Cascadia: What's Next?

There it sits on the top of a hill, one of the Northwest's premium planned communities. Manicured trees. Uncracked, white sidewalks and street lamps that glow each night. Wide, fresh paved roads, with names like "Columbia Vista" and "Canyon Falls Boulevard." 

It even has a new state-of-the-art elementary school.

Cascadia has everything. Everything but the houses.  And money.

The ambitious suburban community just south of Bonney Lake, finally declared bankruptcy on Sept. 22 after almost 20 years of planning, countless hours of government staff time and  millions of dollars spent. Seattle's Homestreet Bank put the project on the auction block Sept. 24, and when no one showed up with a check for $61.9 million, the project defaulted to the bank.

And now the city has a white elephant on its hands. More specifically, only the elephant's cage.

"Our goal right now is to try and stay in tune with [Homestreet], ask a lot of questions and find out what they want to do," said Bonney Lake mayor Neil Johnson. "We don't want to be adversarial, we want a solution. If it's anything other than [Cascadia] happening there, that can only pose problems to us. Not just for Bonney Lake, but Pierce County in general. It has the potential to turn a bunch of small issues turn into one big issue."

The community would have been an unmatched in local scope: 6,500 homes stretched over 5,000 acres, with 626 acres of it dedicated to commercial space. There was going to be a hotel, three golf courses and seven schools, with self-sustaining sewer and water facilities built the state's highest environmental standards. Locals believed Cascadia had the potential to make Bonney Lake a boomtown.

Instead, it's 400 vacant lots, a sewer plant with too little sewage, an elementary school without a neighborhood, roads with no cars. It became a statewide example of vision exceeding reach, a modern ghost town.

"It's an unknown world right now. What happens to a company that went bankrupt, defaulted to the bank, and there are (plans) in place for over 10 years," said Johnson. "Does it all just go away? Does it become null and void? Does anyone step up? That's what we're all waiting to see."

Cascadia lead developer Patrick Kuo struggled in recent years to find funding,  which dried up as the economy tanked. In the months leading up to Cascadia's bankruptcy declaration on Sept. 22, Kuo even lost millions of his own dollars in the process, owing creditors about $750,000, according to the initial bankruptcy filing.

Homestreet Bank put Cascadia to the auction block Sept. 24, but no bidders showed. The project defaulted to Homestreet, and now it's up to the bank to find an owner. But Homestreet Bank, too, is in trouble. It's currently on the FDIC watch list, and there is a possibility that it could be taken over by another bank as mandated by the federal government.

When asked for a comment, Homestreet representatives said the bank is dedicated to finding the right company to complete the project. They even hinted at having a potential buyer.

"The bank is in the process of completing an evaluation of the development plan for the Cascadia project to help identify the appropriate population of potential developers," Homestreet CEO Mark Mason wrote in a statement to Patch. 

"Upon completing this work, the bank anticipates marketing the project for sale in the near future.  We anticipate working closely with officials from Pierce County and local municipalities to ensure that the public's interests are appropriately addressed in the marketing plan."

All of which means bank officials also don't know either what's going to become of the project.  And what's good for the bank might not be good for Bonney Lake -- or Pierce County. Since Cascadia is not part of Bonney Lake or its urban growth strategy, government responsibility for planning and mitigation falls on the shoulders of Pierce County.

"The county has worked with Patrick Kuo and the Cascadia team for upward of 20 years. From the county's perspective, only one thing has changed – there's a new owner of the property," said Hunter George, head of communications for Pierce County. "All the permits, all the contracts and policy decisions, every one is still in place today – the county's interest is long term."

As a neighboring community, Bonney Lake has a limited say in the future of Cascadia -- even though it was always part of a larger regional plan to annex Cascadia to Bonney Lake. But if the project takes a different turn, it's questionable how much influence Bonney Lake will have on any change in plans.

Originally, Cascadia was planned as  an "employment based community," meaning that its residents would not commute to work, school or play. Everything they would need would have been included in the Cascadia package, including hundreds of new jobs.

"If Homestreet gets shut down by the Feds, or if they sell [Cascadia] off piecemeal, then we have to go through a whole new round of mitigation," said Johnson.

"Cascadia was supposed to be self-contained and employment-based. If they split it apart and you have five or six different residential developments, it is no longer employment-based. When you only have people, that means people have to leave to go places. That unfortunately means a lot more traffic."

It's not just a problem for the future. Cascadia's collapse is having an impact today. 

• Cascadia was responsible for fixing important traffic infrastructures along State Route 410 and other connecting roads to support the influx of new residents.  The project remains incomplete.
• Developers also were responsible for filling in the "missing link" that connects 192nd Avenue, from the Wal Mart shopping complex to Bonney Lake High School. Cascadia already contributed $150,000 in mitigation money. However, building the road could cost $12 million or more – something that Bonney Lake can't afford.
• If the project is broken up into segments with an agenda other than that of Cascadia's, a new SEPA plan would have to be created, which then leads additional planning -- and additional money.
• The new sewage plant, built to handle Cascadia-grade waste at 100,000 gallan a day, now only serves Eismann Elementary --  one-tenth of one percent of its daily capacity. Yet its operating costs are more similar to a plant running at full capacity.

Bonney Lake Chamber of Commerce executive director Lora Butterfield called Cascadia a "disappointment." 

And then there's Eismann Elementary, the school without a neighborhood.  Not only is the school in the "middle of nowhere," as a student recently joked but enrollment is declining in the district, making the need for a new school questionable. 

Even so, McAlder Elementary School students will move into Eismann Elementary next year. The McAlder Elementary facility on the Puyallup/Sumner border will sit empty.

"Right now, the priority is in reassigning students to this new school. The existing facilities [at McAlder] will be repurposed, and those students will have a new assignment at Eismann," said Ann Cook, director of communications for the Sumner School District.

"Six or seven years down the road, when enrollment numbers increase again, then we will look at future uses for McAlder Elementary."

As for the future of Cascadia, it's anyone's guess.