Pierce Today

Tumwater gets major grant for brewery property. Is this the catalyst the site n…

Twenty years ago this month the whistle at the Olympia brewery in Tumwater blew for its final time, signaling the end to the community’s largest private employer and a staple in South Sound. Since 2003, the campus, full of derelict yellow-colored buildings, has sat abandoned on 100 acres in the city. Tumwater officials, backed by community input, have envisioned turning the site into a Brewery District, a mixed-use complex with residential, commercial and public use. But the problem is the site may be contaminated with pollutants from decades of industrial work. Now, the city of Tumwater has received a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields grant of $500,000 to assess if the properties are contaminated, and come up with a plan for cleaning it up so the site can be redeveloped. The grant allows the city to take the lead on assessing the site and decide what to do with it in the future.

“I think about growing up in this region, and I’m old enough to remember the Tumwater jingle,” said U.S. Rep. Marilyn Strickland, who toured the property on Friday with Tumwater and EPA officials. “The Olympia Beer brand was a big part of the identity of the South Puget Sound, so being here on this property, thinking about the long-term vision, and really helping engage in the environmental remediation of this site is a really important thing we have to do.” The funds also will go toward conducting more community outreach and to get more ideas on what the site should look like, as well as to the Capitol Boulevard corridor project near the brewery. It’s the first step in a lengthy process, and it’s unclear just how much money will be required to make the site open to the public again. It will require years of cleanup, possible demolition and construction. John Doan, retiring Tumwater city administrator, shared the history of the Olympia brewery with Strickland and the other guests.

He said the owners, the Schmidt family, realized at the end of prohibition that their old brick brewhouse building below Tumwater Falls wasn’t going to be big enough for future demand. So they went up to the top of the hill and built the more modern brewery on Custer Way. Doan said it’s a move that put Olympia beer on the map nationally. “The brewery played an incredibly important part in Tumwater,” he said. “Not only did it have jobs — at the time it closed there were about 600 jobs that were lost — but it was really the heart and soul of the community.” Doan said right now there’s a great big hole in the city that needs to be filled. And revitalizing the site is at the heart of Tumwater’s economic development plan.

During the tour, Doan said many of the buildings are made of concrete and metal, some of them still housing tanks used to store and age beer. He said those factors make it difficult to figure out how to re-use the buildings. Next door lies a giant concrete slab where an office building used to be. It burned down in 2018.

On the south and east sides of the campus are the bottling and shipping warehouses. Nearly a dozen train tracks split off and connect directly to service doors. The facility used to run on its own power substation. The campus is right next to Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls and a salmon hatchery, making it the perfect spot for the public to gather. Despite the vision of the campus including space for craft brewing and distilling, Doan said he doesn’t see it becoming a full-time brewery again. The idea is to build on the legacy of Olympia beer, he said, and find ways to highlight the community’s love for its history. But the beer will still have its place in Tumwater. Doan said South Puget Sound Community College is expanding its two-year program for brewing, distilling and cider making to a full four-year bachelor’s degree program. And down the street is Heritage Distilling; the city is partnering with them to make the Brewery District come to life.

Lisa Parks, Tumwater’s new city administrator, said she’s super grateful the EPA selected Tumwater for a grant. “A Brownfield project is one that can really catapult the city and community into a good and solid economic condition, but it also helps in terms of cleaning up the environment,” Parks said. City officials praised economic development manager Austin Ramirez for writing the grant proposal. Ramirez shared that his position with the city was funded through federal COVID-19 relief dollars, which he said shows how much the state and federal governments are invested in the cleanup project.

Mayor Debbie Sullivan said the only way the city is going to realize the vision for the site is through partnerships with the EPA, federal agencies and other local organizations. Sullivan said that although $500,000 isn’t a lot of money in the long run, it will still make a difference. She said the city needs to know what types of issues need to be addressed on the site, and the EPA grant will give officials those answers. “This is very symbolic. As you can see a lot of areas around here have developed, but this one needs extra help,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to take a lot of partners.

”The funds come from a $300 million grant program through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It allows cities to apply for funds for remediation efforts. Similar cleanup projects have been done using EPA funds in Tacoma, including Thea Foss Waterway and Point Ruston. Casey Sixkiller, EPA Region 10 administrator, said during the tour that the community has been asking what’s going to happen to the site for 20 years, and now, through the EPA program, the public is about to get some answers. “It really is about the water,” he said. “We’re along the Deschutes River right here, which for so many years helped provide a rather tasty beverage the rest of America got to experience. But now the future is about how we use that water to really inform what this can be, and do it in partnership with the federal government, local government and the Squaxin Island tribe, whose ancestral lands we’re on today.” 

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