On September 25, 2000, the permanent home of the University of Washington (UW) Bothell Branch opens for classes with 1,300, upper-division students. The new Cascadia Community College also opens on the same site with 1,200 freshmen and sophomores.
The Bothell Branch was first opened in 1990 with 155 students. The branch campus concept was developed in 1986 to provide degree opportunities for students who could not commute to large university campuses for classes. Seventy percent of the students worked at least 30 hours a week.
Cascadia Community College was an outgrowth of a proposal by Governor Booth Gardner in 1992 to replace the UW Branch Campus with a new four-year university called Cascade State University. The legislature decided on a two-year college on the same campus in 1994. Cascadia had a distinct academic program, but shared many resources with the UW branch.
The UW had originally planned to build the branch campus at Wellington Hills, south and east of the junction of State Routes 9 and 522 in Snohomish County, but that site conflicted with County growth limits. The campus was built on 130 acres that once constituted the farm of Richard Truly and that became Bothell's first residential development, Stringtown.
Total cost was approximately $300 million. The project provided for restoration of wetlands lost to agriculture and logging in the 1900s. Planning and construction took nine years and was slowed by disputes over location, the creation of Cascadia Community College, and the proximity to wetlands.
