Bid to build Ace Hardware in West Richland falters

A prominent Tri-City family’s long-running campaign to build an ACE Hardware store near a busy West Richland intersection has run into a potentially fatal snag.

Grigg Family LLC can’t build the store on Bombing Range Road at Austin Drive, just south of the traffic signal at West Van Giesen Street.

The two-lot site is part of the Canal Heights neighborhood, whose covenants limit it to residential use, a Washington appeals court ruled this month.

The court largely upheld a 2017 Benton County Superior Court ruling by Judge Jackie Shea-Brown.

The three-judge panel said the covenants for Canal Heights plainly restrict development to homes and not commercial businesses.

It rejected the Grigg family’s argument that a hardware store wouldn’t violate the residential requirements because it could be removed in the future, calling the argument “strained.”

Neither the Grigg family nor its Kennewick attorneys returned calls about the ruling or whether they plan to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Limiting development

But neighbors are thrilled that the long-running dispute appears to be over.

“We’re very excited that residential means residential,” said Dan Richey, who joined more than a dozen neighbors who sued to stop the project in Benton County in 2014, leading to the 2017 ruling and subsequent appeal.

Richey said he and his neighbors chose to live in a quiet residential neighborhood and accepted the limitations on future development.

They support a hardware store in West Richland, but not at the end of their street.

“It would have impacted our way of life,” Richey said.

The battle over the hardware store animated the neighborhood and fueled debate over the city’s future in the 2017 election.

The Canal Heights covenant was adopted in 1949, six years before West Richland incorporated in 1955.

By 1960, the city boasted 1,347 residents. A 2017 traffic study indicated an average 10,100 vehicles per day use the stretch of Bombing Range that goes past Canal Heights.

Richey said that very growth makes the corner a bad spot for retail. Access would be difficult, and customers and trucks would instead rely on their 20-foot-wide street.

Neighbors hope the city will buy the Grigg lots as an extension of Flat Top Park, which is across Bombing Range.

The conflict dates to 2010, when Charles Grigg Sr. purchased the first of two lots in Canal Heights.

Grigg paid $43,200 for an empty lot facing Bombing Range at Austin Drive and later transferred it to Grigg Family LLC, which operates a Pasco department store and several hardware stores.

Two years later, Grigg Family LLC paid $105,000 for a second lot on the opposite side of Austin Way, which has a house on it. Like the first, it faces Bombing Range and is part of Canal Heights.

The same year, the city bought a third lot for $70,000 to support the Grigg project. The lot is used as a community garden.

West Richland vote to rezone

In July 2013, over the objections of neighbors, the West Richland City Council voted to rezone the three lots to commercial-general from low-density residential.

The rezone would allow the Grigg family to build a 12,000- 15,000-square-foot ACE Hardware franchise.

The family indicated it intended to reroute Austin Drive through one of the lots it owned so it would intersect with Bombing Range further away from the traffic signal at Van Giesen.

Bombing Range has been without a neighborhood hardware store since Do It Best closed more than a decade ago.

Neighbors sued after the rezone. But the Griggs mounted an unexpected argument: The store and parking lot wouldn’t violate the neighborhood residential requirements because they could be taken down in the future.

The court said that runs counter to the plain intent of the covenants.

“Grigg’s interpretation would also result in the absurd result that the Canal Height’s residential covenant would favor commercial structures over residential ones,” it ruled.

The appellate court overturned a portion of the lower court’s ruling that dealt with the city-owned community garden.

It said the garden is consistent with the neighborhood and is allowed under the covenants. The city charges the public $10 to use the garden to grow their own crops.

West Richland officials referred questions to Grigg Family LLC.