The City of Auburn has never been shy about sharing its hopes for attracting new development to the downtown to expand its tax base.

But vintage electrical and water systems —some of it dating to the 1930s — under the City-owned blocks earmarked for development south of City Hall kept blunting the City’s appeal to developers.

Auburn’s leaders realized that if they were going to make developers salivate about building anything inside their 120-year-old city, they as city officials would have to find a way to bring that dowdy infrastructure up to date. They would have to find a way to get underground systems capable of handling the type of modern development the City wanted above.

Now, five years from the first stabs at financing and designing the City’s answer to the problem, the South Division Street Promenade is open. Underground are some newm city-owned fiber conduits, storm drainage improvements, relocated sewer lines and enlarged city-owned water lines. Workers replaced old clay pipes and buried aerial wires.

Topside, there are other fancy new things, like colored traffic circles, benches, new lighting, crosswalks, new sidewalks, street trees and potted plants.

Ball in the developers court’s court now.

“The Promenade is done,” Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis said at last Thursday’s grand opening at Plaza Park south of City Hall. “Division Street is about to open. We are now taking orders. We have three [city-owned] blocks that we are going to sell… We’ve got the best deals you’re ever going to find. Now is the time to buy.”

The Promenade represents the final leg of some major downtown infrastructure investment. Exactly one year earlier, the City opened the City Hall Plaza. Several months after that it opened Plaza Park across the street at the corner of South Division and West Main.

A vital part of downtown redevelopment plans, the promenade, extending along South Division Street from the edge of the City Hall Plaza to 3rd Street Southeast, took a chunk of the downtown vision that the Auburn Downtown Plan foresaw in 2001 and made it happen.

“The new look — and I’ve been told this many times — is crisp and contemporary … It’s a new gathering place for our city, and it’s to celebrate our history and our people. It’s an investment in current and new business,” said Deputy Mayor Nancy Backus.

Backus noted that 20 percent of the money was spent on the visible stuff, but 80 percent of the money is underground, invested in improvements the downtown just had to have.

City leaders say the project is also about supporting existing businesses.

Nacy Wyatt, President and COO of the Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce one block south of City Hall on South Division Street, promised to do a happy dance in the street after the ceremony, celebrating not only the end of construction-related inconveniences but also good days to come.

“Because I am just so thrilled,” Wyatt explained.

While on-street parking remains, the City has widened the sidewalk on the west side of the street, making it curbless.

Councilman Rich Wagner pushed to include one technological advance that fellow Councilmember Bill Peloza had heard about during a trip to Washington D.C.: a mixture of conventional gray and pervious concrete, capable of slurping up storm water before it seeps into the ground below the street.

To pay for it all, the City tapped $3 million in grant funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) and used a portion of $7 million in local revitalization funds it received from the state of Washington, largely, Lewis said, through the efforts of State Rep. Patrick Sullivan, D-Covington.

Auburn Planning Manager Elizabeth Chamberlain led the City team. She recalled that five years had passed from first grant preparation and the first stirrings of the design phase to the end product.

“KPG, Inc. took our design vision and ran with it,” Chamberlain said.

Within months the City begins work on a downtown sculpture garden to bring additional art into the downtown. with pedestrian kiosks to direct people around.

“This is going to make my job a lot easier promoting downtown,” said Kathleen Keator, director of The Auburn Downtown Association. “There is so much here, and so much more coming. This is a cool place to live, it’s a cool place to work, it’s a cool place to do business. And when someone says there’s nothing downtown, I send them to Federal Way or Covington’s downtown.”