Don’t get carried away by speedway

Published 7:00 pm Saturday, April 23, 2005

A few years back, when the National Hockey League was thinking about putting a franchise in Nashville, one sports columnist had the clarity to ask, “Aren’t there enough toothless people in Tennessee already?”

The quip came to mind this week – dunno why – as word came down that NASCAR might like to site a 75,000-seat racetrack in South Kitsap. Officials from International Speedway Corporation, the company anxious to bring big-time motor sports to the Northwest, reportedly met with county commissioners in a series of closed-door sessions. Said to be under consideration is a parcel south of Gorst, near a wan landing strip known as the Bremerton Airport.

While it’s tempting to have some fun with the sociological implications of bringing NASCAR – an inexplicably popular phenomenon sometimes referred to as “Non-Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks” – to one corner of Kitsap or another, we might better consider the experience of a nearby county that has already gone for a ride with the track folks…and then got the heck out of the car.

Two issues were key: public subsidy and access.

Readers of the regional press might recall that last year,

ISC courted Snohomish County for a track site on farmland next to the I-5 freeway at Marysville. But county officials there broke off the discussions because of project development costs that were farther out of balance than a burst racing slick. According to news accounts at that time, backers proposed to put up $50 million toward the racetrack, with county and state government expected to cough up the rest – some

$250 million in public funds. Even the siren lure of “new jobs” (dubious, since the track would only host two or three events per year) and a predicted tourism windfall from out-of-state fans would not, in the estimation of most Snohomish citizens and officials, have penciled out financially.

Folks were also put off by the prospect of traffic tie-ups on race weekends. A study commissioned by city of Marysville showed that even with $68 million in interchange improvements and road widening around the track, local and thru

traffic would be knotted for hours after race events.

So we might ask: If I-5 interchanges don’t have the capacity to handle traffic to and from a NASCAR facility, how would Kitsap’s county roads and highways fare? If you haven’t driven through Gorst lately, the interchange there makes a Habitrail look like the apex of transportation planning. Imagine 75,000 people descending on South Kitsap’s two-lane roadways, and then recall how people griped a few years ago when a mere 20,000 kids showed up for a big rock festival at the county

fairgrounds. And most of the rockers rode the bus.

As to public financing, to be sure, we have recently seen huge public subsidies for Seattle’s baseball and football

stadiums. But those were for spectator sports that have proven quite popular for decades, far longer than the faddish spectacle of loud cars droning in circles while yahoos wave Confederate flags in the stands. The sports stadiums have also become community landmarks, and are easily accessible by virtue of their centrality – they were deliberately sited close to transit hubs and within staggering distance of Pioneer Square saloons. A racetrack, by contrast and almost by definition, is the last thing anyone would want in their backyard. Thus the middle of nowhere – rural South Kitsap – finds itself in the running.

So we’re not sure Kitsap County really knows what it’s getting into as NASCAR roars through town. We might consider handing them a road map, and pointing them east or south.