OLYMPIA — The state Department of Transportation is preparing a detailed chronology of the rise and fall of the ill-fated Hood Canal Bridge graving yard project in Port Angeles.
Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald told the Transportation Commission at its Wednesday meeting that DOT is preparing “some kind of report” to “pull together complicated facts” about the agency’s decision to cancel the project on 22.5 acres just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
Lawmakers upset over the project pullout and the $58.8 million price tag will be awaiting the chronological report.
The Transportation Performance Audit Board will get a copy, although maybe not by its March 14 meeting, he said.
The House Republican Caucus has sent a letter to the audit board, created by the Legislature in 2003, asking it to investigate the project, canceled at the request of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe because of hundreds of exhumed burials and thousands of artifacts found on the site, the former Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen.
MacDonald said the report’s outline has been prepared, and sections of it have been assigned to DOT staff.
Deputy Transportation Director John Conrad cautioned that the outline was a draft and subject to change.
Eight chapters
The draft outline includes eight chapters and three appendices.
The first chapter covers assessing the need for the project and how the engineering and overall project was developed.
The second chapter will examine how permits and other authorizations were obtained.
The Port Angeles graving yard and Hood Canal Bridge repair and rehabilitation project was one of three “Transportation Permit Efficiency and Accountability Committee” pilot projects to streamline project permitting as part of the state’s regulatory reform effort.
Chapter 3 includes the acquisition and site selection strategy for the project.
It will address the process for identification and assessment of sites and how the Port Angeles property came into consideration.
The third chapter also will cover how the decision was made to obtain the Port Angeles site, and how the question of leasing the land versus buying it was resolved with Port of Port Angeles commissioners.
Prior to contract award
The fourth chapter will examine the culture assessment and tribal consultation process used prior to the June 2003 contract award to Kiewit-General Construction Co.
It will include how the process was expected to work and how it was managed within the “permit streamlining” pilot program.
It also will include how the archaeological firm of Western Shores Heritage Services was hired, and the scope and outcome of its examination as well as the tribal village siting review conducted by Larson Anthropological and Archaeological Services Ltd.
Chapter 5 will cover the period from the project’s bidding process in the winter and spring of 2003 and contract award in June 2003, to the Aug. 6 groundbreaking ceremony and the stopping of the project on Aug. 26.
The sixth chapter will include development and negotiation of the site treatment plan and the memorandum of agreement signed in March 2003 by the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe and DOT.
Archaeological period
Chapter 7 will chronicle the simultaneous construction and archaeological projects at the site and challenges presented by the unexpected scale of the human remains discovered.
The eighth and final chapter will cover the “implications and aftermath” of DOT’s Dec. 21 announcement that it was abandoning its Port Angeles graving yard project.
The three appendices are “What was found at Tse-whit-zen?” and “What was spent at and on the graving yard and where did the money go?” and “Suggestions.”
