PORT ANGELES — Charge more to moor?
Or anchor rental rates where they are for a few years at the Boat Haven?
A committee of volunteer citizen advisers to the Port of Port Angeles is on deck with the latter option but would do away with the former.
Port of Port Angeles commissioners have accepted the committee’s report but said another month probably would pass before they reconvene the committee and decide if they will follow its recommendations.
Bill Spring, its chairman, blames rising rental rates for the dropping occupancy of slips at the Boat Haven marina on Port Angeles’ otherwise industrial waterfront west of downtown.
Who’ll prevail will be up to the port’s elected three commissioners, who received the citizens’ recommendation to reduce rates and to increase marketing efforts several weeks ago.
They’ve also heard consultant Paul Sorensen of Bothell’s recommendation to raise rates and conduct only modest marketing.
The crux of the controversy centers not on luxury yachts like those made nearby at Westport Shipyard LLC but on smaller recreational craft that once were the Boat Haven’s mainstay tenants.
Then trailers grew big enough to haul 26-foot-long boats and pickup trucks grew powerful enough to haul them to and from boat ramps.
As a result, more boats spend most of their time in people’s driveways and yards — saving the $6.11 per foot of boat per month that boaters pay for slips.
But a trailer can cost thousands of dollars, Spring noted, and a diesel pickup truck many thousands more.
Rising moorage rates won’t bring back trailer boaters to the marina, said Spring and Penney Sanders, another committee member.
The Boat Haven enjoyed nearly 90 percent occupancy in 2005, said Spring, who moors his 40-foot sailboat Athena there.
That’s when the port began raising moorage rates — eventually by 40 percent, Spring said — to finance $5 million in marina improvements with bonds that won’t be retired until 2025.
According to Spring, that’s also when Boat Haven occupancy started to decline by 30 percent.
Spring’s graph of the situation shows the line of rising rates intersecting with the falling line of occupancy in 2009 — just when boaters began feeling the recession.
Except for a couple of months and despite a modest moorage-rate reduction, they haven’t recovered.
An ad hoc, six-person People for the Responsible Operation of the Port formed to decry the situation; it grew into the 17-person citizens committee that port commissioners tasked with solving the problem.
However, commissioners also hired Sorensen to study the situation for $36,700.
Sanders said she thought the expenditure was foolish, given that three committee members hold graduate degrees in market studies.
The committee’s report even used some of Sorensen’s data, she said.
“The report was well conceived, well researched and, I thought, rather well written,” Sanders said.
Furthermore, “the amount of money spent on the consultant could have helped buy “substantial marketing or improved amenities,” Spring said, such as laundry facilities and a year-round protected boat ramp.
Moreover, “the only way to recover local customers who pulled their boats out of the water and left” is to lower rental rates.
“We believe the increase in occupancy would more than offset the slightly lowered revenues per boat,” he said.
The commissioners’ response?
“We heard nothing from the port,” Spring said, and commissioners haven’t tipped their hands in public meetings, although they’ve been cordial to both sides.
Spring insists that Port Angeles boaters are more blue collar than their Seattle metropolitan counterparts, Spring said.
“The primary reason why occupancy has declined so dramatically is that moorage rates at the Boat Haven are not affordable to a large number of Clallam County boat owners.”
His answer: Give them a modest break in rates for a couple of years, then re-examine the situation.
Meanwhile, the port should market aggressively to attract owners who now “moor” their boats on trailers and to owners in Canada, where moorage rates are far higher.
Sanders said that Port Angeles would benefit not only from marina rents but also from the gasoline and groceries and boating supplies it could sell to visiting boaters, calling it “a marketing niche for the folks in Victoria bringing over their boats to winter here. We’re a great jumping-off point.”
Sanders — who said she was “between boats,” having sold the 40-foot motor sailer Angelus — said the marina was part of the warp and weave of Port Angeles’ sailcloth lifestyle.
“The boats generate large amounts of economic activity through marine trades, fuel sales, sales of supplies. We ‘re talking about boatwrights, machine shops, repair people,” Spring said.
“So, more boats mean more business volume and more economic activity in the community.”
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
