Business Community Government
From Conan Fuel to “condo quality” dwellings: new apartments to rise on Burnham Drive
Heavy equipment began rumbling across the hillside at 9411 Burnham Drive earlier this month, clearing and grading for a new development, the Burnham Apartments. If things go as planned, the 4.32-acre site will be home next year to six new buildings containing 78 apartments, plus “recreational amenities” and a few leasable professional offices.
Groundbreaking was a long time coming. “It took us 12 years to get it permitted,” said Paul Conan, a firefighter and Gig Harbor native who shepherded the Burnham Apartments from its first regulatory filings until his family sold the project — including land, plans and permits — to a group of local investors for $3.4 million in April.
Construction work at the Burnham Apartments site, 9411 Burnham Drive. Photo by Ted Kenney
Former Conan Fuel Service site
Longtime Gig Harbor residents will likely connect the selling family’s name with a local business, Conan Fuel Service. It sold fuel, heating oil and lubricants for more than six decades, including serving the town’s fishing fleet from a dock on Harborview Drive. The firm later moved its base of operations to a facility close to Highway 16 on Burnham Drive (a different one than the closer-in site of Burnham Apartments).
Conan’s grandfather, Bud Conan, started the business in 1932. The Conan family ended its involvement with Conan Fuel Service in 1995 when Paul’s father, Ed, died.
A clip that let Conan Fuel Service customers know whom to call for their heating oil refills. Source: Paul Conan.
Ed Conan bought the land that is to become Burnham Apartments in 1971 and turned a building that was already there into a maintenance shop for the company’s fuel trucks. Another local business, Nichols Upholstery, also operated on the premises, leasing space from Conan Fuel.
An apartment complex will be something of a novelty along this stretch of Burnham Drive, about a half mile north of the Gig Harbor waterfront. The surroundings are not spiffy and new, like the neighborhoods in nearby Gig Harbor North. They are home to a mix of commercial and residential uses.
The construction site envelops a property containing a single-family home on Burnham Drive on two sides. Burnham Apartments’ other neighbors are the Sun Outdoors Gig Harbor RV resort to the north and the Fraternal Order of Eagles hall to the south. The Hiyu Hee-Hee Tavern, just past the Eagles, provides the closest retail.
‘Condo-quality,’ but affordable
The new apartments “will be condo-quality but they will be affordable for folks who are working and living in Gig Harbor,” said Kathy Dobler of Geld Investments LLC. Geld is one of three limited liability companies (LLCs) that together bought the Burnham Apartments project from the Conan family trust on April 2.
An architect’s rendering of the new Burnham Apartments, complete with an accurate weather depiction.
Like the Conans, the new owners are local. But they bring greater combined resources to move the project forward, including deep experience developing and managing multifamily properties.
Dobler, who has lived in Gig Harbor since 1968 (with a few absences, such as for college), runs Tacoma-based Dobler Management Company, Inc. (DMCI) with her sisters, Christina Dobler and Barbara Dobler Tucci. The firm calls itself “the largest, private property management firm in Pierce County.” It manages some 60 apartment properties, holds an ownership interest in about half of these, and also develops multi-family projects, she said.
In Gig Harbor, DCMI owns the 4425 apartment complex (formerly Harbor Country Estates), just south of Uptown Gig Harbor shopping center and Multicare Gig Harbor Medical Park on Point Fosdick Drive.
Dobler is listed as governor of Geld Investments LLC in the company’s annual reports, which are posted to the website of the Washington Secretary of State. A governor is an entity with the authority to manage or direct an LLC under its governing documents (the governor can be the LLC’s owner or co-owner, but is not required to be).
The Burnham Apartments site at 9411 Burnham Drive lies a half mile north of the Gig Harbor waterfront, adjacent to the Gig Harbor Eagles Club. Map by Tony De Paul, GIS specialist, Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer.
Dobler noted that LLCs can have investors whose names don’t appear in the Secretary of State filings. She said four family members, including herself, are investors in Geld Investments LLC.
More investors
Another new co-owner of Burnham Apartments is SSRM LLC, which is based on Fox Island, according to SOS filings. These records list SSRM LLC’s governor as Mork Family Limited Partnership, A Washington Limited Partnership.
The Mork Family Limited Partnership’s 2025 annual report, in turn, list Sharon Mork as governor. She’s also the governor of some 10 other LLCs that own multifamily properties in Tacoma, University Place, Steilacoom and Gig Harbor. One of these, Stinson Avenue, LLC, owns the Magnolias on Stinson apartments at 7314 Stinson Ave. in Gig Harbor. DMCI appears to manage all the apartment complexes for which Mork serves as the LLC governor.
Tacoma-based K3W Holdings LLC is the third investor in Burnham Apartments. Secretary of State filings list its governor as Austin Kelley. The website of Kidder Mathews, a commercial real estate brokerage in downtown Tacoma, names Kelley as a multi-family broker, senior vice president and shareholder at the company.
Burnham Apartments will have five 3-story residential buildings and a two-story recreational/community/professional office building. The gabled design has “a Northwest look” rather than a modern look, said Kathy Dobler of project co-owner Geld Investments LLC. Source: city of Gig Harbor public portal.
Dobler said that she and the other investors learned from Kelley about the opportunity to buy the Burnham Apartments project from the Conan family.
The project’s Gig Harbor location was appealing. “There just aren’t a lot of opportunities” to invest in multifamily here, she said. “There is a shortage of housing for workers in Gig Harbor.”
The apartment complexes that DMCI manages in Gig Harbor, such as 4425 and Magnolias on Stinson, are in high demand, Dobler said. “We’ve had a waiting list on each of these properties since they were developed.”
“That’s how we know this housing is needed.”
‘Not low-income’
Describing the demographic targeted by the project, Dobler said “we’re market [rate] and we’re also workforce, but we’re not low-income.”
Burnham Apartments will consist of one- and two-bedroom units, with rents likely starting at $1,950 for the former and $2,600 for the latter. And Burnham Apartments is a probably a placeholder name. The developers plan to replace it with something more marketable when the project gets closer to leasing, she said.
The new apartment complex will put more cars onto Burnham Drive. During the peak evening traffic, it will generate some 43 vehicle trips per hour, according to Transportation Impact Fee Calculation documents for the project in the city of Gig Harbor’s permit portal. To mitigate the effect of this added traffic, the developer will pay $371,559 in Transportation Impact Fees to the city to help fund road capacity and transportation system improvements.
To hold Burnham Apartments residents’ vehicles when they aren’t on the road, the complex will provide 154 parking stalls. Twenty-four of these will be in an underground parking garage beneath one of the apartment buildings.