WinCo Foods has refiled construction permits for a roughly 100,000-square-foot grocery store at 13550 Aurora Ave. N. in Bitter Lake.
The filings, reported Monday, Sept. 14, by the Seattle Times, show plans for a major interior renovation of the former Sam's Club that has sat vacant since 2018.
The store would be WinCo's first inside Seattle city limits and one of the employee-owned discount chain's largest locations.
Greg Goins, WinCo's senior director of real estate, estimated the store will open within a year.
The company is waiting on the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) to review the plans and issue a building permit, a process Goins said could take several months.
For Aurora Ave. shoppers who have lacked a major grocery option on the corridor, the timeline offers the first concrete signal that a discount store is actually coming.
The permits mark a restart after a legal fight that stalled the project for much of 2026.
What happened
In April, a group called Lake Washington Working Families appealed the city's environmental determination for the project.
Hearing Examiner Ryan Vancil sided with the group on a procedural point: the city had compared the proposal to a previously operating big-box store rather than the site's current condition as a vacant building. Vancil called that approach "clearly erroneous," KING 5 reported.
WinCo appealed the examiner's ruling in court. The case was dismissed in June.
WinCo scales down to skip environmental review
Rather than redo the full environmental review, WinCo scaled down the number of parking spaces in its site plan. Goins told the Seattle Times that change should allow the project to avoid the environmental review process altogether.
"Because we have run into these folks in the past, we're never comfortable until we have the permit in hand," Goins said.
The "folks" in question remain murky. Lake Washington Working Families has no website and is not registered with the state.
The group has made public appearances only to challenge two WinCo projects, including an unsuccessful appeal of a Renton store that opened Aug. 3. A Portland-based attorney represented the group. The Seattle Times reported the attorney did not respond to its request for comment. Goins said the group has never contacted WinCo directly.
Why Aurora Ave. matters
The site sits along Highway 99, one of Seattle's busiest commercial corridors. The building has attracted homeless encampments since Sam's Club closed in 2018.
When the legal challenge surfaced in April, Bitter Lake resident Hannah Scoyni told KING 5 the vacant lot was "just kind of a sad sight on Aurora." Nearby business owner Janell Hartman said the neighborhood needs a store where "prices can be something that people can afford."
WinCo is an Idaho-based, employee-owned chain that operates about a dozen stores in the Puget Sound region. Its closest locations to the Aurora site are in Edmonds and Renton.
