By Alex Fryer
Seattle Times Opinion columnist
After thieves repeatedly cut through the chain link fence around delivery trucks parked at Merlino Foods — at one point costing the Sodo wholesale grocer about $25,000 to fix vehicles robbed of a couple of dollars’ worth of copper — the company recently installed new, harder to cut mesh barriers.
Then security cameras videoed people getting past them by shimmying up the fence poles. Merlino responded by greasing the poles with restaurant-grade food lubricant. So far, it’s kept the bad guys out.
“I’m, like, wait, does that mean my best public safety advice right now is Crisco?” said Erin Goodman, executive director of the Sodo business improvement area. “That’s not a good look for the city.”
Gallows humor goes with the territory in Sodo, the city’s industrial neighborhood that stretches south from the now-a-distant-memory Kingdome to Georgetown — “South of the Dome.”
This is an amazingly eclectic area, with about 1,200 businesses ranging from cannabis retailers to a hydrogen-powered mining equipment manufacturer. But endemic property crime is taking a toll.
According to the Seattle Police Department, there were a record 1,065 crimes documented in Sodo last year. Most were arson, burglary and theft.
Public safety concerns over the last few years spurred a slew of evolving actions to deter property crime and vandalism. Powerful lights and security cameras. Fences topped with razors. Now some businesses are setting up electrified fences — sending 7,000 volts to anyone who touches them, intended to stop but not kill or injure.
“It’s like an arms race,” said Daniel Byrne, who owns four Sodo properties. “This (property crime) is constantly chiseling away at these businesses. It’s chaotic and it gets exhausting after a while because you are either fixing a window or fixing a fence, trying to get a truck working that doesn’t have a catalytic converter.”
Two things are happening in Sodo this summer. One is the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, a weeklong fan fest scheduled around July 11. Already, there’s new landscaping and transportation improvements near T-Mobile Park. Whether this signals a long-term commitment to the neighborhood or a passing priority remains to be seen.
The other is Seattle City Council elections, with the primary on Aug. 1. Because of redistricting, Sodo will move to the open West Seattle seat, District 1, currently held by Lisa Herbold, who is not running for re-election. With potentially seven new council members coming aboard — eight, if one of the current members wins election to the Metropolitan King County Council — City Hall will be in a place to reset the relationship between Seattle’s small businesses and municipal government.
For the folks who work in Sodo (relatively few people live in the neighborhood), progress comes down to respecting the basics: the need for more police and fixing the roads.
Do those two fundamental things well, and Sodo will continue to be a place that offers essential services and good wages, many in union jobs. Fail, and more Sodo businesses will be hamstrung by the deluge of increasingly brazen and sometimes violent crime.
“We just keep spending money to fortify, I guess is probably the best word,” said Todd Biesold, chief financial officer of Merlino Foods. “When you keep spending 10, 20, 30, $50,000 a year to fortify yourself against bad actors, at some point you’re like, I’m out.”
Sodo reminds me of the Seattle when I was a kid, before the Kingdome. Its selling points are easy access to shipping, rail yards and interstate highways — attributes that long fueled this city’s growth but now seem taken for granted.
With little in the way of natural attractions, Sodo is easy to overlook. But people can spend their entire careers working there, and that’s reason enough to want to root for the neighborhood’s success and defend its livelihood.
There are reasons why Sodo is susceptible to crime. It has many warehouses, which are designed to be inward facing. Few windows means there’s not a lot of eyes on the streets. Also, people go home at night, leaving the area vulnerable.
Consider the fairly typical case of the guy police caught outside a scrap-metal recycler at 5 a.m. The suspect had used a hydraulic jack to raise a fence around the business. In his backpack, cops found coils of metal wiring, scrap copper, a fake gun and more than 250 pieces of stolen mail. The suspect was later charged with burglary.
And another: Earlier this year, also around 5 a.m., police noticed a fire near a parked car several blocks from a reported break-in at a welding shop. In the car and a nearby RV, cops recovered $11,000 of welding equipment and a stolen credit card. Prosecutors charged the suspect with possessing stolen property.
A Sodo commercial landscaping company reported 20 catalytic converters stolen last year, costing tens of thousands of dollars in repair, plus the cost of renting replacement vehicles and the expense of fixing fences. A new food manufacturer had all its copper wires stolen while it waited for a city permit to open for business. The Sodo business association’s Toyota econobox is on its third catalytic converter.
Heavy trucks are frequent targets. Punching a hole in the gas tank to steal fuel — called tin-canning — can bring a thief $300 worth of diesel and cost the owner $3,000 to repair, plus the expense of lost time.
For some business owners, it’s all too much. Earlier this year, Emmanuel’s Rug and Upholstery Cleaners announced it was leaving Sodo. After 116 years, it was time to relocate because of persistent public safety and health issues. Yes, health issues — someone in an RV once dumped raw sewage down a drain on the property. When no company would come out to clean it, they had to do it themselves. It wasn’t a memory you’d want to relive.