PORT ANGELES — It’s on its own now. Almost.
The Composite Recycling Technology Center is a child no longer of the Port of Port Angeles.
It’s a tenant, albeit a nonprofit corporation, with its own board of directors.
“Once we say, ‘We do,’ you do,” Port President Jim Hallett told the center’s board chairman, Robert Larsen, on Tuesday, in effect saying the center’s success was in its own hands.
The port, however, will subsidize the center’s rent until it begins making money and will provide economic development services in the person of Jennifer States.
States is the port’s director of business development, and her bosses said she’ll give half her time to the composites center, most heavily in its first two years, and less of her work for the next three.
Yet the center will remain a political issue, said port Commissioner John Calhoun, while taxpayers wait for it to deliver its promised 340 direct and spun-off jobs.
“What we want is for you to come back and say, ‘We need so many thousand square feet of building to house all the new jobs we are attracting,’” Hallett said.
And whether or not they directly control the center’s future, port commissioners will retain responsibility for launching it.
“They will be held accountable because in the public’s mind, this is a port initiative to give birth and send it on its way,” Calhoun said Tuesday during the port commissioners’ regular meeting.
They and the composites center board also must walk a line between public transparency and proprietary obligations to the private firms that will supply it with recycled carbon-fiber composite material — a lightweight, extremely strong plastic — and that hope to manufacture new merchandise from it.
That issue arose Tuesday when port commissioners waived revealing what would amount to manufacturing and marketing secrets.
“Securing supply is very, very critical,” Larsen said about the source of carbon-fiber composites material the center hopes to recycle.
The identity of those companies — and possible customers who would manufacture new merchandise from the recycled material — mostly have been hidden in nondisclosure agreements between the firms and the port.
“We decided to play it safe and keep things on a pretty general level,” Larsen said.
Some of that veil was parted during Monday’s groundbreaking ceremony inside the building at 2220 W. 18th St., the vacant 25,000-square-foot shell that will house the center’s recycling equipment, classrooms and laboratories for Peninsula College’s advanced materials-composites classes, and startup space for manufacturers.
Toray Composites America Inc., which makes all the carbon-fiber material for the Boeing 787, participated in the ceremony and revealed itself as a supplier of composite scrap.
Another company mentioned during the groundbreaking was Janicki Industries.
It produces composite tools, parts, patterns and molds at its 216,000-square-foot facility in Sedro-Woolley and 154,000-square-foot factory in Hamilton, both in Skagit County, and at its 100,000-square-foot facility in Layton, Utah.
Toray Composites employs 400 people in Tacoma. Janicki Industries employs 600 people at its three sites.
The composites center hopes to provide 340 direct and spun-off jobs at its building on the Composites Manufacturing Campus at William R. Fairchild International Airport.
Although the jobs will be in Clallam County, intellectual property developed by the center could provide work elsewhere.
To tie licensing fees to Clallam County employment would create “a significant barrier to developing any intellectual property,” Larsen said.
Net revenue from such fees, however, must be reinvested inside the county, according to a 15-year-long requirement in a $1 million grant the center received from the state Economic Development Administration.
The center also received $2 million in federal funds and $1 million from Clallam County.
Simon Barnhart, the port’s attorney, said the center would be treated like any other port tenant.
That wasn’t quite enough to satisfy Hallett.
“We want a sense of publicly transparent confidence that the agreement is delivering results,” he said.
States responded by saying port commissioners would receive audits and regular progress reports.
Yet the port “has a special interest in the success of this project,” Calhoun said.
“We have to have some sort of overview because there are major elements of public interest that we are pledged to protect.”
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
