The rumble of diesel trucks echoes across Mud Bay almost hourly as construction crews haul in the granite stones, cedar boards and tinted glass that will eventually become Paul Allen’s four summer homes and caretaker’s cottage on Sperry Peninsula.
With a total of 22 bedrooms, there’ll be plenty of room for guests on the island retreat. Family members, however, will pay Allen rent.
Faye Allen will hand her billionaire son $2,000 a month to lease a nine-bedroom lodge and one-bedroom vacation house, documents filed with San Juan County show.
Faye Allen’s beach house sits within shouting distance of Allen’s main residence, on the former site of Camp Nor’Wester. About 150 yards yards south, Allen will lease another waterfront residence to his sister, Jody Allen Patton, also for $2,000 a month.
Allen’s architects redrew property lines on Sperry Peninsula to place the structures on separate lots. While the boundary changes and leasing arrangements are perfectly legal, critics say Allen skirted codes intended to limit the size and scope of waterfront developments.
Lopez Island is a tightknit community of 600, where passing motorists lift their fingers to wave to each other on winding country roads. It is a place where beater pick-up trucks pull into ferry lines behind BMW’s and Mercedes Benzs. But the summer home of the one of the richest men in America has some locals crying foul, even though building inspectors approved the project.
State laws written to guide development on shorelines contain a loophole: If it’s a single-family residence less than 35 feet high, it doesn’t need a substantial-development permit, an added regulation that would have required an intensified review by a local hearing examiner. Opponents of the project could appeal the examiner’s decision.
By splitting up the project and leasing the properties to his sister and mother, Allen was able to bypass the oversight normally given large-scale waterfront projects, says Don Marcy, a land-use attorney retained by Friends of Sperry, a group opposed to Allen’s development.
“They’re trying to make it look aboveboard with three residences instead of a compound,” Marcy said. “But there is one person behind it all — Paul Allen. Considering the scope of the project, it received a minimum amount of scrutiny.”
Allen’s attorneys say the Microsoft co-founder has gone out of his way to maintain the delicate splendor of the peninsula and fulfill every applicable land-use code in San Juan County.
Each building was scrutinized by local authorities, and opponents of the project had their concerns thrown out of court, the attorneys say.
“I don’t know where the perception that Paul got away with something comes from,” said Beth Clark, Allen’s real-estate attorney. “When you are someone in the spotlight, everything is controversial. Even a permit for a summer house becomes controversial.”
The leases were drawn up for estate-planning purposes and don’t concern the development, Clark said.
As new waterfront homes throughout the Puget Sound region seem gripped with gigantism, the Allen property on Lopez Island serves as a high-profile example for the kinds of development that may increasingly take shape under current land-use laws.
That possibility has prompted San Juan County to consider revamping its shoreline building codes and seek stricter regulations of projects like Allen’s.
“Twenty years ago, we had beach homes on the shoreline. Now we have some rather large developments,” said Darcie Nielsen, a San Juan County commissioner. “The issue has been raised before: When does a single-family residence become a compound?”
In 1971, the state legislature determined that shoreline regulations for homeowners were too onerous. As a result, single-family residences were exempt from the substantial-development permit and the State Environmental Policy Act, a lengthy environmental review.
Allen is not the first homeowner to take advantage of the exemption to build big.
In 1986, for example, a group of homeowners unsuccessfully sued Seattle for not requiring a substantial-development permit from a landowner who divided his Mount Baker waterfront lot to build two houses.
“It always seems like people are getting away with something, but it’s a pretty big loophole,” said Patrick Schneider, past president of the environmental and land-use law section of the Washington State Bar Association. “The legislature left a lot of room for interpretation.”
Some island residents say that whatever happened in the permitting process on Sperry Peninsula doesn’t detract from one simple fact: Allen’s summer homes leave the vast majority of the 387-acre spit untouched, and that’s a far better outcome than some of the alternatives, including the development of dozens of residences.
“Everyone has a right to criticize, but you have to step back and look at the big picture,” said John Thalacker , owner of San Juan Surveying, a consulting company on San Juan Island. “There’s an awful lot of things that could be done on that land that would be a hell of a lot worse than what Allen would do.”
Sperry Peninsula is a dollop of land accessible by a thin, gravel driveway that divides mud flats on one side and a pebble beach strewn with crab shells and eel grass on the other.
For nearly 50 years, a stretch of beachfront on the peninsula was home to Camp Nor’Wester, a summer camp for kids that charged about $2,000 for a four-week stay.
The peninsula’s former owner, Charles Curran, split the property into 13 lots before he sold the land to Allen in December 1996 for $8 million. Allen had waited many years for a San Juan abode. He purchased Allan Island in 1988 and drew up plans for a family compound.
