MultiCare plans to bring a new, 24-7, administrative center and about 350 new jobs to a site on 15th Street Southwest near The Outlet Collection Mall.
Green River College has started construction on its aerospace and aviation downtown campus east of Lowe’s in north Auburn. The college expects to open the building for classes in the fall of 2016.
And World CNG, LLC, a Des Plaines, Ill.-based, freight shipping and trucking company, will bring about 50 new manufacturing jobs to 17,000 square feet of converted warehouse space. At the site, the company will manufacture equipment to convert gasoline engines to natural gas and propane gas engines.
“It’s a company we’ve chased for about three years,” Auburn Economic Development Manager Doug Lein said Monday evening, presenting to the Auburn City Council his Mid Year 2015, Economic Development Update.
Lein said leasing is brisk and tenants have been moving in to the residential floors of the Trek Building, the five-story mixed-use facility that opened this June on the site formerly known as the Cavanaugh Block on East Main Street.
Green River Cycle, a high-end bicycle-sale-and-repair operation, will be the first retail business to open on the Trek Building’s ground floor.
Lein said Trek’s owners have also told him they will also open a coffee shop on the first floor facing East Main Street.
Commencement Bank has leased space in a new retail office building going in on Auburn Way North, just south of 272nd, anticipating a grand opening in the coming weeks.
In late July, Teutsch Partners, LLC, began work on the Merrill Gardens Assisted Living and Senior Apartment Complex on South Division Street. Construction should take about 18 months.
Panera Bread, and Qdoba Mexican Grill plan to open shops on 15th Street Southwest, adjacent to The Outlet Collection.
Most, but by no means all of the news, was positive.
The number of single-family residential building permits the City of Auburn had issued by mid-2015 fell to 105 from the 164 the City issued in the first half of 2014. In monetary terms, that’s worth $8 million less than in the first half of 2014.
In the same time span, the number of commercial building permits issue rose slightly, from 205 to 207.
Meanwhile, the number of business licenses issued rose from 148 to 220, and sales tax revenue increased from $7.5 to $8 million.
Lein was optimistic that the number of single-family building permits issued would rise by the end of the year. He said more builders are already going through the plat process, putting new product on the market that they had been holding last year.
