A retired Spokane lawyer who appealed Spokane County’s environmental review of the planned Costco project north of Spokane reached a settlement of sorts with the membership warehouse retailer prior to a scheduled Aug. 30 hearing on the appeal.

“The environment won out in the appeal,” the appellant Tom Cooney claims, while he also commends Costco, saying the company “wants to be a good neighbor.”

A Costco representative couldn’t be reached immediately for comment.

Cooney says Costco has agreed to pretreat stormwater runoff from its planned 14-acre, 820-stall parking lot before it enters its bioinfiltration swales.

He says Costco also has agreed to complete a traffic analysis in cooperation with the Washington state Department of Transportation within a year after the store opening to determine if the store impacts access to and from Winchester Road, at its junction with Newport Highway.

Costco will conduct additional contaminant testing at the excavation site for its underground fuel tanks and have an environmental professional on hand to check for adverse environmental conditions throughout all grading and subsurface site work for the project, Cooney says.

Prior to the agreement, the appeal had been scheduled to go before a hearing examiner.

“Costco and I parted as friends,” Cooney says. “Costco shows it wants to … have due regard for the environment.”

Issaquah, Wash.-based Costco Wholesale Corp. plans to construct a $14.6 million, 167,300-square-foot retail warehouse and a fueling station with a total holding storage capacity of 133,400 gallons of fuel on a 20-acre site at 12020 N. Newport Highway. Spokane-based Lydig Construction Inc. is the contractor on the project.

County records show the building permit hasn’t been issued for warehouse structure, although planning director John Pederson told the Journal in July that it’s ready to be picked up.

Cooney, a resident of the Camelot neighborhood, located across Newport Highway from the planned Costco site, filed the appeal in July.

He claimed that the county’s environmental finding, called a mitigated determination of nonsignificance, contained only boilerplate findings and didn’t focus on specific environmental conditions at the project site.