PORT ANGELES — Best Western Olympic Lodge owner Tod McClaskey Jr. was a sharp-elbowed critic of efforts in 2002-2004 to bring a convention center and hotel to Port Angeles on the Oak Street property he now owns.
Port Angeles city, Port of Port Angeles and community leaders have wanted to bring a convention center to Port Angeles for more than 50 years, but focused efforts on the Oak Street property for about the last two decades — efforts now dashed by McClaskey’s pledge to not sell the property to anyone who wants to build a hotel or motel on the waterfront parcel.
Randal Ehm, president of Ehm Architecture of Seattle and San Diego, Calif., wanted to build a four-story, 156-room hotel and conference center on the Oak Street property.
Worried that the new hotel would take business away from the Olympic Lodge, McClaskey joined several city residents in unsuccessful efforts to stop the project.
McClaskey framed his fight against Ehm in the language of the jungle.
“We’re just trying to protect our area,” McClaskey said in a Dec. 22, 2002, Peninsula Daily News interview.
“We’re trying to signal to people [that] just like in the animal kingdom, this is our territory, and if you want to come in, there’s going to be a fight.”
McClaskey’s efforts became moot when Ehm’s project collapsed in August 2004.
Ehm was unable to obtain financing despite the city’s pledge to pour $2 million in hotel-motel tax money over 20 years to market the conference center.
Community leaders have tried to get a convention center in Port Angeles since the 1950s, when the Oak Street property was still used as a log yard.
The goal was to get a facility that could hold 500 to 900 persons, preferably with an adjoining hotel.
The Red Lion Hotel, the city’s largest hotel, has second-floor meeting room space for about 150 people.
Large groups have to find additional meeting space at the Naval Elks Lodge and at the Vern Burton Community Center.
After Ehm’s project collapsed, the city gave up on plans to use public money to help fund a convention center.
There have been no new efforts to build a convention center in Port Angeles.
McClaskey Enterprises, once owned by McClaskey’s father, was a suitor for the Oak Street Property in 1993.
Then based in Portland, Ore., Tod McClaskey Sr. had wanted to build a 150-room hotel with enough meeting space for 500 people.
Shilo Inns submitted proposals in 1993 and 1998.
Harry Dorssers, who is married to a former Port Angeles woman — they live in the Seattle area and Monte Carlo — bought the parcel from the Port of Port Angeles in 2006 for $800,000.
He considered first building an aquatic center (Dorssers had built many of these in Europe), then condominiums with retail businesses on the first floor, then listed the property for sale for $1.6 million, $300,00 less than McClaskey paid him.
“It cost me a fortune making all the building plans,” Dorssers told the PDN in a telephone interview Friday.
“For me, the thing is over,” he said before hanging up.
Said McClaskey: “It’s amazing this has been going on for 20 years.”
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
