Friends of Rocky Prairie Ask for Support for Rezone in South Thurston County

Perhaps you have already read or heard about the South Sound Logistics Center (SSLC), proposed by the Port of Tacoma and Port of Olympia. Located within a 1/2 of a mile of Millersylvania State Park, plans are already on file for a high-cube warehousing facility. In this biologically diverse area of rural Thurston County, plans show a structure with a building footprint of 3,028,00 square feet, the size of 28 football fields.

We’ve seen this sort of thing already; construction of a project that in no way reflects the rural setting on which it is sited. Both the Ports and the County have sought to downplay the significance of the plans or even the likelihood of the project going forward. Meanwhile, plans are now on file with Thurston County.

The Friends of Rocky Prairie “is a group of concerned homeowners and residents in Washington’s South Puget Sound region, including the Thurston County rural communities of Maytown and Tenino.” According to Friends of Rocky Prairie:

The plans for the SSLC contain numerous possibilities including a rail switching yard, chemical manufacturing plant, solid waste transfer station, warehousing and a truck to rail distribution site. This would create a massive 24 hour per day industrial complex the size of Olympia, and would inundate roads from Olympia to South Thurston County with 1000’s of trucks and blocked railroad crossings.

A citizen has filed an application with the county to rezone the Port’s property in order to bring it into conforming use with the surrounding rural lands, including the State Park, the Fish & Wildlife Preserve, and long-term forests.

You can help.

Learn more about the issues. The Friends of Rocky Prairie have a page dedicated to the rezone, on their web site. Click this link to visit that page.

If you believe the County ought to rezone the property, you may sign a petition. The Friends of Rocky Prairie would like to obtain the names, addresses and phone numbers of as many County residents as possible, by Wednesday, March 19. There is a link here to that petition.

The Olympian has run a number of articles on the project. Among these are:

Crowd of 300 speaks out on port project
Logistics center meets opposition
Ports to meet on cargo center
Plans for cargo center collide with concerns about prairie
Ports team up on depot Web site
Neighbors rail against cargo site

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