A favorite son returns to surging Mattawa

MATTAWA — Like a lot of youngsters growing up in Mattawa, Lars Leland couldn’t wait to get away. Far away.

So far away that the 2008 Wahluke High School graduate went off to Pullman and Washington State University to earn a degree in Economics in International Trade with a minor in business.

He was going to join the corporate world in Seattle, Portland or San Francisco and travel the world doing trade-related business.

Then Lars decided he’d better take another look at the old home town. He found it to be the right place to do business and hopefully start a family.

The Leland family, led by patriarch Glenn Leland, farms 1,000 acres of row crops and orchard, specializing in wheat, corn, apples and cherries. Lars is still part of that, helping with bookkeeping and crop forecasting.

But Lars’s full-time job is with the Port of Mattawa. His degree matched up well with the purposes of the port authority. Now he’s excited about the future of the Mattawa area.

Ten years ago, Lars noted, there was no industrial park. Now the Wahluke Industrial Park, below and west of Mattawa has about 15 buildings that are in use. It continues to develop, and the Sentinel Gap Industrial Park, north of the WIP, is under way.

“The buildings are rented as fast as they go up,” Lars said. “Driving by, people see a new building going up, and they stop in.”

Lars added that POM Executive Director Bob Adler is continuously attracting new business or doing studies about which businesses would find the WIP or the SGIP suitable.

“He’s on the phone all the time,” Lars said

What Lars found when he took a better look at the Desert Aire-Beverly Corridor was about l0,000 people. He was surprised.

Then he looked at the growth pattern. Mattawa’s population was 941 in 1990. In 2000, it was 2,609. In 2010 it had jumped to 4,437. There are another 1,700 people in Desert Aire, just five miles away.

Throw in the folks at Beverly and Schawana and all of those scattered from Desert Aire to Beverly and points east on the Wahluke Slope, and you’re looking at around 10,000 folks.

“I believe now that this area could be as big as Moses Lake some day,” Lars said. “It’s been growing, and now we are doing things to make it grow.”

“It needs to grow in the right direction,” he added. “What we need now is housing. People are pouring in, but housing is not going up fast enough.”

The reason for Lars’s optimism is the very thing that almost drove him out of here – isolation. He and most of the corridor’s population didn’t like being far from everything else. Now the isolation is the reason for making Mattawa the business hub of South County.

Desert Rentals, which opened less than two years ago in the WIP, has made owners Greg and Candy Mead very happy. They are an example of the hub mentality, Lars said.

Until they came over from Seattle and opened, area folks went to Othello, Sunnyside, Tri-Cities, Moses Lake or Yakima for their rental needs. Now practically all of them come to Desert Rentals.

Another reason the Mattawa Corridor is growing, Lars believes, is Highway 243. Lots of Seattle-Tri-Cities traffic takes that route. Highway 243 ties in with I-90, which ties in with I-5.

“It’s scenic, especially the drive from Desert Are to Sentinel Gap.” Lars said.

Sandbar Marine, which seems oddly out of place in the desert, draws more motorists off of 243 than you would think into the WIP.

Lars noted the POM may get involved in tourism. There have been talks with the Port of Benton and Port of Sunnyside about collaborating on a RV park at the Hanford gate for the B Reactor, which will be open for the public in the near future for tours.

“People are going to want to see it, and this highway goes right through there,” Lars said.

Lars has taken a leadership role in a project that will make downtown Mattawa safer for traffic and pedestrians and more attractive to new business.

He is the chairman of the Government Way Improvement Committee. He encourages every resident to attend the meetings and pour out their ideas.

Lars noted Sun Hwang, owner of Red Apple, the Shell station and property in the WIP, has attended. So has Joel Fabela, owner of Fabela’s Market.

The general plan is to improve Mattawa’s main street from a point near the Lep-Re-Kon Harvest Foods on the west end to Boundary Street on the east end. It will have new curbs, gutters and sidewalks. There will be a center lane for left turns, hopefully all of the way, Lars said.

The reason the improvement will start at the grocery store is that the road is county jurisdiction from there to Highway 243.

Lars’s committee is working with $65,000, for planning only. The city put up $10,000, and it received a grant for $55,000 from Grant County’s SIP program. A one-month traffic count was started recently.

The committee’s costs will be kept low by collaboration with a program with Washington State University called the Rural Communities Design Initiative (RCDI). Gathering all of the ideas from the folks, the WSU people will design several street models for the city’s engineers, Gray & Osborne of Yakima.

“The community will be seeing the models throughout the process, encouraging them to be actively involved,” Lars said.

Gray & Osborne will offer its expertise in determining the feasibility of each model.

“Mattawa was placed here for the workers on the dam,” Lars said. “Now the people are making it the center of South County.”