PORT ANGELES — For the North Olympic Peninsula to experience growth, local leaders will have to start inviting and aggressively pursuing every opportunity, three businessmen told the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce on Monday.
Bill Hermann, one of the owners of Hermann Brothers Log & Construction, Dan Abbott, who owns George Washington Inn in Sequim, and Jack Heckman, whose family owns Heckman Motors, spoke at the chamber as part of a four-part weekly series on growth.
About 100 people attended the lunch meeting at the Port Angeles CrabHouse Restaurant.
All three emphasized the need for innovation when trying to grow the town.
Abbott said he’d like to see an economic zone centered at Hurricane Ridge.
He said he’d like to see a local leader step up to persuade lawmakers and Olympic National Park that a restaurant and gondola leading up to the ridge would be beneficial.
“We need a real leader,” he said.
Heckman said he would like to see the city ease permitting to make it easier for developments, including downtown condos.
“It would be great if the upstairs of some of the downtown businesses were turned into some really nice condominiums and apartments so that there are people continuously walking around the downtown and making it into a vibrant area,” he said.
“If the permit process were eased, that would be a fantastic way to move that along.”
Hermann agreed that the permitting process could be complex and suggested that the Clallam County Economic Development Council should be helping businesses through the process.
“Sometimes the permitting people are not telling all of the options,” he said.
“We have the hardware store on Marine Drive, and we needed a storage building down there.
“They told me I couldn’t do that because I needed a 25-foot setback, and that was the end of it.
“But then I got to talking to one of the engineers, and they said that if I did a firewall, all I would need is a 5-foot setback.
“So we did that, and we gained 20 feet of our property.”
Transportation snarls are another area that needed to be improved because a two-lane highway would continually cause issues, Hermann said.
During the question-and-answer session, Port Angeles car dealer Howie Ruddell said there had been reports that Angeles Composites was being courted by five other states and was in danger of leaving town.
Heckman said the city should pull out all the stops to make sure the airplane part-maker has everything it needs to remain in Port Angeles through its expansion.
Mike Rauch, Angeles Composites CEO who was not at the chamber meeting, told the Peninsula Daily News that the company is not planning to leave town, but five other states have been making bids for relocation of the business.
“It is absolutely our intention to work with the city and the port to come up with a plan in our current facility — and we are doing that,” he said of Angeles’ facility at William R. Fair child International Airport.
“The bottom line is that our plans are to expand our business.
“We can hopefully do that here — but if that doesn’t work out, we could do it somewhere else.”
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladaily news.com.
