SEATTLE — A state Transportation Performance Audit Board report on the ill-fated Hood Canal Bridge graving yard project in Port Angeles won’t become public until at least May 5.
The board had been expected to release the report Friday at the Puget Sound Council of Governments office in Seattle, but postponed the meeting for nearly a month.
In February 2005, state Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, asked the audit board to investigate how the state Department of Transportation had spent $58.8 million on the Port Angeles waterfront without building any of the concrete anchors, pontoons or decks for the crumbling east end of the bridge.
Worked was halted on the 22.5-acre yard in December 2004 after 337 human burials were uncovered, plus thousands more skeletal fragments and artifacts, on the site that had been the ancestral Native American village called Tse-whit-zen.
Cost rises to $86.8 million
Costs associated with the former graving yard have risen to $86.8 million.
Construction of the pontoons and decks has been shifted to Tacoma and Seattle, although the massive anchors probably will be built in Port Angeles on the shoreward slice of the former graving yard.
In the meantime, the audit board last year passed Buck’s request to the state Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee.