OLYMPIA — Two of the 24th District’s three state legislators reacted to Wednesday’s ranking of potential graving yard sites by emphasizing that repairing the Hood Canal Bridge is the most important consideration.
Transportation officials announced Wednesday that sites in Everett, Mats Mats Bay north of Port Ludlow and in Tacoma were front-runners for the graving yard following an initial engineering and environmental reviews of 18 sites proposals.
Now the agency will concentrate on developing plans for the three proposed sites, while also investigating building concrete bridge anchors in the Port Angeles area.
The Port Angeles waterfront was the original graving yard site, but the discovery of Klallam remains and artifacts caused Transportation to cancel the project in December after $58.8 million was spent.
Top priority
Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, said Transportation’s top priority is getting the aging Hood Canal Bridge repaired, regardless of where the floating bridge components are built.
Buck, along with Rep. Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, and Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, represent the 24th District, which includes Clallam and Jefferson counties and part of Grays Harbor County.
“We need to get a bridge built. We need to very, very quickly start to deal with that bridge,” Buck said.
The Hood Canal Bridge rehabilitation and replacement project originally called for replacing the span’s eastern half in the spring of 2006.
Now that replacement is delayed until possibly as late as 2009 — 48 years after the bridge was opened in 1961.
Buck said it looks like Clallam County has been shut out of site consideration. But he would like to figure out how to get the most work in the 24th District and will continue to do so, he said.
The 24th District delegation is still trying to get the heavy concrete anchors built in Port Angeles, Buck said.
Not a final decision
But Hargrove said it was his understanding that Transportation didn’t make any decisions about where the new graving yard will be located.
The agency has just gone through a rating process for the 18 potential sites that responded to its request for proposals, he said.
The process used 20 criteria, including tides and weather, rail access and environmental permitting requirements, then prioritized three sites to conduct further investigation, Hargrove said.
When he talked with Transportation officials on Tuesday, Hargrove said they told him the screening process was not a numerical rating process.
He urged them to look at the overall cost of finishing the project, he said.
The Everett, Mats Mats and Tacoma sites might the top three based on a Transportation panel’s criteria, but there are other considerations, Hargrove said.
The agency, he said, must compare spending an additional $20 million to continue work at an existing or already developed site versus $80 million for digging up prime real estate — such as being proposed at Everett.
Transportation officials showed him their draft document of site evaluations and said if one of them was eliminated for any reason, they would continue down the list, Hargrove said.
That list includes sites in both Jefferson and Clallam counties.
Peninsula favoritism?
Hargrove said he asked Department of Transportation officials if the appeals by Gov. Christine Gregoire and others to keep the project on the North Olympic Peninsula factored into the process.
The officials said those appeals haven’t been factored into their decisions except for possibly building the anchors in the Port Angeles area, he said.
“Mats Mats is on the North Olympic Peninsula, though,” Hargrove said.
“One thing to remember is we have to get the bridge built — that’s an overriding thing.
“So timelines are important. I will continue to ask for scrutiny of costs of other sites.”
Kessler could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.
But she said last week that Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald had told her that none of the top three sites was in Clallam County.
Kessler said she had a feeling all along that the agency had chosen Tacoma, but MacDonald told her that was not true.
Coming full circle?
Port of Port Angeles Commissioner Leonard Beil said if Transportation decides to build at least some of the concrete anchors in Port Angeles, that would come back to what the agency was looking at initially.
When the state started looking at Port Angeles in 2002, the waterfront was being considered for manufacturing just anchors, Beil said.
Then state officials began getting excited about the prospect of doing both the anchors and pontoons on a larger parcel spanning more than 20 acres east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
Building just the anchors in Port Angeles would get the area back to the original projection for job opportunities, Beil said.