Port Townsend plans to solicit project developers
Published 1:30 am Friday, February 20, 2026
PORT TOWNSEND — Port Townsend city staff updated the city council on progress made in the pre-development of the Evans Vista housing project.
The task at hand is to solicit developers to partner with the city.
After gathering data by conducting more than 25 interviews with developers, city staff suggested Tuesday that moving to the more flexible request for expression of interest (RFEI) over the more rigid request for proposal (RFP) would benefit the process.
“It’s a less prescriptive way of soliciting proposals from developers that might be interested in the Evans Vista project,” said Renata Munfrada, the city’s housing grants coordinator, in a presentation to the council.
Staff hope to open the RFEI from April through June.
After closing the application period, a committee would score the expressions of interest.
Developers’ interest and capacity to produce affordable housing should be the priority criteria, Munfrada said. Other criteria would include financial feasibility, experience with comparable projects and alignment with the city’s master plan goals, she added.
“From there, we’ll ask the developers to sharpen their pencils and bring us back a more specific proposal,” Munfrada said. “Once we’ve selected a developer, we will determine the structure of the deal and funding and disposition of the property, etc. Then we’ll execute the contract.”
Staff are hoping to have the contract executed by spring 2027, Munfrada added.
As staff moves toward forging conditions for partnerships with developers, questions around which elements of the project should be mandated — as opposed optional — are coming into focus.
Developer feedback, for example, pointed strongly toward making vertical mixed-use — with commercial on the ground floor — optional. Such construction is very difficult, Munfrada said.
“We’d really love to have our little corner stores, a coffee shop on the ground floor, with apartments above,” Munfrada said. “But we’ve heard from developers that it’s going to be very difficult and that, if we mandate that, we might not get as many proposals.”
Council member Libby Urner Wennstrom said the city should neither write off commercial uses, nor prioritize them.
With the Quimper Mercantile moving nearby, commercial uses feel like less of a priority, Mayor Amy Howard said.
The RFEI’s affordability priority is tied directly to funding requirements for the city, Munfrada said. Grants for purchasing the property and developing infrastructure carry affordability requirements, and future grants may as well.
One possible source of future funding is the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program (LIHTC), which Munfrada called a likely route for the city to pursue.
“At a minimum, (with LIHTC), at least 40 percent of the units must be rented out to households earning 60 percent of the area median income or less, or at least 20 percent of the units must be rented out at 50 percent of the area median income,” Munfrada said.
The city recently pursued a state Department of Commerce Connecting Housing to Infrastructure Program (CHIP) grant. The grant was not received, with Commerce’s primary feedback being that it favors projects that are at a further stage of readiness. Commerce prefers shovel-ready projects, Munfrada said.
“The second (reason) was affordability,” she continued. “Even though we envision this potentially providing more affordable housing, we only mandated in our CHIP application that 25 percent of our units to be affordable at 80 percent (area median income). Commerce felt that that was the bare minimum and therefore they gave us a bare minimum number of points allowable in that category.”
The city also requested $800,000 for phase one through Local and Community Projects (LCP) funding, a direct state legislative appropriation. Their application included 75-125 units in the phase. A quarter would be affordable and the remainder would be considered workforce housing.
In soliciting the widest range of developer offers, staff are apprehensive about mandating deeper affordability requirements than 25 percent below 80 percent of area median income.
“We would certainly like to encourage it,” Munfrada said. “We think a point-based system might be a good way to encourage affordability.”
When some developers expressed interest in the prospect of developing all affordable units, Munfrada said she was initially excited by the idea. Conversations with colleagues pointed toward the community value of designing mixed-income neighborhoods.
The possibility introduces questions for the city, Munfrada said.
“If we were to get a developer who says, ‘I want to do 100 percent affordability,’ do we turn that developer away just because they’re not providing some of those missing middle housing units?” Munfrada asked.
In public comment, resident Dylan Quarles cited a study of mixed income neighborhoods by Harvard economist Raj Chetty.
“Neighborhoods that were socio-economically mixed were associated with better economic outcomes for children from low-income families,” Quarles said. “The research suggests that growing up in communities with a range of income levels can expand access to networks, resources and opportunities that may not otherwise be available in areas of concentrated poverty.”
A question consistently raised by city resident Derek Firenze during public comment has been about the site’s close proximity to the Port Townsend Paper Mill and the potentially adverse health effects emissions might cause. The city has done its due diligence in researching the concern, Munfrada said.
Staff reviewed monitoring data from the Washington Department of Ecology, the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which Munfrada said show Port Townsend’s air quality in the ‘good’ category and indicate little to no overall health risk from emissions associated with the mill.
A 2024 published paper from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which analyzed outdoor air exposures relating to emissions from the mill, concluded that breathing sulphur compounds near the mill could potentially cause adverse effects on respiratory health.
“While exposure to the concentrations of the individual sulfur contaminants is not likely to cause adverse effects, exposure to the mixture of contaminants may cause occasional acute respiratory effects,” the study concluded. “Sulfur compounds are associated with the environmental odors described in complaints from community members.”
Howard said that while she does not expect the issue to be a part of the project, she will commit to pursuing further information on how the mill’s emissions might affect health outcomes.
Council member Monica MickHager also expressed interest in continuing to examine the issue.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
