Robert Whale, Auburn Reporter

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ELECTION 2018

Fortunato, Fain among incumbents advancing to Nov. 6

By Robert Whale rwhale@soundpublishing.com

With half of the seats in the state Senate and every seat in the state House up for grabs, Democrats and Republicans appear to be headed to a street-to-street battle this fall to determine who holds the power in Olympia.

In a state where the election rules advance the top two vote-getters in any primary to the general election, regardless of party affiliation, voters in the 47th and 31st Legislative Districts saw few surprises in the early results of the Tuesday, Aug. 7 primary.

In the primary for state Senate 31 Legislative District, Phil Fortunato, R-Auburn, who is heavily favored in the rural, majority Republican district, received

10,948 votes, or 55.39 percent, of the total 19,764 votes available, while Immaculate Ferreria, D-Sumner, rolled up 7,627 votes or 38.59 percent. Jeff Benson, who stated no party preference, garnered only 1,189 votes, or 6.02 percent.

In the primary for Legislative District 31 State Representative Position 1, which is split between Pierce and King County, Democrat Victoria Mena and Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn, ran uncontested for the right to represent their parties, so they will square off in November.

In the primary for State Representative Position 2 Legislative District 31, the King County results showed Morgan Irwin, R-Milton, See INCUMBENTS, Page 10

Rossi, Schrier lead 8th District race

By Josh Kelety jkelety@soundpublishing.com

Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Kim Schrier are the top two finishers in the Aug. 7 primary race for U.S. Representative in Washington’s 8th Congressional District.

Early results show Rossi leading the 12-candidate field with 39.2 percent of the vote, followed by Schrier with 21.3 percent.

This was by far the most closely watched and high stakes national-level race in the region. The district spans multiple counties from Issaquah, Covington, Maple

Valley, Auburn and Enumclaw in King County west of the Cascade Mountains to Ellensburg and Wenatchee on the other side of the range.

Last September, Congressman Dave Reichert announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election in the district, quickly making the open seat a priority race for Democrats seeking to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report has deemed it one of the nation’s “toss up” seats.

In response, Republicans

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Action Tattoo owner Rich White, amid the implements of his art. White is a reputable artist, whose work has been praised by his large clientele. ROBERT WHALE, Auburn Reporter

Action Tattoo still going strong after 19 years

By Robert Whale rwhale@soundpublishing.com

The tattoo – and this should come as no surprise to any contemporary with working eyeballs – is not what it once was, or where it once was in days of yore, when it was commonly seen on the arms of toughs, desperadoes or old salts.

Or whereever that one was on the dude wasting away again in Margaritaville.

No, sir.

Indeed, so mainstream has the tattoo become today that even otherwise button-down Auburn bigwigs have gotten themselves inked up, said Rich White, owner of Action Tattoo at 225 Auburn Way North.

“I’ve tattooed teachers, police officers, grandpas and grandmas and great grandmas, pretty much everyone in this community,” White said. “I’ve been tattooing since 1999. I’ve pretty much tattooed ’em all.”

Of course, some tattoos cannot be properly described in a family newspaper without inducing various shades of blushing in readers, and White is not a man to tell tales.. And his own high standards demand he refuse tattoos of swastikas or any other emblems of hate or violence.

But gross and evil is not where most folks are at.

Turns out, what’s in “is a lot of sleeve work, a lot of total- arm-coverage. That’s probably the most popular these days,” White said.

In his time, White said, he has seen trends come

In the palm of his right hand, Rich White displays the tattoo machine he won for Tattoo of the Day at the Seattle Tattoo Expo of 2010. ROBERT WHALE, Auburn Reporter

and trends go.

“I started getting tattooed right when I turned 18, and so did my friends,” said White, whose arms and ankles provide a lavish display of the art, right down to Boba Fett, the bounty hunter of Star Wars fame peering up from his right shin. “Being the artistic one, I was drawing everybody else’s tattoos for them and then going with the designs to the local tattooer, who offered me an apprenticeship. And at the time, I scoffed, thinking, ‘What a silly job that would be!’ ” A few years later, White recalled, he stumbled across equipment of the trade and started dabbling.

Fast forward from his dabbling days to the afternoon a friend, whom he had tattooed, strolled into a tattoo shop where the proprietors found the

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tattooing was a credible job, and I could have a lot of fun doing it. So, basically, I just quit my job that night, and I’ve never looked back.”

When he was 24, White opened his shop on East Main Street a few doors down from Zola’s. Since then, everything, including Action Tattoo’s reputation, has spread.

“We’ve got people who come to Auburn from all over the world. Someone from Ireland came here to get tattooed after seeing our work online. Often, we

get people from California, Idaho, they come from all over the place,” White said.

Why? For one thing, White is a skilled and imaginative artist, with high standards.

“The state of Washington requires that you obtain a tattooer’s license, and it requires training in bloodborn pathogens, and you pay a fee to the state to get your license, and you are legit from there. But it would be nice to have stricter laws as far as location, so you can’t just tattoo out

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embellishment the stuff of admiration.

“They asked who did his work, I let ’em know my name, and they offered me a job,” White said. “That first day, I worked half a day, and I made a good pile of money. Then, when I went to my bar-tending job that night, I made about half as much there for twice the work. That’s when I realized

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A sample of the photo realism made possible by recent advances in the art of tattooing. ROBERT WHALE, Auburn Reporter

of a kitchen or a garage somewhere. That’s where you see a lot of bad work and infections,” White said.

“The ones who just want a cheap tattoo, they go to another shop or to somebody’s house,” White said. “I can spot them; I do it all the time. Typically, they come in here with a really bad tattoo, and I say, ‘Ah, I know exactly what local shop you got that at!.’ There’s a saying: good tattoos aren’t cheap, and cheap tattoos aren’t good.

“We have put a lot of time and energy into making sure this is a clean, safe environment to get tattooed. People know that, they choose wisely, and the ones who understand cleanliness and want to avoid risk show up at our shop,” White says.

Sometimes customers arrive with a design carefully laid out, and sometimes they come in with a rough idea they put it in the hands of the artist. At

that point, the artist renders his or her version of what the client wants.

“We’ll draw it up and take a deposit to start the ball rolling, and then the client comes in, and if they like what they see, they get what they want,” White said. “I would say 90 percent of the people who come in here have no artistic skills, so they leave it in the hands of the artist.

“Right now, I specialize in photo realism. I do a lot of portrait work, a lot of duplication of existing photography, so there’s really very little drawing with that. I also do a lot of freehand work. I tattoo pretty much anything and everything in every color in the rainbow. The supplies and equipment have come so far, it’s really limitless, the amount of colors you can put in. There’s no color we can’t apply,” White said.

Sure, White concedes, getting tattooed is an ordeal by ink, but if it didn’t hurt, everyone would have ‘em, and that would cheapen their value in the eyes of true aficionados.

“Pain is part of the process, and going through a painful, well, almost a ceremony to get this beautiful piece of art, that’s the appeal to a lot of people; you really earn your art. Everyone can buy a painting or poster, but to sit through it, to suffer for your art, that’s another thing,” White said.

A question White hears a lot from critics of the art: how you gonna feel about

that tattoo when you’re older?

“Thing is, I look at my old tattoos as sort of a passage in time. Sure, I’m not into the things I was when I was 18, but I have this reminder of where I was at, and what I was thinking, and the person I was back then. And what I appreciate, more than the art itself, is really this timeline.

“Yes, mistakes happen.

I’ve lasered away all the tattoos on my right arm to restart it because it was just a collection of mistakes,” White said. “We have friends that are in the laser-removal industry, and we refer people to them daily to get their tattoos removed. It’s affordable now, and it’s an easy way to correct a mistake.”

These days, White is not looking back, he’s looking ahead, to the annual Seattle Tattoo Expo on Aug. 17-19, where he and his tattooing brethren and sistren set up booths and livedemonstrate in contests and seminars some of the jaw-dropping advances in tattooing.

Now in its 18th year in the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Center, the convention is a rollicking, bodacious – yet at the same time, public and familywelcoming – celebration of the art, to which flock tattoo artists from all over the world – think Australia, Europe and Asia – to sell their merchandise, enjoy burlesque shows, feast, sip microbrews in a beer garden and just, well, whoop it up.

City OKs reforms to ease city attorneys’ work

New coach, talented returnees guide Ravens

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After 38 years, Comstock’s turns the final page Auburn’s iconic small bookstore shuts its doors after 38 years

By Robert Whale rwhale@soundpublishing.com

The news must come as a shock to Auburn bibliophiles and all lovers of the printed page in the surrounding area.

But there it is, in black and white, the stark truth, taped to the inside of the front door: “Comstock’s Bookstore is closed.

Thank you to everyone for your friendship and support for 38

A still from one of Jessie Brugger’s animated shorts, showing her at the height of her invention.

COURTESY IMAGE

Bringing art to life

By Robert Whale

I

n one of Jessie Brugger’s most haunting, hand-drawn, painted and animated short films to date, the Virgin Mary slips the leaden bonds of a stained glass panel and goes a-roaming.

In numerous films since that early effort, the Auburn native, artist and animator has brought to life charcoal drawings, puppets, clay beasts and common items too numerous and wildly funky to describe, then sat back and delighted in the on-screen antics of the creatures she’d created.

Brugger has come to dig this

one medium so fiercely her gray-blue eyes spark when she talks about it, as if ball lighting were rolling about behind them.

“It feels so magical, every time. It’s your own world, you’re master of the universe, and you can create anything; there’s so much freedom,” Brugger said.

This fall, Brugger’ll be talking a lot about animation when she teaches the first class Green River College has ever offered on the how-to of the art.

“The class is going to involve different techniques – some claymation, some hand-drawn animation and a lot of digital animation. They’ll learn about timing and spacing and basics like that,” Brugger said.

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Seniors take wing Foundation honors elderly military veterans with flights in an historic, open-cockpit, two-seater biplane

Creative, versatile Jessie Brugger to teach Green River College’s first ever how-to animation class this fall rwhale@soundpublishing.com

years.”

Comstock’s, that refuge in the heart of Auburn’s downtown, its shelves bulging with more 100,000 titles, with cats on the prowl, is no more.

With partner and ex-husband David Comstock’s recent passing, Anita Comstock closed a bookbinding service next to the bookstore.

She told the Auburn Reporter earlier this year that she had not yet made up her mind about the future of the business.

Comstock did not respond to a requested interview for this article,

By Mark Klaas mklaas@soundpublishing.com

Auburn native Jessie Brugger is an artist and animator.

“Everybody will be coming from a different place. Personally, I love doing hands-on animation like drawing and claymation, See BRUGGER, Page 3

Invited to soar the sunny skies in a open-cockpit, vintage biplane last Friday, Steve Dyke and several Auburn-area seniors jumped at the chance.

For Dyke, who has spent a lifetime in aviation, foremost as an air traffic controller, the front-seat view of the Green River Valley from 1,000 feet above the ground took him back to his days in the Air Force and Air National Guard.

“Absolutely wonderful,” said the 76-year-old man, who grew up in the Midwest before embarking on a long and rewarding career that embraced the wonders of flight. “It was very comforting, knowing I had the power there, which a lot of these planes don’t have.

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“I’m always leery about abrupt changes,” said Dyke, having lunch after his nostalgic flight from the Auburn Municipal Airport, “but this particular aircraft had the weight, it had the power and the stability to handle just about anything. It was very comfortable, very nice. Wonderful airplane, wonderful flight.”

All courtesy of Ageless Aviation Dreams Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring seniors and United States military veterans in long-term care facilities. Since its launch in 2011, the Reno, Nev.,-based foundation has flown more than 3,000 “dream flights” throughout the country.

The foundation, composed of volunteers who donate their See WING, Page 4

Sunday, August 26

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Gardening Talk: 11:15am-12:45pm auburnfarmersmarket.org

LOCAL

Don’t tread: Crews are striping arterial and collector roads throughout Auburn through the end of September. Please

do not follow paint vehicles too closely or cross over wet paint. Access to residences and businesses will be maintained during painting, but minor delays should be expected. For more information, contact the City of Auburn Community Development and Public Works Department at 253-931-3010.

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2018

AUBURN REPORTER

Council OKs legal reforms to ease city attorneys’ burdens

By Robert Whale rwhale@soundpublishing.com

State law gives Superior Court the sole authority in King County to prosecute felonies like murder and armed robbery and leaves the prosecution of lesser misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors to municipal courts like Auburn’s.

Too often, says City Attorney Stephen Gross, the guys upstairs decline to prosecute lower Class C felonies, like ID theft, preferring instead to kick those back down to municipal court.

As Gross told the Auburn City Council on Monday, this particular practice

Brugger From Page 1

but I think lot of students may not want to do that, they will want to use the computer.”

For the digital doers, the course will provide programs like Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, and an editing system called Premier Pro to assemble the films.

Brugger was in graduate school at the New York Academy of Art in Tribeca when she began making small, clay sculptures, which she would place in boxes, then study from all angles, and under shifting lighting conditions to tighten her grasp on perspective. After graduation, Brugger decided to make use of the clay figures, bought herself a stopmotion animation program and began playing around with it.

Being self-taught in animation, Brugger has been a voracious student, well versed in the masters of the art, and has led animation workshops.

“I have been looking at a lot of Joseph Cornell lately, who did a lot of stuff with Greek mythology and the power of myth. He’s somebody a lot of filmmakers look to for telling the story.

So, we’ll go through the hero’s journey and storytelling and story-boarding.

I’ll show the students all the different techniques, but I’ll let them choose the

“My suggestion though, is it would be better to have it in than to add it back in later on. I understand councilman DaCorsi’s position, but we have no authority to tell the prosecutor what to charge and what not to charge. So, if you strip it out of this ordinance, we can’t charge anything but an “attempt” again, and we’re back doing the same things we are, which creates more work for my prosecutors.”

In the end, however, when council agreed to strip the ID theft section out, DaCorsi joined all of his peers in adopting the reforms.

has created problems for his attorneys, who have only been allowed to charge defendants in those remanded cases with “attempting” to commit Class C felonies, even when the bad guys actually did Claude DaCorsi the deeds.

What Gross sought and council finally approved Monday was to clean up the language of city ordinances so his attorneys could charge defendants in such cases no longer with merely

“attempting” to commit Class C felonies, but with actually committing gross misdemeanors.

But convincing council members that that would be the right thing to do turned out to be tougher at first than Gross had perhaps expected.

Council members fretted that the suggested changes would weaken prosecution of felony ID theft in particular by charging it as a lesser gross misdemeanor, and this concern nearly derailed the entire package of sought-after reforms.

Council member Claude DaCorsi recounted the pain to which he and his wife

had been subjected over the years in their efforts to overcome multiple instances of identity theft, and the debilitating after-effects on their finances and credit.

“When I see, in my personal opinion, a lessening of the crime of identity theft from a felony to a gross misdemeanor, to me, that’s unacceptable,” DaCorsi said. “Many, many people go through the pain of ID theft, and it is painful.

I understand we have 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine for gross misdemeanors, but in many cases, even with the Class C felony portion of it, the judge will slap the wrists of the perpetrator and say,

direction they want to go,” Brugger said.

Brugger landed her dream job by being in the right place at the right time.

“I kind of got lucky with this. There was an art teacher at the college, and I was sitting there when she proposed an animation class. I thought, ‘Man, I would love to teach that class.’”

When the teacher landed a job at a local middle school, GRC faculty approached Brugger with a question: would she like to teach the class? Would she? Would she!?!

“My answer was, ‘Oh, my god, yes!’”

Recognizing that all people have different strengths, Brugger is excited to see what her students create. For their first assignment, Brugger said, her students will create a 30-secondor-so film, and then learn about after-effects, how to make titles and do other complicated things like that.

“I’m personally into making stuff, but I am not a great storyteller. That’s why I love listening to my dad (former Auburn Poet Laureate Dick Brugger).

That’s my weakness,” she said. “One cool thing about animation is collaboration. Being a painter, I’ve spent a lot of time in my studio by myself, and this is an opportunity to collaborate. So, you’re really good with music, you over there, you’re good at voice, each person has different

strengths. You can be an animator and not draw. If you can take this cup, give it personality and make me care about it, you can do this.”

The class will meet for two hours, three days a week, and for now will only be offered during the fall quarter.

Animation is a tough taskmaster, and it asks a lot of its burgeoning practitioners, Brugger said.

“Animation takes a long time. When you watch an animated clip, you may say, ‘that’s fun, that’s easy.’

But something like 10 seconds of animation can take a whole day or two days. For me, it takes total concentration,” Brugger said.

Brugger graduated from Auburn High School in 1997, attended Western Washington University and then transferred to Montreal Concordia University, where she finished her undergraduate degree. In 2010, she completed her masters degree in fine art from the New York Academy of Art.

Jessie Brugger’s animated works sprout from the many visual projects she crafts herself.

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‘OK, suspended sentence, and pay your fines.’ “… I believe we should put the emphasis on county prosecutors to do their job.

Declining felonies because (prosecutors) are either overworked or don’t have the staff – whatever their reason – is to me not a reason not to prosecute. In my opinion, a Class C felony is a felony, and should not be a gross misdemeanor,” DaCorsi said.

DaCorsi added that with the ID theft section left in the ordinance, he could not vote yes.

“You could strip that exhibit out of the ordinance,” Gross responded.

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FRIDAY, JULY 27, 2018

Officer Moreno distinguished himself in community

By Steve Hunter shunter@kentreporter.com

Kent Police Officer Diego Moreno – killed Sunday in the line of duty when struck by another officer’s vehicle – never hesitated to take his job to a higher level.

In April 2017, Moreno responded to a call about a person who was unresponsive after an opioid

overdose and didn’t have a pulse. Moreno administered life-saving drugs and hooked up a defibrillator even before the fire department arrived.

“He single-handedly saved this resident’s life,” Kent Mayor Dana Ralph Moreno said at a Monday press conference outside the Police

Station about the eight-year veteran of the department.

In 2011, Moreno responded to a call about a child drowning. He located the pool, jumped a fence and found the child, who had been in the water for a two-to-three minutes and was unresponsive.

“Officer Moreno began chest

compressions and saved that child’s life,” Ralph said.

Moreno, 35, of Auburn, received awards from the police chief in each case and was honored in front of the City Council.

Ralph fought back tears as she told a story about her personal experiences with Moreno, who always went the extra mile at the annual Shop With a Cop holiday

event at Target for economically disadvantaged children.

“Diego never missed one of these events,” Ralph said about the five-year program. “He would work his graveyard shift – we all know how busy that is – nonstop all night long, and then he would show up at Target in the morning, be paired See MORENO, Page 4

Leaving a loving legacy Patricia Cosgrove to retire after fulfilling her work to improve a museum, enhance an historic farm

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

Patricia Cosgrove used to say that she and the White River Valley Museum’s board of directors to date had changed everything about the institution since her first day on the job in 1990 – everything, that is, except the plumbing.

Then, those old pipes got the do-over, too.

Last week, WRVM’s longtime director and its first professional hire had one last thing to say about time and change: seems even museum directors are not immune to them.

On Tuesday of last week, Cosgrove informed one of her

training and staff meetings that she would retire in mid-to-late October.

“I’m 63, and at some point you begin to slow down and run out of ideas a little; you have to dig a little deeper for them, and I’ve been there for a while,” Cosgrove explained.

She said she could have stepped away at any time in the last year but stayed on to front one more version of “Suffer for Beauty,” WRVM’s recurring ladies’ underwear exhibit, and to launch her final exhibit, this one about Sasquatch.

She will not be alone or idle in her golden years.

“My boyfriend, Rich, lives and works in Wenatchee, so for six years we’ve lived apart except

for weekends, and he’s going to retire when I do, so I’ll get to have a full-time partner. That will be delightful, a huge motivator to do this together,” Cosgrove said.

She also hopes to travel to France to train with Cavalia founder and equestrian trainer Frederic Pignon, train her border collie, Zip, to herd, perhaps even help out at the Mary Olson Farm or write a few grants as needed.

“When you work for a city, you are so fortunate to have a nice benefit package of the sort that doesn’t happen very often these days. I’ll be on a smaller budget, but I’ll have a budget, so I can manage,” Cosgrove said.

In her wake, Cosgrove will leave raft of transformations seen and

White River Valley Museum Director Patricia Cosgrove shares a happy moment with a boy and a donkey at Mary Olson Farm. COURTESY PHOTO

unseen, but summing to a ceilingto-studs remake that would probably leave the historical society’s founders slack-jawed.

How it started In 1990, founding members of the historical society, looking around, seeing the same faces who’d founded the museum 20 years or so earlier but aging, approached then-Mayor Bob Roegner to discuss a succession

plan for the museum. He was receptive.

“Got get the museum,” Roegner directed the City Parks Department In November of 1990, the City hired then 35-year-old Cosgrove, who had a master’s degree in museology and had worked in museums for 15 years, to form a relationship between the volunteer historical society board and the See LEGACY, Page 12

‘Baptist to Buddhist seems a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it?’

Jim Warrick took a unique road that led him to the White River Buddhist Temple, where he is the new reverend.

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

Jim Warrick’s childhood in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina has stamped itself indelibly in his honey-tongued,

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southern drawl, smooth as molasses.

But the teachings of the hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Baptists who peopled the tiny town of Egypt and the county that surrounded it more than 60 years

ago only confused him, fired up questions that defied answers, and finally led him to abandon the faith of his forebears. The answers to the many questions that threatened to burn a hole in his skull, the grown Warrick, by then a

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returned Vietnam veteran, a father and husband and a field engineer, would find only in the teachings of the Buddha.

Today, Warrick is the See BUDDHIST, Page 2

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Auburn Reporter

Legacy From Page 1

City, and to figure out how the city and the non profit could work together.

The result was a Museum Services Agreement (MSA) that codifies the partnership between the Historical Society and the City.

Two years in, the City hired Cosgrove to run the museum, then on an operating budget of $14,000.

At the time, the exhibits looked like what one might find in any small-town museum in America: behind this pink pegboard divider everything that could fit in a dining room display, then behind that pink pegboard over there a living room or a parlor scene, then on the other side of one more pink pegboard, a kitchen.

“My predecessors had built a building, they had some money in the bank, they had amassed a really good artifact collection,

but they weren’t much for cataloging it and organizing it. Being untrained, they knew to set up a generic room displays where you could see old things. And they gave good lectures and did programs, and they actually had a pretty strong support system throughout the community,” Cosgrove said.

“So, it was not an easy task to gain their trust,” Cosgrove said, “and that was what I did all the time for a number of years – work to gain their trust. It didn’t work with everybody, but it worked with a majority of them. I developed this little adage: that I would out-live them or out-love them. I remember Doris Ramstead, a very colorful character, saying to me, ‘Gosh, I wish they’d hired a man; I just don’t like getting along with women.’ I said, well, thanks!”

Museum pioneer and former newspaper publisher Al Leslie spent nearly every day in Cosgrove’s office to support her, and his widow, Ruth, volunteered at the

museum until she was 99 years of age.

“Those were years with a lot of difficulty, but we kept making headway, building some better, more interpretive exhibits, trying to take care of the artifact collection and cataloging the photographs. Over those many years we moved from having a board of directors composed of museum volunteers to a working board to a policy-setting board composed of skilled civic leaders,” Cosgrove said.

As the museum’s budget grew over time – its 2018 operating budget is $620,000-plus – Cosgrove began working with the City to bring in other professional staff, hired a part-time then a full-time collections caretaker, and a part-time educator then a full-time educator.

In 1996, the WRVM started raising money and making plans to renovate the museum. It replaced a ghastly heating system and added a cooling system bristling with the sort of

environmental controls a museum needs to have.

It rebuilt the permanent exhibit and Auburn architect Al Keimig helped reshape the interior walls pro bono.

In 1998, WRVM rebuilt and reopened its permanent exhibit. In 2001, it added a classroom and a storage warehouse wing and created a gallery to showcase two to three temporary shows a year.

During Cosgrove’s career with the City, she said, each dollar the city invested in the MSA earned the non-profit $1.05.

Work on the farm In 1994 the City bought the turn-of-the-20th century Mary Olsen Farm on Green River Road, and the museum began the tough task of raising funds to preserve and restore it.

“I don’t think it’s possible to describe how hard that work was,” Cosgrove said. “And I took it all very personally, which meant that I spent probably a few years being mad at the world because it was so hard! But eventually, in little bits and pieces, between 1998 and 2011, we raised $2.5 million or so. We restored all of the historic buildings and the historic orchard and the gardens and landscape, and then we started to create

programming to introduce the site to the public.”

The cornerstone of that effort is the field trip program, which Cosgrove developed and designed. In her tenure, 38,000 students have visited the museum and 23,000 students have visited the farm. Those numbers grow by about 5,500 a year, as first-graders learn where their food comes from, milk a life-size fiberglass cow, make cider in the orchard, dig up potatoes, feed the chickens, sweep the barn and make milk, in a setting that is just as much education as anything else they do.

With eighth-graders, the emphasis comes down more on the science side of things as they watch salmon spawn and learn about stream ecology and the water cycle.

And of course, there’s the annual September Hops and Crops micro-brew festival at the farm, a nod to Mary Olson, who is known to have raised hops.

“Our education and events person, Rachel McAllister, does a fabulous job getting 10-to-15 microbreweries there every year and wonderful bands.

When I go around, I think I’m going to introduce people to the farm and to a person they tell me, ‘Oh, we’ve been here every year.’

“Every single time I go to the farm, I pretty much choke up. I think for a lot of people it’s their happy place. We have been blessed with amazing contractors. A couple have stayed with us, even changed their lives so they could continue to work at the farm,” Cosgrove said.

To date, she has raised more than $2,400,000 to restore the farm.

In recent years, Cosgrove has turned her attention to the preservation and enhancement of Pioneer Cemetery.

‘It’s a little bit like the farm in that it holds a lot of emotion and has some very unique, sweet stories to tell. I will be leaving it with a plan for restoration and some major grants written and things, but unless I’m contracted to work on it or something, that will be the end of that. Somebody else will get to make those restorations come true,” Cosgrove said.

Leaving it all will not be easy. “I’m very proud of the legacy that I have been allowed to work on and make happen here. And for several years, retiring from it is something I have been trying to get my brain ready to accept. It’s almost like leaving a child, especially the farm, because it’s just so full of good feelings and love,” Cosgrove said.

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Making emotional music Timely lesson in civility

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

At a poignant break in Amanda Dewell’s recording session at Abbey Road Studios in London last summer, Joe Wilson, who’d brought her there with other young musicians, couldn’t find her.

On a catwalk overlooking Studio 3, he spotted her. There she’d been for 20 minutes, she told him, “just thinking.”

“What the hell about?” Wilson asked.

“About everything that happened here before me, and everything that will happen after,” Dewell answered.

Dewell had cause to reflect; the studio she was looking down into, and in which she was recording her first album with the help of some of the best music producers on the planet, using some of the most-advanced equipment in the world, was the same one in which Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon more than 40 years ago. Next door was Studio 2, where the Beatles recorded Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and other legendary albums.

Heady stuff for the-17-year-old Auburn High School student.

Dewell is about to release that album, HUND, a compilation of all-original songs. Hund, she explained, is the Swedish word for dog, and the title is a tribute to her Swedish heritage.

“We’ll probably release the album by the third week of April,” Wilson said. “We’re waiting for it to be mastered, and if it gets mastered by the end of this week, then we’ll have it by the end of this month. She’s thrilled, thrilled to get it over with.

She’s on to the next one already, and she’s already written two more songs.”

Wilson, a veteran of the local music scene, a longtime employee of Ted Brown Music, and a veteran of recording studios from here to Los Angeles, took Dewell and other youngsters who’d studied at his rock ’n roll school for kids in Tacoma to London last June.

Wilson, who met Dewell when she was 11 at the school and in a band

Parliamentarian schools the Auburn City Council on how to be a civil council.

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

Inviting professional, registered parliamentarian Ann Macfarlane in to speak to the Auburn City Council about her area of expertise, Robert’s Rules of Order, and how to use them to serve the community better, had been in the planning stages for months.

So it was actually one of those ironies that her presentation of Robert’s, written long ago to oil the wheels of civility in formal meetings, appeared on the docket of Monday’s study session, hard on the heels of a recent council controversy.

“It was timely, I would say, in that the issues we addressed were symptomatic of what went wrong,” said Deputy Mayor Bob Baggett, who runs the council meetings.

Baggett’s reference was to Councilmember Largo Wales’ use See CIVIL, Page 3

One Table full of many opinions Auburn’s Amanda Dewell, 17, haa come a long way in her musical career as a songwriter and performer. She mines her own experiences to create emotional, multifaceted songs of stunning depth, well beyond her years.

ROBERT WHALE, Auburn Reporter

Plan put out by a King County task force on homelessness leaves some members thirsty for bolder solutions.

By Josh Kelety jkelety@soundpublishing.com

that had taken first place in a competition at his school that summer, was knocked over by her cry-of-theheart, “Broken.” Dewell wrote it in 10 minutes to answer the need for another song for the contest, but in it she displayed the musical maturity and pathos of a much older person, and an amazing talent.

Dewell recalled her experience at Abbey Road, one of modern music’s sacred places.

“To be honest, I don’t closely follow Pink Floyd’s albums and the Beatles albums. I know that they are big names in music, and I appreciate

their music, but I’m kind of ignorant about that kind of stuff. But kind of the overall feeling – despite not being completely brushed-up on the history – was you could still feel something in the studio. It was really cool, and it was unlike anything I had ever felt before, especially when I was trying to record emotional pieces, and it definitely helps to have sort of an emotional aura,” Dewell said.

“It was fascinating. She was put into places she didn’t really understand. She didn’t understand what

At its creation last December, King County’s One Table task force had a clear goal: address homelessness on a regional level. But after releasing its first draft set of recommendations last week, some members of the task force say they feel the proposals come up short.

The draft recommendations – which independent journalist Erica C. Barnett first reported on – were based on input from a group of 75 individuals, ranging from statelevel elected officials to business owners to representatives of the nonprofit sector, all brought to the proverbial table

by King County Executive Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus. The recommendations name six “priority actions:” building

See MUSIC, Page 3

See TABLE, Page 3

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Auburn Reporter

From Page 1

Abbey Road meant, and what really happened there. So before she left, I told her to look up Dark Side of the Moon. … You could put half a symphony in that studio, and Studio 1 is where they do all the film work. It was unbelievable.

I had no idea that any place could be that immense and that cool,” Wilson said.

As might have been expected, Dewell was nervous for the first two or three songs, but soon enough she found her groove.

“She said it did up her game a lot, and when we finally got the stuff back from London and started to play with it here, it was incredibly well done. I mean, the difference between her voice as they recorded it there, and previous recordings was absolutely unbelievable.

“This was really meant to be nothing but a demo, really, a

Civil From Page 1

of an obscenity during the March 5 regular meeting to refer to fellow council member John Holman, who had just called out Wales on one of Robert’s points of order, that is, for speaking more than two times on a single topic.

Turns out, Macfarlane stressed, that initially limiting a single member’s comments to two-pertopic, to give others a chance to speak, is one of the most important of all the rules which that necessarybut-dry-as dust-book-of-do-thisesand-don’t-do-thats sets down.

Macfarlane rolled out all she had to say in a lively, twp-hourmix of anecdotes about meetings gone bad elsewhere – including one where somebody in a city-notnamed dropped his pants during a meeting to express an opinion – and lecture and role-playing scenarios.

An interesting fact of history, Macfarlane noted, is that it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote the first manual on parliamentary procedure in 1776, with the acknowledgment that any association of people, “from the smallest town vestry to the greatest assembly of nations,” will have its quarrels.

“We think of our Founding Fathers and how great they were, but they had their quarrels, they had their fights, they had their

high-dollar demo, if you will,” Wilson said. “I didn’t think of it as something that could actually be an album, or something you would release as an album.

When we got it back – and there weren’t a whole lot of instruments on it, just one instrument on most of the songs ,and her voice – we and a lot of people from different parts of the country played around with it as to what to do with it. I wanted to have a recording of just her voice and instrumental accompaniment to take to the record labels, and I wanted them to fill in the holes. Ultimately, I was told that was probably the best decision I ever made.”

Before she left for London, Dewell described her process to the Auburn Reporter. Dewell writes – typically in her room at home – of her own experiences, but her songs are multi-faceted, touch on universal themes, say many things. And while she writes, the melody composes itself

in her head.

“It’s strange mostly because I feel that I’m not even saying what I’m feeling correctly, so that’s where I think the most difficulty comes. I use it mostly as a therapeutic thing. It’s nice when you can write down what you’re feeling because it makes it easier to grasp onto something that’s not tangible. If I don’t do that, it can make me feel more stressed out or depressed,” Dewell said then.

“It’s an interesting way of writing something,” Wilson said. “She’s not writing about little kids’ things, she’s actually writing adult sort of lyrics, but always about something that is affecting her at some point.

I played ‘Broken’ for a guy on an airplane. He was 65, and he said, ‘This woman is writing about my life, singing about my life.’ ” To hear one of the songs off of Dewell’s soon-to-be-released album, visit the link below. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=doznTNHS5AA&feature=share-

difficulties as well, and the whole idea of writing the manual was to try to help everybody come together,” Macfarlane said, Macfarlane assigned the City’s legislators the roles of council members of the fictional city of Dinoville, giving them names like Betty Brontosaurus and the like, and put them through their paces.

Respect each other, put the personal aside, and remember you are here for a sacred purpose, that is, to support the City and all its residents, Macfarlane said.

And once a measure is passed, move on, don’t dredge it up later on in the meeting.

Whether a particular remark constitutes an insult should be up to council consensus, but if council agrees, even calling others “Bozos” could be allowed.

Crucial, McFarland said, is the role the chairperson – here, the deputy mayor – plays in running the council meetings: how he or handle sinappropriate comments, non-germane comments, flaring tempers ,and all the unpredictable things that can happen when people are hashing out issues with others who may vehemently disagree with them.

The question at the end of the evening, of course, was whether vigorous observance of Robert’s Rules of Order and the council’s own rules will make things better.

Council members were optimistic.

“Point of order was the biggest

contention; it raised the hackles on a lot of us” Councilman Bill Peloza said after the meeting, about the recent controversy. “This has been a good education process for leadership, and it should bear out a lot of positive movement for the council going forward.”

“I think it’s going to provide better civility between council members because it gives you more formal processes. Robert’s gives you that anyhow, but I think after tonight we have the opportunity to go a little bit deeper into understanding each other,” said Councilman Claude DaCorsi.

A lot of what happens in meetings to come will fall on Baggett.

“It’s a lot to remember as to protocol and procedure, the right words to say at the right time. It’s a challenge, but it’s part of the learning process. Like Ann said, you have to repeat these things time and time again to be in the habit of doing it,” Baggett said.

Would application of Robert’s Rules of Order all around have prevented what happened on March 5?

“I’m not sure, can’t say for sure,” Baggett said. “You get personalities and things like that involved, and it’s … difficult to assume what a person will say or do at one moment in time. I believe what happened was a clash of personalities more than anything. We have to learn to respect each other and remember why we are all here.”

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Table From Page 1

5,000 affordable homes over the next three years, creating a housing stabilization fund to prevent people from becoming homeless, providing on-demand behavioral health treatment, training and hiring 1,300 people at-risk of homelessness over two years by the county, reducing jail bookings and charges against individuals facing housing instability, and expanding foster care services.

Notably, the draft doesn’t include new revenue sources to pay for any of the priority actions, and it doesn’t list cost estimates for the new investments.

According to the draft, the task force believes that these actions “can put a stop to the flow of our friends and neighbors into homelessness.” Yet, some members of the task force say the working recommendations fall short.

One Table member and Executive Director of the Seattle/ King Coalition on Homelessness Alison Eisinger said that the draft “does not reflect an accurate response to the scale of the crisis.” Eisinger, who is a member of the affordable housing “work group” within the task force, said that the draft’s call for 5,000 additional, affordable homes is woefully inadequate.

“When I think about being bold, when I think about being strategic, when I think about being realistic about what this region needs, 5,000 falls short,” Eisinger said. “Good thing that it is only a draft.”

Recent estimates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development put the countywide homeless population at more than 11,000. The 2018 tally from the annual One Night Count of people living outside and in emergency shelters reported similar numbers.

King County Councilmember and One Table member Jeanne Kohl-Welles said that while the 5,000 homes figure is “inadequate,” it is an ambitious and achievable target for a three-year time frame. “I don’t believe that it is large enough of a scale,” said Kohl-Welles, “yet to realistically reach that goal over a three-year period is very aggressive.”

According to officials in Executive Constantine’s office,

A3

task force members generated all of the ideas listed in the draft recommendations, and staff in the county’s Department of Community and Human Services prepared the actual report.

Gordon McHenry, a task force member, who serves on the affordable housing work group and is president of the anti-poverty, non-profit, Solid Ground, said that the plan isn’t bold enough and hasn’t laid out a clear implementation strategy in terms of how local governments will carry out the recommendations and finance them.

“We don’t have a clear understanding of the next steps,” McHenry said. “For me, implementation is a concern.”

“We have not yet identified what the funding will be or what the resources will be, which is a critical part of it,” Kohl-Welles added.

One Table members will discuss the draft recommendations at their next meeting in mid-April, and finalize them at the last meeting on May 3.

County officials say that, while potential revenue sources and the financial costs of the draft recommendations may be discussed at that mid-April meeting, the task force wasn’t chartered to identify revenue sources for its recommendations.

“Dow and both mayors didn’t put a requirement that the work group identify revenue streams on this,” said Chad Lewis, deputy director of communications in the executive’s office. “You don’t want to stifle it by saying, ‘We don’t exactly have funding sources.’ ” Lewis and other county staff stress that the draft recommendations could still be altered at the mid-April meeting, should task force members choose to push that through.

McHenry added that both the final recommendations and the implementation of them will have to be aggressive and bold to effectively address the regional homelessness crisis. “Our community is in such a hole … anything we come up with is going to have to be incredibly bold because we’ve had years, if not decades, of inadequacy.”

One Table is the latest iteration of countywide plans to address homelessness. In 2005, the county rolled out a 10-year plan to end homelessness. It failed.

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Music

Friday, April 13, 2018

Community awaits return of Petpalooza

Stars sparkle at All-City track meet

Pages 7-10

REPORTER AUBURN

SOUND PUBLISHING, INC.

Page 14

AUBURN-REPORTER.COM

FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2018

Presidential history as he saw it

Harold Hill served 3 administrations

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

Harold Hill was in a car in Austin, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963, as a member of the communications crew setting up for President John F. Kennedy’s next stop after Dallas.

Shortly after 12:30 p.m., at the window, a sharp rap. Two strangers had spotted the White House sticker on the windshield.

“Did you know the President got shot,” the men asked?

Hill and crew did not believe it.

“Yeah, sure,” Hill said.

Shortly after that, two other men came along, talking to each other about the shooting, and Hill and his crew realized the terrible truth.

Hill, a former Auburn and Kent resident, and a longtime member of First United Methodist Church in Auburn, died at St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way on April 6 at age 87. The couple had seven children: Howard, Nancy, Doug, Anita, Patrick, Ellen and Larry.

He was buried in a Kent cemetery on April 11. His memorial service is at 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 19 at the First United Methodist Church in Auburn.

Today, the dining room table in the home Hill shared with Sylvia,

his wife of nearly 68 years, in Tacoma, is laid with photographs and mementos of his long, rich life, all of which his wife will share at the memorial service.

Hill in the 71st Army Band barracks at Fort Clayton in Panama.

Hill training in Panama, where he learned to exist for days in the jungle and eat bugs.

The couple’s first car in Panama, their postage stamp of an apartment, their dinky kitchen,their children; a newspaper photo of JFK at his desk signing a document in the Oval Office, Hill among a group of men in the background.

In the living room, one of Eisenhower’s paintings, which became a presidential postcard.

Harold met Sylvia in geometry class at Auburn High School.

He, a year her senior, sat behind her, and, she couldn’t help notice, began finding his way into her classes. Turns out, he knew how to make her laugh, too.

“A smartass,” Sylvia said with a laugh.

Upon Hill’s graduation from AHS in 1948, a representative of the Army Band at Madigan recruited the trumpet-playing youth into the band, along with See HILL, Page 3

Extensions give officials time to invite pool of local haulers to submit requests for proposals.

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

to match her machine. “But at the end of the day, we’re a group of friends who have the same interests. We get together … have fun and talk about racing.”

Like her competitors, Dooley is learning to drive responsibly, race safely under expert supervision.

Her father, Mark, tunes the race car, a scaled-down version of a Top Fuel dragster, powered

The City of Auburn will extend the term of its solid waste contracts with Waste Management and Republic, and while its haulers are still picking up the trash, scout out a new extended contract through a request for proposals process.

Monday’s vote was 4-2, with Councilmembers Largo Wales and Yolanda Trout-Manuel voting no. Councilman Larry Brown was absent.

For Councilman Bill Peloza, Monday’s decision brings the City one step closer to the realization of a long-cherished goal.

“We have been trying now for 14 to 15 years to have the City of Auburn under one hauler,” Peloza said. “Right now, we have several haulers doing the city, and some of the pricing is one way, some of the container sizes are one way.

This will make it consistent with other city governments’ ways of handling waste within the city.”

When the City last advertised for bids in 2016, Auburn-based Waste Management was the only company that submitted. But to give staff time to study hauling costs and related solid-waste-related issues in other cities, the City Council delayed accepting the bid by exercising the first of two, up-to-two-year extensions allowed by the present contract.

See RACE, Page 11

See WASTE, Page 2

Sylvia Hill displays a newspaper article about her late husband, Harold Hill, and the presidents he served during his 11 years as a communications specialist in the White House. Hill died April 6 at 87.

ROBERT WHALE, Auburn Reporter

Junior Dragster program puts youth in fast lane Teams honor Mark Lyle, beloved NHRA chief starter.

By Mark Klaas mklaas@auburn-reporter.com

She’s an energetic, fun-loving teen who morphs into a focused, fierce competitor behind the wheel of a sleek dragster.

They call her JoJo.

And she’s fast, wow, is she fast.

So fast, the competition seldom catches up to Jordan Dooley and her purple blur of a lightweight race car. A flawless, routine run covers a one-eighth-mile, asphalt drag strip under eight seconds at a top speed of 85 mph.

And she’s just getting started.

“It’s fun. It’s the feeling of having the power,” said the 14-year-old Port Orchard girl, moments before her qualifying

City extends waste contracts

run at the inaugural Mark Lyle Junior Invitational at sun-doused Pacific Raceways in Kent last Saturday. “When the (starting) light goes on and you’re off, it’s hard to pick yourself back up in the seat because you get pushed back into it from all the force. And I love that feeling. It’s so cool.”

Even cooler when she beats the boys.

“Oh, yes,” she said with a wide smile, hair dyed in bright purple

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Auburn Reporter

Hill

From Page 1

two other young musicians.

Silvia graduated a year later.

When the Army sent Hill to Panama in 1949, Sylvia began college in Ellensburg. But in June of 1950 he returned to marry her, in a night ceremony lit by flashlights in her back yard. The couple went on to Panama, where they spent the first four years of their married life, and where their first two children were born.

After four years, Hill was reassigned to Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Later, the Army sent him to New Jersey and then on to Fort Meyer, Va. near Washington, D.C. When sinus trouble forced Hill to give up the band – he was one of those people who could, and did, play every instrument that came to his hand – he retrained in recording and electronics and went looking for a job at the Pentagon.

Shortly after President Eisenhower’s first heart attack, the Army assigned Hill to the White House as a communications and recording specialist. His job then, and after, would be to record every public utterance of the president.

While Hill did not have a lot of personal contact

with “Ike,” Sylvia said, her husband found him predictable and punctual, always Army, and always “The General.” And he thought the world of First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.

Of the three presidents Hill served in his 11 years in the White House, however, Kennedy was his favorite, and he always carried a special place in his heart for him.

While he found Kennedy not as predictable as Eisenhower, he was personable, informal and approachable. The president and Jackie invited the children of Hill and other staff members to participate in the annual Easter Egg hunts on the White House lawn. He played softball with Joseph Kennedy II, the oldest son of Robert Kennedy.

The president presented him a rare, white leather-bound copy of his 1961 Inaugural Address.

And when Kennedy delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Germany in 1963, Major Sgt. Harold B. Hill was there to record it for posterity.

“I thought at the time I was in Berlin it must have been the biggest crowd in the whole world,” Hill told the Auburn Globe upon his retirement from the Army on Sept. 13, 1968. “But later, I went to Southeast Asia and Korea with President

anything that happened along the way and took pictures,” Sylvia said.

“I had our kids up on top of the hill above the burial site. You couldn’t see anything but the procession from there, but there were crowds up there. It was all wbroadcast on loudspeakers.

I took a couple of neighbor kids along with mine. There was a big cross, 8-foot tall and made of granite. My boy and another boy climbed up on the arms of the cross. I decided, ‘I don’t know those kids.’ They wouldn’t budge, so there they were, looking disrespectful,” Sylvia said.

Hill found President Lyndon Johnson much more aloof and distant, or, as he told Sylvia, a “big blowhard.”

Sgt. Hill served one year of active duty in Vietnam.

After his retirement, he found a job with an up-and-coming electronics firm, AUDISCAN Inc., a manufacturer of portable, audio-visual equipment in Bellevue.

When he passed, Sylvia said, the world lost someone special.

“He was someone who was earnest about everything, gave his best, always worked hard,” Silvia said of her late husband. “From our children, I’m learning how much fun he was. I forgot that he played with the kids – he got grumpy when he got older.”

Johnson, and the crowd that greeted him in Seoul was even greater. In fact, I was frightened because they pushed and shoved so that I was certain I would be trampled to death.”

In the article, Hill reminisced about JFK. “He was young and vital, and learned to call us by our first names,” Hill said.

After Kennedy’s assassination, the communications crew in Austin had to return to Dallas to pack everything up, and then make their way to LBJ’s ranch and install the communications apparatus to link the ranch with the world.

“Johnson was on a 29-farmer line to the ranch, that was it. They had to put in new communication lines out to the ranch, so they were out digging ditches. Same thing when Eisenhower went in, they had to dig ditches and stuff to get lines to the Eisenhower farm. When presidents go on vacation, they’ve got to have secured communications there,” Sylvia said.

Hill’s last act for the late president was to record his funeral, at the special request of Jackie Kennedy.

“Jackie wanted him to record the procession, everything from the cathedral to the gravesite, so he had to get men stationed along there, and they leapfrogged the parade and recorded

Friday, May 11, 2018

City awards contract for street preservation

By Robert Whale rwhale@auburn-reporter.com

It will cost $2.1 million to complete the 15th Street Northeast-Northwest preservation project.

And here’s what Auburn residents get for those bucks.

Grinding and overlaying of 15th Street NW/ NE from State Route 167 to Auburn Way North and grinding and overlaying of Harvey Road Northeast from Auburn Way North to 8th Street Northeast, all to restore 7.57 lane miles of pavement, upgrade the pedestrian signal system and approximately 30 curb ramps to meet ADA standards and to relocate traffic signal poles that are prone to damage where they are.

On Monday, the City Council awarded the contract to CPM Development Corporation (ICON Materials) on its low bid.

City officials expect work to start this month and wrap this October.

“It will come off State

Route 167 and go into Harvey Road, so it will be a fine addition to the city,” said Councilman Bill Peloza.

Despite the low bid coming in at 20 percent above the engineer’s estimate, all four bids received were within close range of each other.

Staff evaluation indicated that the electrical and traffic control work was bid higher than anticipated, probably because of the Underutilized Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (UDBE) goal of 19 percent, which the Federal Grant administrator had to assign to the project so the city could use the federal grant funds.

A project budget contingency of $21,435 remains in the sewer fund.

The estimated total project costs for street and signal improvements within the arterial preservation, capital signal improvement, engineering repairs and maintenance funds are equal to the amounts budgeted for the project.

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