Battle on the Bellingham waterfront

Four years ago, when the port and city of Bellingham were good friends, they displayed gorgeous watercolor paintings to illustrate the future of the Bellingham waterfront. There are seaside condos, upscale shops, sidewalk cafes, business offices, marine-related light industry, a college campus, acres of tree-studded parks. The sun glistens on sailboats anchored in a new marina. But that was then.

The reality of that vision is in considerable doubt, with public squabbles between city and port about the shape of the new waterfront and who controls its destiny.

Last month the port's three elected commissioners sent Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike a letter declaring that the port would stop working on the project. "It is apparent that the city and the port cannot go forward with the waterfront redevelopment project as we originally envisioned," the commissioners said.

Soon after, Pike called a public meeting to explain city concerns over some of the port's redevelopment plans and likely environmental impacts on the city. Port commissioners and staff were invited. They stayed away, but 200 or so agitated citizens showed up, to take turns blaming the port and encouraging Pike to keep control of what could be the biggest waterfront redevelopment dream on the West Coast.

Surely it's the biggest deal in the 106 years of this former coal mining, salmon-canning mill town turned university town. There are implications for other port-city relationships, including Seattle's. They center on the city's determination to control land use, even when the land user is a public agency with a huge acreage of prime waterfront and an urgent need to do something with it.

In the buildup to the Bellingham showdown:

• City planners rejected, in blunt language, the port's environmental impact statement on its redevelopment plan. The phrase "the above statement is false" dominates the city's comments on the port's work.
• The city sued the port to prevent destruction of three older waterfront buildings that may or may not have historic value. The two sides follow conflicting policies on the amount of building preservation that's reasonable in the new waterfront plan.
• The port proposed a street alignment that's totally at odds with the grid planned by the city, changing view corridors and continuing to isolate the new waterfront from downtown.
• The two sides offered conflicting ideas for getting people to and from the waterfront. The port's plan calls for more parking spaces than exist in all the current commercial areas of Bellingham. Pike wants fewer cars, more transit, more bikes and pedestrians.

The idea of a renewed waterfront caught the public's attention in 2003, when Georgia-Pacific (GP) Corporation gave up on its aging, polluting pulp and paper mill on Bellingham Bay. The Port of Bellingham bought the plant and 137 waterfront acres for ten dollars. Some Bellingham cynics said they may have paid too much.

They own it, they have to fix it — the port now is cleaning up GP's mercury-laden chemical stew and that of previous industrial users, that has found its way into the Bay for a hundred years. Cleanup is expected to cost $95 million or more, with state grants paying half the cost. That includes a $20 million insurance policy against finding any contamination they don't yet know about. Add another $149 million to clear the land and put it in shape to develop.

Port officials say they would never have put their ten bucks, much less the port's long-term investment on the line, without a partnership agreement with the City of Bellingham. The agreement, signed in 2004, calls for the port to clean the Bay and prepare the land while the city foots the $200 million bill for streets, sewers, water, and other essentials. The port makes money on the land and a new marina; the city benefits from new jobs, increased tax revenue, and the notoriety of a spectacular seashore. But now the two sides can't agree on just what it is they agreed to.

Port officials claim the deal calls for a detailed master plan with land use regulations spelled out ahead of time, allowing developers to plan many years in the future without the cost of individual environmental impact statements on each project.

Mayor Pike says the city can't approve such a long-range, detailed agreement for the entire site and the six million square feet of building space it could someday support, 20 or 30 years from now. "We can't write a blank check," he told Crosscut. "We want to be a good partner, but they've got to realize we're also the regulating authority. We have to be. We couldn't give that away even if we wanted to."

Mike Stoner, the port's environmental director and spokesman for the redevelopment project, says the city's authority was never in question. "We recognize, clearly, that the city is the regulator," he said in an interview. "But we have to offer investors the certainty that they'd be allowed to move ahead without starting from the beginning on every piece of the waterfront a developer wants to build."