Construction Junction

High Traffic, Easy Access Draws Businesses to Hannegan-East Bakerview Intersection

by Heidi Henken

 

It’s one of the hottest spots in the county for business development right now. That’s the area around the Hannegan and East Bakerview roads intersection in northeast Bellingham. Commercial development is going strong in one of the most-traveled locations in both Whatcom County and Bellingham proper and, from all indications, it’s only going to get better.

Both Whatcom County and the City of Bellingham have done traffic counts in the area because the city only relatively recently annexed north. Both show the area, particularly along the Hannegan Road, as very heavily traveled.

Rodney Vandersypen, an engineering technician for the county, says that when that section was still a county road, in the mid-1990s, car counts showed Hannegan Road to be the busiest county road and the Hannegan-East Bakerview Road intersection to be the busiest county intersection. That comparison doesn’t include the Guide Meridian or the Mount Baker Highway, which are state-maintained and counted. Of those two, Meridian routinely counts higher than Hannegan Road and the Mt. Baker Highway counts lower, if counted outside the Sunset Drive corridor.

In 1999, Bellingham counted an average day’s worth of cars at 12,000 north of the Hannegan-East Bakerview Road intersection and 17,000 south of the intersection. The Mount Baker Highway counted an average of 11,000 cars a day at Britton Road and 18,000 a day just next to the Hannegan Road-Woburn Street junction. That same year the state took a 31,000 daily count for the Guide Meridian just north of Interstate 5.

A 2001 count of the Hannegan north of the East Bakerview intersection showed a daily average of 12,000 cars, and an average of 11,400 cars on East Bakerview west of the intersection. A new count of the Hannegan Road south of East Bakerview was completed at the end of January, but totals were not available at press time.

“Every two or three seconds a car goes by,” affirms John Beebe, owner of Bellingham Automotive, which just re-located to a new 9,000-square-foot, 12-bay repair and service facility at 4116 Hannegan Road. Known as Bellingham Auto and Truck when the business was located on Irongate Road, Beebe says the business took the new name “so people will understand at we are at our heart an auto-repair facility,” specific to cars and light trucks. The former business name will be used in serving commercial fleet customers, which account for approximately half of the company’s business.

Beebe is enthusiastic about the car count on Hannegan Road and about prospects for his company’s new venture. Bellingham Automotive has gone with a retro, 1950s-inspired design that incorporates red brick and a covered portico to evoke an era that valued service, he says.

“Our business is flat out built on one thing, and that’s trust, not a lot of flash and dazzle. We do the job right the first time,” Beebe explains, and that’s what he wants the building design to convey. Because Beebe does so much fleet business, the new facility also has an express service for fleet operators, with a separate entrance.

Bellingham Automotive is combining the yesteryear feel with cutting-edge technology that includes an emphasis on preventative maintenance and computer diagnostics and a Web site, www.bellinghamautomotive.com, through which customers will be able to schedule appointments online.

Next door, Rob Walker, owner of No. 1 Collision, which opened in December, also sings the praises of a Hannegan Road location.

“I can’t believe it,” enthuses Walker. “We’re doing double what I predicted would happen.” Walker is already adding new employees. Starting with five, he plans to increase that to eight.

“You expect the worst when you start from scratch,” says an amazed Walker. “It’s unbelievable how well it’s gone.”

Both Walker and Beebe consider their neighboring businesses to be complements to each other, and refer business back and forth.

“I’m the body shop. He’s the repair,” Walker explains.

Builders wanted

Across Hannegan Road, in front of Cascade Linen, more new construction is set to break ground in March. DeWaard & Bode appliances is building a 26,000-square-foot warehouse with a small show floor area for wholesale sales to builders and contractors.

DeWaard & Bode, which has a downtown Bellingham retail store, chose the location because “that particular area is already the center for builders and contractors,” says owner Jerry Roorda. The site also offers quick access to Bellingham, the Guide Meridian and Lynden, Roorda notes. When the new warehouse opens, Roorda says he expects to add two or three new employees to his staff.

Builders Alliance, a hardware and construction supply store, also caters to the building trade. It moved to Hannegan Road a decade ago as Bellingham Sash & Door and adopted its current identity about three years ago. The name change reflected a refocusing of the business to the professional market, says sales manager Drew Orem.

“We were one of the earliest,” Orem says of development along the south Hannegan Road. “There was a little bit of development above in the industrial park. Our feeling was the growth in the county was north, not south, of town.”

Orem says Builders Alliance has been happy with its location and the results of the business refocusing. It’s “predominately pro focused” with “about 20 percent of our business consumer project focused.” The professional focus emphasizes building and nurturing relationships with customers and those relationships have grown, Orem observes.

“We’re very pleased,” he says. “We’re heading in the right direction and pleased with the results.”

 

Banking on location

Whidbey Island Bank moved into its permanent branch facility at the northeast corner of the Hannegan-East Bakerview intersection last August. The area was chosen for the bank’s second Bellingham branch because, “This particular market area — Irongate in particular — is really under-banked in our opinion,” says Todd Sewell, assistant vice president and branch manager.

The bank had a temporary office at the site a year before its building was completed and “in a lot of people’s opinion, it was a stretch to locate out here as early as we have,” says Sewell. Development had not really begun showing itself back then, he explains. But the site made sense to Whidbey Island Bank when it looked at the next probable growth area for Bellingham, which it sees as pushing north and out along the Mount Baker Highway.

The branch was targeted to serve small and medium-sized businesses, says Sewell, so it surprised them to discover how many new individual consumer accounts they’ve been getting. People who live out in the county drive by and remember they need to go to the bank, or they’ve forgotten to go, explains Sewell. “Right from the start, we got a surprising number of accounts from Deming.”

A future goal is to locate another branch farther north in the county, “although I don’t think we have a time frame on when that will happen,” he says.

The Sign Post, a company which manufactures and installs signs, moved to 2019 E. Bakerview in early November after 22 years of being headquartered in Blaine. Its thinking for the relocation was much the same as its neighbors. The Sign Post saw growth heading north, and noted the number of builder-customers in the area.

A significant portion of its work is construction signs and signs for new businesses, says Glorene George, who co-owns The Sign Post with her husband, Ray.

Much of its business was also in the Bellingham area, she says, and “The commute from Blaine to Bellingham was becoming quite a bit.”

The Sign Post’s new location has high visibility and easy access, and so far it’s doing very well. “The move has been better than we anticipated,” George remarks. The company added two employees in January, bringing its total to 13.

The Blaine facility isn’t going to waste. The Sign Post is still using the space for manufacturing “anything we can’t do down here,” she says. “We can go there and finish it out.”

Here comes the bus(es)

A large public project is also in its final stages at 4111 Bakerview Spur Road, where Whatcom Transportation Authority is completing a $10 million facility that will consolidate maintenance, operations and administrative departments onto a single 10-acre site. The site includes a 55,000-square-foot maintenance and operations building and a 10,000-square-foot fuel-and-wash facility for buses.

This is the first time WTA will have all of its operations in the same location, notes Pete Stark, who is director of fleet and facilities. The site was chosen, he says, because it was near supporting vendors, appropriately zoned and had adequate acreage, while still being reasonably close to the downtown terminal. Stark estimates that the facility should last the agency 20 years.

Of the WTA’s other sites, he says three leased facilities will be turned back, and they will be negotiating with the City of Bellingham to take over the Nevada Street site. With the consolidation, Stark says the WTA expects to save approximately $500,000 a year in operating costs.