
Sequim Planning Director Dennis Lefevre brought the proposed amendment to the Sequim City Council for a public hearing Monday.
The well-paying, clean jobs to be generated by Battelle “are the kind we’ve been hoping for and praying for,” said Mike McAleer, a longtime Sequim Realtor who serves on the Clallam County Economic Development Council.
“This project is a tremendous opportunity,” added Andrew Shogren, a Sequim conservation activist who is Jefferson County’s Environmental Health director.
When facing the challenge of protecting the oceans while finding energy sources, “Battelle is doing a lot of the work to move us forward,” Shogren said.
In a later interview, Shogren added that he is pleased that no new residential subdivisions will be part of the expansion. There will be no “creep,” he said, from eastern Sequim where housing tracts have proliferated already.
Hughes said that Battelle has always used a septic system, but that as an environmentally conscious organization, it wants off it as soon as possible.
Making the transition from septic to city sewer and water service will take two to three years, Hughes said.