PORT ANGELES — Although the Rayonier Inc. property on the Port Angeles waterfront is not listed for sale, Harbor-Works Public Development Authority has expressed interest in acquiring all or part of it to help direct both cleanup and marketing.
On June 23, city officials and Harbor-Works board chairman Orville Campbell met with Rayonier CEO Lee Thomas and talked about Harbor-Works acquiring the property, Campbell has said.
Signing a purchase and sale agreement with Rayonier is one of Harbor-Works’ goals for 2009.
Port Angeles City Attorney Bill Bloor and Economic and Community Development Director Nathan West have said Harbor-Works was formed in May to facilitate three parallel but separate projects:
•âÇAssist in the cleanup of the Rayonier site.
•âÇAcquire at no cost a 5-million-gallon tank on the Rayonier property for the city’s combined sewage overflow. The purpose of this project is to eliminate sewage entering the harbor.
•âÇPlan for the future of Port Angeles Harbor. In 2007, the city took over harbor management planning from the state Department of Natural Resources.
The property is not listed for sale, nor has the company marketed it in any way to find a buyer, said Charles Hood, Rayonier vice-president of corporate affairs.
“We’ve sort of referred to the community visioning process taking place,” he said. That process began in 2007.
Bloor has said that the idea of the city assisting in the Rayonier property cleanup was first broached to Rayonier in December 2005.
The assistance was to be in exchange for city acquisition of the water tank at no cost.
Bloor has said that formation of a public development authority was first considered in April.
At that time, the city of Port Angeles and Rayonier officials were discussing a public development authority — which had not yet been established — possibly acquiring the Rayonier property and taking on liability for the cleanup, according to a document obtained by the Peninsula Daily News in November.
The cleanup could cost tens of millions of dollars, Marian Abbett, site manager for the state Department of Ecology, has said, but Bloor said that the idea was to accomplish the cleanup without cost to the city through state funding.
Ecology has since said that Harbor-Works is not eligible for remedial cleanup funds for two years.
The city of Port Angeles and the Port of Port Angeles each contributed $150,000 in start-up costs for Harbor-Works.
The money is from their economic development funds.
That money came from a state settlement of $7.5 million to each agency to offset loss of economic development when the state Department of Transportation abandoned the graving yard project on Marine Drive in 2004.
The graving yard project was abandoned because of Native American artifacts found on the Marine Drive site.
