CHIMACUM — Union leaders are scratching their heads at why local Democrats — the party they typically draw support from — are opposing the proposed “pit-to-pier” gravel mining project on Hood Canal.
Eight union representatives lined the entrance to the Jefferson County Democratic Convention in Chimacum on Saturday morning to distribute a six-page leaflet urging support of Fred Hill Materials Inc.’s project in Shine.
The project, which would include a four-mile conveyor belt to take rock to barges at a new, 1,100-foot pier, would create many living-wage jobs, the literature said.
“It was sort of like walking through the gauntlet,” party Chairman Bill Biery said of the unionists at the convention entrance at Chimacum School.
Hours later, the 129 party members in the county convention snubbed the unions and passed a resolution that says the gravel project “would risk enormous detrimental impacts on the environment and economy.”
Democrats in Jefferson and Kitsap counties passed similar resolutions last year, too.
At the Clallam County Democratic Convention in Sequim on Saturday, delegates unanimously passed a resolution opposing the Fred Hill project.
The pit-to-pier project “would be the first step in the industrialization of Hood Canal and runs directly counter to the landmark 1976 decision of the Shorelines Hearings Board that rejected a much smaller, but similar, project at the mouth of the Hamma Hamma River in Mason County,” the Clallam resolution stated.