Bremerton's Stalled $300 Million Racetrack Gets a Sixth Lifeline

The Port of Bremerton Commissioners voted July 28 to give Circuit of the Northwest another year to find the money for its motorsports park at the Bremerton National Airport, the sixth extension the private developer has received since the original lease was signed in 2011. The vote itself took only minutes. What it bought CNW was time: the company says private financing for the roughly $300 million first phase is due to be confirmed in August, and if it lands, construction on a road course, motocross track and twin outdoor amphitheaters could begin in early 2027, with the full build-out running through summer 2029.

Fifteen years is a long runway for a project that still has not broken ground on a permanent facility. Port commissioners have granted CNW's requests every time it has asked, and this extension carries the same structure as the ones before it: no new public money changes hands at the Port level, but the public clock on the airport's industrial-park land keeps resetting for another twelve months.

What the Commissioners Actually Approved

The July 28 vote extends CNW's lease on Port of Bremerton land at the airport's industrial park by one year, according to Kitsap Daily News. It is a procedural step, not a financing commitment: the extension exists specifically because CNW has not yet closed the private investment round it needs to start construction. Company owner and COO Joel Cohen told commissioners the facility's design is "nearly complete" and that events would likely be scheduled on weekends once it opens, but he did not name the investors he is courting or say what happens to the lease if August financing talks fall through, according to the same reporting.

The Port has not attached new financial conditions to this extension beyond the one-year term, no interim funding milestones, no clawback if August financing fails to materialize. That matters because it means the project's fate over the next twelve months rests entirely on CNW closing outside capital on its own timeline, a step that has eluded the company through five previous extensions stretching back well over a decade. A lease extension is, functionally, a renewable option on public land rather than a construction commitment, and nothing in the July 28 vote changes that underlying structure.

Fifteen Years, Six Extensions

CNW's presence on Port land dates to 2011, when the Port first leased the developer land at the airport for what was then pitched as a Formula One-caliber circuit. The company held a ceremonial groundbreaking in October 2019 for a 2.66-mile Hermann Tilke-designed road course, motocross facilities, karting and an RV park overlooking the Olympic Mountains, with an anticipated opening in 2021, according to Supercars.net's coverage of that event. None of it was built. The Kitsap Public Facilities District separately evaluated the project for more than a year before approving an interlocal agreement in 2019 to fund engineering and technical drawings, according to the Kitsap Public Facilities District's own project page. That agreement authorized payment of up to $502,300 in public money to the Port of Bremerton to contract for those drawings, money already spent on a facility that, six years later, still exists only as a rendering shown at commission meetings.

The current one-year extension is the sixth since that 2011 lease, a cadence of roughly one every two to three years, each one arriving just as the previous deadline lapsed. No extension in that run has come with a public accounting from CNW of why the prior deadline was missed, and none of the coverage of the July 28 vote indicates commissioners asked for one this time either.

What Circuit of the Northwest Wants to Build

The latest proposal, shown to Port commissioners July 14, is considerably larger than the 2019 concept. It now includes a road course, a motocross track, a 20,000-seat outdoor amphitheater, a second 10,000-seat outdoor theater, a 4,000-capacity flexible community space, a hospitality village, a clubhouse, grandstands, a hotel, condominiums and corporate suites, according to reporting cited by Kitsap Daily News. In effect, CNW is no longer proposing a racetrack with amenities attached. It is proposing an entertainment district anchored by a racetrack, on land that currently hosts none of it, one that would rank among the larger private developments Kitsap County has seen in decades if it is ever built as pitched.

That scope expansion is itself worth noting: each extension has coincided with the project growing larger and more expensive, not smaller and more achievable, even as the company has yet to demonstrate it can finance the version it pitched in 2019, let alone the amphitheater-and-hotel version it is now pitching. A bigger footprint means a bigger financing gap to close before a single foundation is poured, which cuts against the read that a larger, more ambitious plan signals more momentum toward completion rather than less.

The Runway It Would Replace

The site sits on Port of Bremerton land at the airport that has hosted racing and testing activity informally for more than two decades. More than two dozen public and community organizations currently use the existing runway area for training and evaluation exercises, according to the Kitsap Public Facilities District, a use case that has quietly persisted for twenty-plus years precisely because the land has never been fully built out. A build-out on the scale CNW is now proposing, with hotels, condos and two amphitheaters seating a combined 30,000, would occupy Port land well beyond a simple racetrack footprint, raising the practical question of where those decades of community and public-agency training activity relocate once construction, if it happens, actually starts. Neither the Port nor CNW has published a relocation or displacement plan for those users, and none of the current reporting on the July 28 extension addresses it, leaving an open question for the next round of public meetings.

That gap is easy to overlook because none of it shows up in a lease-extension vote itself; extending a term of years does not require the Port to resolve where two dozen organizations go if ground is finally broken. But the longer CNW's timeline stretches, the more those groups have organized their own operations around land they do not control long-term, which is its own quiet cost of a project that has spent fifteen years in a holding pattern.

The Money Question

No direct public funding flows to CNW as a company; the $502,300 KPFD authorized in 2019 went to the Port of Bremerton for engineering work, not to CNW's balance sheet. But the project's economic case leans heavily on public-facing projections that have not been tested against results. The KPFD-funded market demand study projected more than $57 million in first-year economic benefit; CNW's own figures, cited by Kitsap Daily News, put the 30-year economic impact at roughly $3.5 billion and 975 jobs. Those are the kind of numbers that accompany most large stadium and arena proposals nationally, and they typically assume the facility opens on schedule and operates at projected capacity, an assumption this specific project has already missed once, by at least six years past its original 2021 target. Nothing in the public record indicates an independent third party has verified either the $3.5 billion figure or the 975-job estimate, and Port commissioners have not commissioned a competing analysis of their own in the years since the original market study was funded. That leaves Kitsap residents with a single set of numbers, produced or commissioned by the parties most invested in the project moving forward, as the only economic case on record.

What Happens Next

Two traffic studies are underway, with the Port coordinating on findings with Kitsap Transit and the Washington State Department of Transportation before any construction permit would be issued, a real bottleneck given that Highway 3 already carries commuter and ferry-dependent traffic through the area at peak hours. If CNW's August financing round closes as planned, construction on the first phase could begin in early 2027, with completion targeted for summer 2029, according to Kitsap Daily News. If it does not close, the Port's likely response, based on the pattern of the last fifteen years, is a seventh extension rather than termination of the lease or a search for a different developer. For Kitsap residents, the honest way to read this: the project remains a real possibility with real financial backing genuinely being sought, but "under construction by 2027" has been the promised outcome of at least two prior milestones on this site, and neither arrived on schedule. The traffic studies, unlike the financing round, are the one part of this timeline residents will be able to watch play out in public regardless of whether CNW's investors ultimately sign.