PORT ANGELES — The city and the Port of Port Angeles will receive $15 million in reparations for the failed Hood Canal Bridge graving yard under settlements signed Monday by Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Not nearly so large but perhaps as important could be an additional payment of $480,000 to try to prevent another mistake like the graving yard fiasco — which cost taxpayers $87 million before it was shut down — from happening again.
That’s what the state will pay the city to hire an archaeologist for five years.
The archaeologist will survey the Port Angeles waterfront from the tip of Ediz Hook to the former Rayonier paper mill site.
“The end product . . . will be detailed maps designating areas as having high, medium or low probability for the presence of archaeological resources,” says the settlement.
Parties to the pact hope the survey will be better than those that allowed excavators to inadvertently dig their way into Tse-whit-zen, an ancient Klallam village, and its tribal cemetery three years ago.
The agreement also establishes procedures parties will follow if a developer encounters artifacts or remains.
As for the payments to the city and the Port, the money will cover some of the losses they suffered when the project was closed at the insistence of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe in December 2004.
By that time, archaeologists had recovered 337 intact burials, thousands of skeletal fragments and 10,000 artifacts.
Portions of Tse-whit-zen date back 2,700 years, and archaeologists say it is the largest Native American village ever discovered in Washington.
The tribe now hopes to rebury its ancestors at the site within a year.
(See related story, below)
‘Positive closure’
The $15 million going to the city and Port to compensate for the loss of jobs and other economic damage from cancellation of the graving yard — this money is subject to approval by the state Legislature — would be in addition to $87 million already lost by the state on the project.
Not counting the $15 million and other reparations — including a package totaling $2.5 million which would go to the Lower Elwha — agreed to Monday, the Hood Canal Bridge renovation project is now expected to cost about $470 million, which is $195 million over budget and three years behind schedule.
Monday’s agreement, which Gregoire said brought a “positive closure to a difficult and painful experience,” gives the city $7.5 million for economic development projects.
These could include a water line to the airport industrial park, a downtown waterfront promenade or a new Francis Street sewer main.
The Port will receive an equal amount for improvements — like a sturdier bridge across Tumwater Creek, a multi-purpose cargo pier or expansion of Terminal 3.
The Port also will get the 2.5-acre shoreline slice of the graving yard site north of the steel sheet pile wall, although the tribe will have a ceremonial access to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The slice will connect two other Port properties.
The pact gives $500,000 up front and $2 million to the tribe to develop a cultural center and museum for Tse-whit-zen’s archaeological treasures.
The Lower Elwha Klallam will receive the 11-acre core of the site.
The state will remove steel sheet piling and concrete from the former graving yard– a graving yard is a huge, onshore dry dock — for the tribe to rebury its ancestors.
The state will retain but lease to the tribe the 200-foot-wide strip of land between Marine Drive and the excavation.
The tribe will use the land for a cultural heritage center.
Gabriel “Gabe” S. Galanda, a Seattle attorney who represented the Lower Elwha, grew up in Port Angeles, graduating from Port Angeles High School and Peninsula College (where he was student body president).
He said he expects the state lease will have low or no rent.
Land ceded or leased to the tribe will be restricted to cultural and historic preservation.
The agreement specifically precludes gambling activities.
Lower Elwha tribal monitors also will examine the 20,000 cubic yards of earth trucked from the graving yard to the Fields Shotwell Recycling Facility west of Port Angeles.
Soil that contains artifacts or remains will be returned to the graving yard site of Tse-whit-zen.
Court approval
Thurston County Superior Court must accept the settlement that ends both the tribe’s lawsuit and the state’s counterclaims.
The state Legislature must ratify the reparations to the city and Port in its capital budget and approve the land transfers.
Mediator John Bickerman of Washington, D.C., who negotiated Monday’s agreement, said it had been one of the hardest situations he had encountered, given hard feelings among the parties and a lack of cultural understanding.
It took 4½ months for the parties to reach an agreement — which Bickerman said “was remarkably fast. Something like this typically takes a year.”
The negotiator said the proof of success will be the state Department of Transportation’s willingness to clean up the graving yard site quickly.
At the signing ceremony, attended by about 160 people in the Vern Burton Center, Mayor Karen Rogers called for citizens to become “committed to celebrating the wonderful diversity of our cultural heritage and economic prosperity.”
Gregoire said the settlement would “bring closure and heal and bring a positive pathway forward.”
Closure with reburials
Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said such closure will come when Lower Elwha remains are reburied “where our ancestors want to rest.”
The graving yard site just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill was selected to build giant concrete pontoons, anchors and decks to retrofit the crumbling east half of the floating Hood Canal Bridge.
Informal negotiations to decide the fate of the graving yard after its closure in December 2004 stretched through 2005 before Gregoire and Charles agreed to new discussions mediated by Bickerman.
The pontoons for the bridge project are now being made at Concrete Tech in Tacoma.
Twenty concrete anchors, weighing from 1,000 tons to 1,400 tons each, are being fabricated at Todd Shipyards in Seattle.
‘Joyous’ end to bitter rift
BY JIM CASEY
PORT ANGELES — Monday’s signing of agreements by the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, the city and the Port of Port Angeles and the state of Washington ended a nearly three-year-long impasse over excavating a huge dry dock in the midst of the ancient Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen and its tribal cemetery.
In Gov. Chris Gregoire’s words Monday, the ceremony was “joyous,” and so it was for Lower Elwha Chairwoman Frances Charles and the city and Port dignitaries who squeezed onto the podium at the Vern Burton Community Center for pictures with the governor.
However, a more somber, subtler feeling underlay the hour-long event:
Plans to rebury 337 remains of men, women and children that had been uncovered at the site.
They now rest in hand-crafted cedar boxes.
“Now we can rebury the ancestors,” said Robert “Sonny” Francis, who had led two-dozen Lower Elwha singers and drummers in a song of Tse-whit-zen.
The village once existed along the shoreline just east of the present-day Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
“My heart has been heavy,” Francis said. “Now I can be glad.”
‘Painful experience’
Gregoire also acknowledged the sorrow beneath the joy.
“This agreement brings positive closure to a difficult and painful experience,” she told the nearly 200 people who filled the community center, which is next to Port Angeles City Hall.
Charles echoed the sentiment.
“This has been a difficult experience for everyone,” she said.
“We have been forced to understand each other. We look forward to when our ancestors will return to their final resting place.
“For us, reburial is what this has always been about.”
After the governor had departed, and the others began to drift away, a tribal elder sat alone and, without a word, summed up what had happened and what lay ahead.
Johnson Charles, the Lower Elwha elder who had prayed over so many of the ancestral remains taken from what had been Tse-whit-zen, opened Monday’s ceremonies with prayers in Klallam and English.
Now he took out his wooden flute and played “Amazing Grace.”
