PORT LUDLOW — The Jefferson County commissioner whose district includes the Mats Mats quarry site under top consideration by the state expressed doubts Thursday about the quarry’s viability for the new Hood Canal Bridge graving yard.
“I think it’s got some very difficult problems,” said Pat Rodgers, R- Brinnon.
“It appears to me that it’s got to be a straw man” — something that could be knocked down to open up other possibilities.
Out of 18 proposals, the state Department of Transportation on Wednesday ranked the 120-acre Mats Mats site — which was proposed by its owner, Seattle-based sand and gravel company Glacier Northwest — as No. 2 behind the Port of Everett’s south terminal.
Rodgers said he believes once Mats Mats homeowners persuade state Department of Transportation officials to reject the quarry site, the doors will be opened for another highly ranked site finalist.
That finalist ranks just behind Mats Mats — the FCB Facilities Team.
FCB is a partnership involving the Concrete Technology graving yard on the Blair Waterway in Tacoma, Todd Shipyards located on Terminal Island in Seattle, and the AML/Duwamish Shipyard on the Duwamish Waterway.
Rodgers said he was not convinced that a Mats Mats graving dock site could be constructed without using the underdeveloped residential roads in the quiet neighborhood of about 300 homes.
“If everything could be done from the water side, it might be feasible, but I just don’t see that,” he said.
Department of Transportation officials, in their evaluation of the site, said much of the equipment and supplies would have to be barged in because roads are inadequate for industrial use.
Rodgers said he has heard no support so far from residents in the area.
Attending a Port Ludlow Village Council meeting Thursday, Rodgers said he heard comments similar to those made by Bernard Belkin to the Peninsula Daily News on Tuesday after the state announced its graving yard finalists.
Belkins, whose wife, Rae, heads up the Mats Mats Coalition, which opposed expansion of the Port Ludlow quarry, told the PDN that homeowners would likely band together to fight the project.
Many live within eyeshot and earshot of the site.
Property values, traffic, noise and visual issues are reasons not to designate the quarry for a graving yard site on Hood Canal, about 8.5 miles from the Hood Canal Bridge.
The graving yard, a lock with a gate that would be flooded to float massive concrete bridge pontoons, would produce the components needed to replace the eastern half of the floating bridge, an estimated $280 million project.
Two other site proposals in Jefferson County were proposed by the Port of Port Townsend and Port Townsend Paper Corp. on Port and mill properties, and Northwest Security Services on property it leases on the western shores of Discovery Bay.
The Port and mill sites were ranked seventh as “high risk” sites, and the Discovery Bay site was rated No. 4 under “acceptable” sites.
Rodgers said he saw the more remote Discovery Bay site as more viable than Mats Mats.
Four proposals in Clallam County — ranging from the Rayonier Inc. site of its former Port Angeles pulp mill at the east to the Makah Reservation near Cape Flattery at the west — were lower-ranked by a panel of Transportation surveyors.
But Transportation officials have hinted that some concrete anchors to hold the pontoons in place might be manufactured above ground on Port of Port Angeles property just west of Boat Haven marina.
That site is near the 22.5 acres on which construction of the original graving yard begin in 2003 but was subsequently slowed and finally halted in December because of the discovery of hundreds of Klallam ancestral burials and thousands of artifacts on the site.
The partial construction and subsequent archaeological dig turned up remnants of the 2,700-year-old village of Tse-whit-zen.
The site is now fenced off and idle.