City after land for bottling plant Posted by Kimberly Jacobson | Aug 13, 2012 | 604 views

The city of Anacortes wants to add about 11 acres off Highway 20 into its urban growth area in hopes that it will make an appropriate site for the proposed Tethys Enterprises bottling plant.

Mayor Dean Maxwell said the request to Skagit County was made to recoup industrial property the city lost with the Samish Indian Nation’s purchase of nearly 15 acres of property along Highway 20 in 2008. The land is expected to be placed in trust, which means Anacortes’ amount of industrial land has decreased.

While the site is being eyed for the Tethys plant, Maxwell said the city will benefit from the added industrial property no matter what ends up on the site.

“This may not work for Tethys but it may work for someone else,” he said. “I’ve always been pro-business, trying to find jobs for this community that have been lacking.”

The City Council will take up the issue at its study session at 7 p.m. tonight. Council approval is needed for the application to move forward. No public comments will be taken at the meeting.

In September 2010, the Anacortes City Council OK’d a contract with Tethys, agreeing to sell a proposed state-of-the-art, environmentally sensitive bottling plant up to 5 million gallons of water a day.

The plant could be built in three to five years, and employ more than 500 people, with a payroll of $30 to $60 million, Tethys said when it made the proposal. It would be built on a 30-acre site using environmentally friendly standards.

The council in September 2011 approved an extension to the water contract to allow the company more time to find a site. The contract expires in December.