CLINTON: AVAILABLE FOR LEASE | ‘Ghost town’ feel a concern for community, business leaders

Published 7:00 am Saturday, May 30, 2015

Drive on Highway 525 into Clinton, and the “for lease” signs dot the roadway left and right.

There’s space available, high visibility and frequent traffic. Yet Clinton, the southern gateway to Whidbey Island that sees hundreds of thousands of passersby every year, struggles to fill its ample vacancies.

While commerce dwindled, some business owners saw drug deals and other crime increase in the empty parking lots.

“We need to have something in these places, in these empty spots,” said Jason Kalk, owner of Lincoln Computers in Clinton. “If not, the whole ghost town feeling kind of becomes a little bit more ripe for crime and things like that.”

Members of the Clinton Community Council, a volunteer board put together to try and represent the unincorporated area better with the state and county and push for improvements, are looking at traffic mitigation as a key to invigorating the commercial core. Recently, the council has started to consider a roundabout in the intersection of Deer Lake Road and Highway 525 to slow traffic and make it safer for pedestrians. The council was also responsible for getting the Washington State Department of Transportation to address the overgrowth along the bluff that was covering part of the sidewalk to the ferry.

The council’s president, Jack Lynch, wrote in an email while on vacation in Croatia that traffic and lack of sewers are hindrances to higher density development. Speaking only for himself and not for the council, he also noted the lack of development and “aggressive marketing” plans by property owners hurts commercial growth.

“This takes leadership on the part of owners,” said Lynch, a retired career community planner, in the email sent Friday morning. “Government can provide tools to spur certain types of development and even, in some cases, provide assistance in the form of infrastructure needed to support development, but government cannot be the developer.”

In recent years, some fixture tenants in the lower Clinton area relocated or closed shop. Jim’s Hardware bolted for Ken’s Korner Shopping Center and Wild Birds Unlimited moved to Freeland a couple of years ago. Anchor Books & Coffee closed its doors in late 2013.

“The rest of the places on the highway are well filled except for those spots,” said Kalk, adding that Clinton Auto and Cooper’s Auto have been in the same spots for decades. “If those get filled, people will probably start looking around the corner to get in on the action.”

Only recently has the space previously occupied by Jim’s Hardware been filled, with Britt’s Pickles expanding some of its production to part of the space in March. Anchor Books’ former space, 2,000 square feet located a ways away from the ferry holding lot where the ferry traffic queues regularly, still sits empty.

Commercial rent in Clinton spans from close to 65 cents per square foot to nearly $1.50/sq. foot. Spaces in the shopping center where Jim’s Hardware was, just off Highway 525 and Deer Lake Road with a water view and parking lot, is closer to the lower end of the cost spectrum. A handful of 900-square-foot and 1,200-square-foot spaces, each with its own bathroom, costs $750 or $995. 

Leanne Finlay, a Windermere real estate agent, said in an email commercial rental costs in Langley, Freeland and Greenbank are between $1 and $1.50 per square foot.

“This is some of the cheapest rent on the island,” said Barb Taylor, owner of Clinton-based South Island Properties. “You’re looking at way under a dollar per square foot, like 65 cents, with no triple net rent.”

Taylor relocated her business from north of Bob Galbreath Road back to the shopping center because of its visibility, low rent and view. Clinton is a walkable place with just about everything within a short jaunt’s reach.

“We love it because we can keep our car in the parking lot, walk down the hill, get on the boat and go to Ivar’s, walk to the bank, walk to the post office, walk to the park,” she said. “Food Mart will order whatever we ask.”

Traffic, however, remains on the tip of lots of tongues in Clinton as the source of much consternation.

Every 30 minutes, motorcycles, trucks, cars and freight roar up the hill and speed through Clinton. Electronic radar signs installed a couple of years ago have helped, but people still speed off the boat.

“By the time you get up to Dalton (Realty) there’s time to make a turn,” said Taylor, who moved her business from that area back down closer to the ferry into the business center where she started her property management company nearly a decade ago.

For all of the visible vacancies, some of the recent additions have gone less noticed. Britt’s Pickles and a Crossfit gym opened in the same center behind the Clinton Food Mart. South Island Properties moved back in to the same complex. Make Whidbey moved into the Dodge Building across from Cozy’s Roadhouse. Blueschool Arts, a studio-gallery-instruction space on Harding Avenue tucked just off the busy roads, opened in late 2014.

Lynch said the Island County Comprehensive Plan update is the prime opportunity for Clinton to focus on a direction for itself for development “consistent with the rural character that everyone wants to see continues.”