Two years after Renton evicted a thriving aircraft parts manufacturing business, the buildings sit empty

In this 2024 photo, Sofia Farret prepares high-tech Renton-made titanium landing gear for shipment, at ” the Landing Gear Works” at Renton airport. This facility is now abandoned.

The Renton City Council should thoroughly review how Renton manages our city facilities to return the best value to our residents and businesses.  Lately, it feels like our city facilities are being treated as if they are disposable.  With replacement buildings now costing in the tens of millions of dollars, our city facilities should be utilized to their fullest and managed with respect.

It’s been two years since the City of Renton evicted the popular “Landing Gear Works” from their leased manufacturing building and hangar at Renton Airport.  The decades-old landing gear manufacturing company specializes in small-airplane components,  and their operation provided desirable economic diversity to our airport.  The eviction eliminated dozens of living wage jobs, sacrificed city B&O and sales tax revenue on a multi-million dollar business, and left aircraft owners queuing for support for their aircraft products while the Landing Gear Works hurriedly relocated their operations to other cities.

Two years after this eviction began, nothing has been done with the city’s now-empty buildings.

The eviction process began when a roof replacement was needed on the manufacturing building that was partially leased by the Landing Gear Works.  The City (which owned the building)  would neither pay for the repair themselves nor grant the tenant reasonable lease terms to accomplish the repair.   The dispute became exacerbated when the city realized they had made a multi-month billing error, and then demanded tens of thousands of dollars in surprise back-rent from the Landing Gear Works at the same time as they were refusing to address the roof.

While a negotiated settlement could have quickly resolved these issues, the Renton City Council (which has responsibility and authority for leases) never publicly discussed a possible resolution, either among themselves or with the tenants.  The Council remained silent during a series of Council meetings as the tenants made repeated heartfelt pleas for a negotiated settlement.

Derek Anderson, a third-generation Renton business owner and machinist is preparing parts for milling at the Landing Gear Works at Renton Airport in 2024. This building is now vacant.

When it ultimately became apparent that the Council would not intervene, the airport manager pressed the tenants to work around-the-clock to meet a strict move-out deadline; the tenants used floodlights and worked into the nights, to clear the buildings– as if it was one of the City’s biggest emergencies.

But following the midnight move out, the city has let the buildings sit vacant and abandoned in the year-and-a-half since.  The message apparently was “Hurry up and get out, so that we can leave TWO MORE City of Renton buildings vacant.”

The Landing Gear Works worked night and day in November 2024 to vacate this large hanger and a manufacturing building under intense pressure from Renton. After their forced move out, the buildings have sat vacant and neglected for the past year and a half.

While a new roof might have cost six months of lease revenues, it would have kept years of lease payments and taxes flowing into the city and preserved an important Renton business.

Eventually the manufacturing building (and maybe the hangar) will be demolished and replaced, but there is still a long process to do so, and it could have hosted a viable, revenue/tax-generating business in the years leading up to its replacement.  We certainly don’t want private property owners leaving abandoned buildings all over our city, and there is absolutely no reason the City should be modeling this bad behavior.

The Landing Gear Works buildings have joined a long list of city buildings that have been temporarily vacated or completely abandoned by Renton in recent years, including:

The Former Chamber of Commerce Building (left vacant, now demolished)

The Renton Historical Museum (Historical Society kicked out, now sitting empty with unclear future)

Rainier Flight Services flight school building at Renton airport (school kicked out, building sitting empty)

The Pavilion Event Center (empty for over a year, now getting a taxpayer-funded $10 million conversion into a privately-managed market)

Carco Theater (flooded by Cedar River in December, activities cancelled as flood-damage is  remediated)

200 Mill Avenue- former City Hall (recently flooded by broken 16-inch water main, repair costs and future currently unknown)

The Landing Gear Works hangar and nearby manufacturing building (thriving business kicked out, now left vacant)

This protracted, wasteful vacancy of the Landing Gear Works buildings was 100 percent predictable.   In a blog post two years ago I identified many errors in the Mayor’s official statement regarding Renton’s airport management at that time. Many topics were errantly discussed in that memo, leaving me seriously concerned about Renton’s airport leadership. For example, the Mayor asserted that business jet operations would cease each day when the tower closed, and I corrected that (per FAA policy) jet operations would continue 24 hours per day  which they have.    The Mayor’s equally erroneous comments concerning the Landing Gear Works in that memo are shown in italics below, with my corrections underlined and linked to source data.  (This exchange is excerpted from the April 2024 blog post):

5. Is there a business leaving the Renton Municipal Airport?

The City of Renton is moving through the legal process of eviction of a tenant for a long-standing non-payment of rent. The occupied buildings in question were originally scheduled for demolition in 2015. The buildings occupied by the Landing Gear Works, the old tower building and hangars, have never been scheduled for demolition. 

The occupation of these buildings were at a deeply discounted rate, with an understanding that any repairs needed would be at the expense of the tenant. This statement is false. Landing Gear Works hangers are priced like all other Renton airport hangars.  The old tower building was leased for the highest rate the Airport could get after it had been vacant for months.Airport management had responsibility for maintenance of common areas and the tower of the office building through most years of the tenancy.

The natural end of the lease was slated for July 2024, we have moved forward with a lease termination date of March 31, 2024 in light of nonpayment. This more accurately would say “in light of an ongoing rent dispute that began when we improperly billed the tenant, then ignored his concerns while we played musical chairs with our airport managers, and finally denied him and his employees their First Amendment rights to communicate with their elected officials.”

It is the responsibility of the city to maintain safe, functional and market-rate buildings for future tenants. It IS the city’s responsibility, and the city has unreasonably tried to get out of it by arguing that the building is going to be replaced in the future.  It’s also the city’s responsibility to ensure that private buildings are safe, and they are failing in many places.

One of the core pillars of our city administration is to communicate regularly and clearly with plain facts and direct language.  The Council, not the Administration, is responsible for leases under state law.  The council members have never publicly discussed this lease issue with each other, or communicated in any way with the tenants.  An attempt to reach out was made by one council member, and was apparently shut down by the city attorney.  This complete lack of council involvement and communication is shockingly different than council behavior and actions in the past. There were many steps where a collaborative discussion between the tenant and  the airport manager or council members would have quickly and peacefully resolved this dispute.

(Reminder: The full Mayor’s statement and my responses can be found here.)

Employees of the Landing Gear Works made numerous requests to City Council to help them reach agreement on their lease

FAA-approved spare parts for aircraft landing gear, many of them fabricated in Renton, were stocked, sold and delivered from this facility in Renton. Renton collected associated B&O and sales taxes. This spares business has been moved, and the facility is now abandoned and empty.

Shiney titanium Renton-made landing gear adorn this Cessna 180. The city-owned historic building in the background needed new roofing, and the city was unwilling to discuss a plan to replace it.  The building now sits empty.