PORT ANGELES — Three environmental activists suggested Tuesday that developing the abandoned Rayonier mill site to a low level of economic activity focused mostly on Native American cultural history would help protect downtown business interests.
But many of the 50 people at the Port Angeles Business Association’s Tuesday breakfast meeting seemed more interested in questioning Darlene Schanfald and Robbie and Jim Mantooth over suggestions on how cleanup and redevelopment should be funded.
Schanfald, Rayonier cleanup project coordinator for the Olympic Environmental Council, and the Mantooths, board members on the North Olympic Peninsula Land Trust, could not cite cost estimates for developing the site but said grants and other funding might be available for more benign commercial activity that would focus on the site’s history.
“You’ve got to have the vision out there first,” said Robbie Mantoot said later.
The Mantooths said they were not speaking for the Land Trust at the presentation.
Low-level activity
The suggestion for low-level activity was in line with what’s known as “Alternative B” in a list of three options for the site being considered by the Harbor-Works Development Authority, which is chartered with redeveloping the property and assisting in its cleanup — and which may purchase the property.
That alternative includes building a 30,000- to 50,000-square-foot research institute for the cultural and anthropological study of Northwest Native American tribes on the portion east of Ennis Creek, a narrow, salmon-bearing waterway that bisects the property and which local, state, federal and tribal officials say will be made healthy no matter what’s done with the property.
Some of property is over remnents of an ancient Kallam village that once flourished in the area.
Schanfald and the Mantooths also suggested removing all industrial fill down to the beach along with concrete pads, a 4-acre dock and 7,000 pier pilings from the 75-acre site, located about two miles east of downtown.
One disagreement
But Schanfald and the Mantooths disagreed on one key vision for the site: whether Rayonier’s 5-million-gallon storage tank should be used by the city in its mandated effort to process untreated sewer water and stormwater so it doesn’t flow into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The city would purchase the tank in a $42 million project financed through loans from the state Department of Ecology, but Rayonier has said it won’t sell the tank unless the Harbor-Works Development Authority purchases the entire Rayonier site.
Water tank
In a later interview, Schanfald said “absolutely,” the tank should be removed from the property and insisted that there was “cutting edge technology” that made use of the tank unnecessary, but Mantooth said she and her husband believe the city should move ahead with the tank project.
They said their focus was on Ennis Creek.
“We’re not including the tank,” Robbie Mantooth said. “We’re talking about the land fill, concrete pads, the asphalt that is under where the stream would be going.”
Jeff Lincoln, Harbor-Works executive director and a civil engineer, said the consultants who studied how the city should handle its stormwater and sewer water overflow would have found an alternative better than the storage tank if such a solution existed.
“We have to move in one direction here,” Lincoln said.
“To continuously loop and go back and restudy the issue is not a way of moving forward. The people of Port Angeles are sick and tired of being held hostage to agendas that are not in the interest of the community.”
Community direction
He also said that the intention is for development at the Rayonier site “to complement the direction of the entire community, not just downtown,” noting the parcel is about a mile east of the city center.
“I’m basically saying we’re not connected at the hip,” Lincoln said.
He added that it is a “misconception” to believe ready money is available to develop the site and urged moving forward as quickly as possible with the tank-storage project, the engineering design for which is 60 percent complete, and developing the site.
“This community has been redoing Rayonier over and over since 1997,” when the pulp mill closed, he said.
Ennis Creek restoration has been at the heart of cleanup efforts since then, said Larry Dunn, Rayonier site coordinator for the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.
The Elwha trace tribal roots back to the site, where the bustling tribal village of Y’innis was located and was built around creek before the area was industrialized in the mid- to late-1800s.
Rayonier is preparing a creek restoration report that will outline what’s entailed in restoration and completed by March 31, Dunn said.
The tribe has $250,000 to make the creek whole, an amount that could grow exponentially if matched as a percentage against government grants, Dunn said.
Stream restoration
“Stream restoration is going to be paramount to the cleanup effort, because if you are going to restore the stream, the cleanup will have to work around that.”
Company officials have said they have removed the majority of dioxins, PCBs and other toxins from the site.
But there could be “a lot of graves” at the site, Dunn said, adding, “the tribe is not a major impediment” to development.
“The only thing the tribe doesn’t want to see is another Tse-whit-zen,” Dunn said, referring to the village discovered in 2004 on Marine Drive during the failed construction of a state Department of Transportation graving dock.
“They don’t want to see 300 ancestors unearthed and drug out of their graves,” Dunn said.
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
