Shining a light on the Peninsula

Published 1:30 am Thursday, June 18, 2026

IT’S OFFICIAL: NEXT week marks the start of summer and the year’s longest daylight.

Now is a great time to enjoy that extra light — whether it’s taking in one of our Peninsula’s exhilarating festivals, catching up with friends and enjoying (and supporting) our unique local businesses, exploring our unparalleled outdoor environments, making progress on those house or garden projects, or whatever fuels and inspires you.

Halfway into the year, now is also a great time to take stock, reflect and shine some light on what the City of Port Townsend has been up to these last six months.

I’m going to skip over the ongoing services the city and city team provide that make up about 90 percent of our efforts — like delivering water, library books, permits or public safety — and into the strategic projects that aim to up our game.

Grounding the vision and building community

A major achievement this month was the completion of our Parks, Recreation and Open Space (PROS) Plan, adopted by City Council.

It’s a dynamic, readable and inspiring plan that represents broad community engagement, implements our Comprehensive Plan and demonstrates our collective love for our parks and open spaces.

Speaking of parks, we received proposals from 17 local artists to our request for proposals issued earlier this year to create new artwork on the walls of the Seamus Sims Skate Park.

Funded by the Washington State Arts Commission, we’re excited for our local stakeholder panel to hear finalists present their proposals from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. June 23 at the Cotton Building, 607 Water St.

We also put on a successful Soundcheck Art and Music Festival, a weekend of participatory, artist-driven events and experiences that reached 1,500-2,000 participants, and supported other crowd-pleasers like the Rhody Festival and Pride, with many more events on the way.

Add to that our biggest ever Community Read and our participation in the Connectivity Summit in March, our Comprehensive Plan celebration at the Golf Park in April, a new approach to City Council Workshops at Salish Coast Elementary School in May, and you can tell we’ve been out convening, connecting and celebrating community.

Delivering projects and bringing in funding for more

While the bulk of the construction season is ahead of us still, we’ve already seen some projects over the line.

For instance, we reopened the Kah Tai restrooms after a nearly 20-year closure. We’ve successfully received state approval to raise the Lords Lake reservoir an extra 3 feet, securing an additional 54 million gallons of water in advance of an expected drought.

Of course, as soon as the weather is reliably dry, we’ll be putting our streets crews and equipment to work on our expanded street chipsealing program, aiming to push past the 5 miles we did last year.

Speaking of streets, we’ve recently secured an additional $2.7 million for our Lawrence Street Restoration project, which augments over $3 million of existing state grants, to get Lawrence Street stormwater and street improvements completed.

The grant funding so far this year has been diverse, including $349,000 in state funding for native planting and invasive species removal, $62,500 for cybersecurity and $4,700 for universal play equipment to be installed in Chetzemoka Park.

Finally, we launched our request for expressions of interest for the development of the Evans Vista Neighborhood, a project intending to deliver 321 units of mixed-income housing, and held site visits and meetings with potentially interested developers for the project.

Empowering our teams and raising the bar

Getting the most from our team and delivering the best value for our community also means ensuring we support those who put their talents and time to work.

We’ve completed our third year of measuring and taking action on employee engagement, making notable progress and helping us take collective responsibility for improvements and enhancing our high-performing organizational culture.

We’ve also launched our first Advisory Board Handbook, doing so at a gathering and celebration of our dozens of volunteers who provide advice to City Council and staff.

We won our first-ever Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for our 2026 budget document, which complements a previous national award for our Financial Sustainability Initiative.

Finally, after more than a decade of aiming for Police accreditation, the Port Townsend Police team was awarded its first-ever accreditation in May.

There’s more!

You can learn more about our recent work by reading our e-news here: https://cityofpt.us/administration/page/city-newsletter-archive.

Or you can catch our quarterly magazine in your mailbox (if you live in 98368) or find them at the same link above.

You can also watch our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@cityofporttownsend. Or you can catch our short videos as they pop up weekly on our website homepage: www.cityofpt.us.

None of the work our city team does — including the examples I’ve shared above from the past six months — would be possible without community volunteers, partner organizations and our City Council.

We share the work and achievements, as we will for the second half of the year and into the future.

Thanks to those of you who help shine your light to ensure our collective path forward as a community and region is clearer, fairer and better for all.

________

John Mauro is the Port Townsend City Manager.