FW City Council split in exploration of buying Sound Transit property

The Federal Way City Council explored at its Jan. 21 meeting the possibility of attempting to acquire land from Sound Transit for development.

The idea was suggested by the Federal Way Public Market group during a Jan. 7 presentation to the council.

During that presentation and discussion there were a few inaccurate statements that Keith Niven, the city community development director corrected this week.

The FW Public Market group encouraged the city to purchase at least one of the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) parcels near the light rail station directly from Sound Transit. Niven said it was important to make the record clear that this hasn’t been done before and for every other TOD project, Sound Transit has worked within a process where they see requests for proposals.

He also corrected the basis for this idea from the group, saying “What we heard was the city of Lynnwood purchased a to property for $167,000 – that is also not true – what happened is that in Lynnwood, Sound Transit sold a piece of property for about $167,000 to Housing Hope….a nonprofit affordable housing builder,” Niven said.

One last fact check included a statement made at the last meeting that Sound Transit would be starting that process of reviewing requests for proposals within the next few weeks. The updated timeline is actually within the next few months and only for two of the parcels, not the one that the FW Public Market group has proposed for the market.

While no city has actually purchased a large TOD property directly from Sound Transit before, Niven shared some additional information with the council so it could consider whether to try.

Exploring the potential value of the site, Niven used a rough estimate of $1.7 million per square acre. The parcel of land in question also has a lot of environmental damage from a former dry cleaning business that was on the property.

“Perchloroethylene (PERC) is the most common solvent used for dry cleaning in the United States,” according to the National Library of Medicine, which continues that “PERC is a reproductive toxicant, neurotoxicant, potential human carcinogen, and a persistent environmental pollutant.”

PERC is also quite costly to fully clean up. This cost of clean up would actually be subtracted from the cost of the land, since the buyer would take on the responsibility of dealing with it.

While this would make the purchase price of the land lower, it wouldn’t actually save any money for the city.

The entire discussion was hypothetical, since they are not even sure if Sound Transit would actually be open to selling the property to the city. But that didn’t stop council members from speaking passionately about the possibility.

Councilmember Jack Dovey called the decision “the most pressing thing our city should be looking at right now,” while councilmember Susan Honda said “I have a lot of concern with this proposal.”

Dovey stressed the “opportunity to control what happens downtown” and added that “Sound Transit may not negotiate with us, but if we don’t ask the question we’re going to throw our destiny to somebody else to make the decisions.”

To Honda, the idea is too little too late.

“We just went through our budget season and we talked about buildings and roads and streets and parks and things that need maintenance and things that need to be improved…we don’t even have any money to do the roof on this building that needs to be replaced,” Honda said.

The city has made several large investments including beginning the Operations and Maintenance Facility that broke ground in late 2024 and the Town Center Three (TC3) plan that was also finalized this year.

Ultimately, the council discussed adding the topic to their agenda at their upcoming council retreat and voted to authorize staff to initiate discussions with Sound Transit regarding the potential property acquisition of one or more of the Sound Transit Surplus TOD properties.