PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend City Council has affirmed a new group of residents to examine the Sims Gateway and Boatyard Expansion Project, an effort that could include the removal of some 130 Lombardy poplar trees from the city’s entrance.
The project, a source of passionate discussion around town, now has an advisory group called the stakeholder committee. The nine members are tasked with looking at the project from a technical standpoint “to determine what is the best solution,” city Public Works Director Steve King told the council Tuesday night.
The committee’s meetings will be made available online via the city’s website, cityofPT.us, King said in an email to Peninsula Daily News. He didn’t yet have a date and time for those sessions.
While people can watch them, the viewing public will not be invited to comment until the panel’s findings are forwarded to the city’s Parks, Recreation, Tree and Trail Advisory Board (PRTTAB).
That board was the body that forwarded the idea last summer of cutting down the poplars on both sides of Sims Way — alongside the Boat Haven and Kah Tai Lagoon.
The city and Port of Port Townsend and the Jefferson County Public Utilities District, whose power lines are close beside a stand of elderly poplars, joined in a plan to reimagine Sims Way. The old trees could be replaced with native species, a pedestrian-bicycle path put in, power lines undergrounded and the boatyard expanded, officials from all three entities agreed.
In the ensuing months, the Gateway Poplar Alliance, a group of opponents to that plan, has written letters, posted paper hearts onto the trees and asked the port and PUD to “stand down their chainsaws.” Their website, poplaralliance.org, describes some alternatives to the city-port-PUD proposal.
The City Council, however, focused on the new stakeholder committee. It includes people with a variety of interests: Arlene Alen, director of The Chamber of Jefferson County; landscape designer Kate Dwyer; Ron Sikes of the Admiralty Audubon Society; arborist Forest Shomer and permaculturist Jennifer Rotermund, who will serve as the liaison with the PRTTAB.
Residents Dan Burden, Russell Hill and Steve Mader are also members, along with Joni Blanchard, who’s been vociferous in her opposition to the poplar-cutting plan.
The city’s next step, King said, is to hire a consultant to work with the stakeholder committee on the whole Sims Gateway proposal.
Council member Ben Thomas said he’s seeing deep divisions develop in Port Townsend over the poplars’ fate. It’s been painful to watch, he said.
“I really hope [the stakeholder committee] is as mindful of the community as possible … so there is some way we can come together on this,” he said.
Deputy Mayor Amy Howard added that the committee and the PRTTAB members are all volunteers — “and I would like to entreat the community to be kind to them, even in disagreement.
“We are all people, and we are all trying to do the best we can for each other,” she said.
The public will have a chance later to comment and participate in the PRTTAB meeting, King said. That panel meets only every other month; it has its next session on April 26.
The City Council voted unanimously to recognize and support the stakeholder committee process.
Then council members Owen Rowe and Monica Mickhager remarked on a letter that had come to them from Rick Jahnke of Port Townsend. Jahnke is an emeritus professor from the universities of Georgia and California who researches human-caused environmental change.
The Sims Gateway project “provides the opportunity to begin adapting this area of town to be more resilient to climate change-driven sea level rise. This area of town is topographically low, and yet supports a significant number of local jobs and businesses that even moderate rises in sea level would impact … A first step in any adaptive design will be to seal off stormwater drainage pipes that connect directly to the bay, to prevent street flooding at high tides,” Jahnke wrote.
A new landscape design could also direct rainwater runoff into the soils adjacent to the road, he added. This would bring fresh groundwater to that land — and block saltwater intrusion from sea-level rise.
“This project represents an opportunity to lay the foundation to protect the jobs and businesses in this low-lying area of town,” Jahnke wrote.
Rowe expressed appreciation for Jahnke’s prescription.
“I would love to see that added into this project,” he said.
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Jefferson County Senior Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
