PORT LUDLOW — A decision on location of the next Hood Canal Bridge graving yard site won’t come before March, a state Transportation Department spokesman said Wednesday.
Lloyd Brown, Department of Transportation’s Olympic region communications manager, told the Port Ludlow Chamber of Commerce that a panel of national and regional construction and marine environmental experts will choose the second graving yard location.
“They will review the site proposals,” Brown told more than 30 attending the chamber luncheon at the Harbormaster restaurant.
The proposals will include a joint offer from the Port of Port Townsend and Port Townsend Paper Corp.
Others are expected from the ports of Grays Harbor and Anacortes, and the Makah tribe at Neah Bay.
Bridge work in 2009?
Brown said it appears more likely that actual east-half bridge construction will not begin until 2009 — but even that is an uncertainty.
“In fact, the only think I can tell you for sure — the graving dock situation in Port Angeles has pushed us into the unknown,” Brown said.
That situation is the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe’s request that the Department of Transportation heeded last month to abandon the project in Port Angeles.
The tribe made the request after thousands of ancestral remains and artifacts were uncovered in the 1,700-year-old Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen.
The panel of experts will also decide if the project will continue to be built by contractor Kiewit General Construction Co., based in Poulsbo, Brown said.
Kiewit was awarded the bridge retrofit-replacement and graving yard construction projects in 2003 in a $204 million contract.
