PORT TOWNSEND — Tourism boosters have done well in their efforts to bring visitors to Port Townsend, but the town could do better in encouraging people to live and work here, Mayor David King told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday.
“I’d like us to work on letting people know what a great place this is to live,” King said in his first address as mayor to the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce in front of about 60 people.
“We can do a much better job representing ourselves as somewhere to settle and raise a family.”
King, now in his second term on the City Council, was elected mayor by the other council members to succeed Michelle Sandoval in January.
He has worked in the marine trades since arriving in Port Townsend in 1978 and said he hopes to better integrate that area of local business and recreation into the community at large.
“I think there is a certain disconnect between the marine trades and the rest of the community,” he said.
“We’re an insulated little group — we have our own culture and stuff — and one of the things I want to do as mayor is to help to stitch them together.”
King said he wanted to decrease the barriers between members of the community and government entities.
“I think of myself as a problem-solver, a person who unties knots,” he said.
“We need to understand and manage the barriers we have between us.”
King said when he was first elected to the City Council, he attended a symposium where the speaker held up a Heinz ketchup bottle as an example of how government works in Washington state.
“There are 57 varieties of elected bodies in Washington state, and the effect of this is to put us into different silos of funding and constituency,” he said.
“I think the reality of living day to day does not respect those boundaries, so I am looking for ways that we can work together so our whole can be greater than the sum of our parts.”
King said that as much as the city attempts to plan for the future, it is at the mercy of external occurrences such as the Fort Worden State Park transfer proposal to a local authority or the interruption of state ferry service in 2007.
“We are well-positioned to manage the changing times that we find ourselves in, but there’s still going to be a challenge for us,” he said.
“We have growing understanding of sustainability, but it means different things to different people.
“For many people, it has environmental definition, while for others, it has to do with the [public utility district] and Quimper Mercantile, where we learn to manage some kind of autonomy as a small city.”
King said part of Port Townsend’s future resides in its name.
“We were one of the most significant immigration ports in the early 20th century, and we were an extractive port that shipped out fish and shipped out timber,” he said.
“What does it mean to be a port now? I think that’s one of our most interesting opportunities.
“For me, that means we export experiences, and there are lots of way that people can live here and do that.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.