Written by 
For almost 20 years, Renton has had the privilege to be home to the Northwest Mountain Region office of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) It’s been a great partnership. Their current home is on Lind Avenue, across the street from Wizards of the Coast.
Now, following tremendous growth in aviation over the past two decades, FAA has outgrown their existing facilities. They are looking for a place to expand.
Our economic development specialists have worked with local landowners to identify for FAA ten possible sites in Renton that we feel would be excellent locations for their new Northwest-Mountain Headquarters building.
The FAA is a very important employer in Renton, as they currently provide almost 1500 high-quality aviation jobs in our community. In their new headquarters building, this number is likely to increase to almost 2000. They are currently our city’s fourth largest employer.
The FAA also attracts engineers, mechanics and business owners from all over the Northwest and Rocky Mountain states (Washington, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado) for prolonged business visits related to work on their airplane projects. Many of these visitors stay in our hotels and eat in our restaurants, adding even more to our jobs and city tax base. The local FAA office also host national meetings and conferences related to their leadership role in commercial jet transportation (in aviation language, they are the home of the national Transport Airplane Directorate).
We strongly desire to keep them in Renton.
Here are the sites that have been suggested to the FAA:
• The FAA Building: Current home of the nearly 200,000 square-foot FAA Northwest Mountain Regional Office at 1600 Lind Avenue Southwest. Expansion is possible there.
• Southport: 17.5 acres at 1087 Lake Washington Boulevard N. on Lake Washington.
• Lakeshore Landing: 16 acres (total 21 acres) of Boeing property at Park Avenue North and North Eighth Street.
• Sunset Bluffs: 36 acres on State Route 900/Southwest Sunset Boulevard on northwest corner of Renton’s valley office and industrial area.
• Hawk’s Landing: 7.2 acres at 4350 Lake Washington Boulevard N., near the Seahawks’ headquarters.
• Former Sound Ford property: 8.4 acres at 750 Rainier Ave. S.
• Stoneway: 14 acres on Maple Valley Highway (former Stoneway concrete plant).
• Triton Towers expansion: 21.6 acres on South Grady Way at Renton Village.
• Longacres Office Park: 12 acres of Boeing property at Southwest 27th Street, visible from I-405.
• Regal East Valley Theaters: 12.3 acres at 3751 E. Valley Road.
You can read some more about this competition in this Renton Reporter article
Are the East Valley cinemas shut down? TCC
For a few months at least.
I had no idea. Why are they shut down? TCC
East Valley 13 theaters are open
They show second run movies for $3 any time of the day. I see more movies now than I have in years. I just have to wait a few weeks to see them. I took my kids to see ‘The Hurt Locker’ last saturday night. We always get good seats too.
‘The Blind Side’ just started playing. I might be taking my wife to see a movie tomorrow.
I will miss them if the site is redeveloped.
Union Hat
Re: East Valley 13 theaters are open
I agree that this is a great theater. It’s a very nice, fairly new facility, and always offers ten or more fairly new movies (before they reach video) for $3 each. And there is never any issue finding a parking spot or a seat.
But the 12 acre property, which has been marketed publicly on Loopnet, is worth something near ten million dollars. The $3 movie theater is a good interim use, and I hope and expect it to keep operating for at least a while, but ultimately the owners of the site are going to want to find a use that capitalizes on the 10 million dollar value of the site. I think it is possible that with some uses they could still keep the theater building, especially if they built a parking garage. So stay tuned!
Re: East Valley 13 theaters are open
In this post from last year, you can see that East Valley 13 was being marketed on Loopnet for 11.5 million. It’s shown as “prime commercial property” on page 1 of the Loopnet listings.
Oops… me being stupid. I was thinking of the theatre near the old Thriftway.
choose the southport office complex!!!!!
Southport would be perfect for the FAA and others
Southport has approved permits for three 250,000 sq.ft. office towers and a hotel right on the shores of Lake Washington. This is right next to the Boeing 737 final assembly plant and a few blocks north of a large cluster of Boeing office buildings. The FAA would fit nicely into one tower, with a little room to expand. They could not find a nicer setting anywhere in Renton. There are darn few nicer places in the entire state.
On another blog topic a commenter incorrectly indicated that Microsoft has offices in the valley. Microsoft does have a significant presence in Renton in the form of several hundred employees, like my next door neighbor, who live in Renton and waste one or two hours a day commuting to and from Redmond. Microsoft tends to work employees far more than eight hours a day, so time lost to commuting translates into lost work time and decreased productivity. It would be really smart, and green, if Microsoft were to lease or buy an office tower at Southport. I know of a way that Microsoft could very cheaply lease dark fiber to their north Bellevue offices and possibly to the Sabey complex in Tukwila where they have a few buildings. Several major national carriers have Internet PoPs at Sabey.
So, Microsoft can have an office close to lots of employees and lots of nice, affordable housing, right on Lake Washington, adjacent to the nicest park on the lake, a five minute walk from a cluster of new restaurants and entertainment, and a twenty minute walk from the Seahawks training camp with essentially unlimited, cheap bandwidth to the main campus and the Internet in a city that makes it easy to build and room to grow to 500,000 square feet in a heartbeat and a few blocks from 21 acres of undeveloped land that is just begging for an expanded office, retail, residential complex with a motivated, experienced developer right next door in The Landing in a city that would roll out a red carpet and probably have a parade every year on the anniversary of the date they open a new office.
I usually think of the people at Microsoft as being really smart. So why are they not doing this already? Maybe it is the stupid $55 per FTE business tax that has driven half of the Boeing jobs out of Renton. This tax will cost the FAA about $100,000 per year if they stay in Renton. It would cost Microsoft something like $75 per employee as it is charged based on the number of hours worked and they work long hours. I could be wrong, but I credit this suicidal tax policy with keeping the total employment in Renton below 45,000 when the rest of the Puget Sound was rapidly increasing daytime jobs. It is going to work wonders for the local economy in the weak recovery when business are looking for any kind of savings.
Maybe the Council likes the idea of being a small-time bedroom community adjacent to Seattle and Bellevue. Oh wait, we get to have a strip club, casino, bar district so I guess we won’t be just a bedroom community after all, even if there is a whole lot of sleeping together going on.
A city has to have sufficient income to deliver municipal services, but maybe Renton could be more like Kent or Bellevue and at least pretend that we won’t punish a business when they are successful and hire a few employees.
Union Hat
Re: Southport would be perfect for the FAA and others
Nice post… it’s making me think a lot about Renton’s per-hour tax.
For someone like Microsoft who typically hires salaried workers – figuring out the tax liability probably costs them more than the tax itself as you’d have to get $100,000 workers to waste their time filling out time cards.