PORT ANGELES — A city of Port Angeles agreement with the Harbor-Works Public Development Authority has no timeline for paying back the $150,000 loan approved on Tuesday — although it does have a repayment trigger.
“There is no specific date in the contract,” said Bill Bloor, city attorney.
“But there is a trigger. When they get funds, that is when they should start paying us back.”
Port of Port Angeles commissioners unanimously approved giving Harbor-Works $150,000 last week — with no loan agreement.
The port’s agreement hasn’t been drawn up yet, said Bob McChesney, port executive director, on Wednesday.
“Ours will closely resemble what the city has,” McChesney said.
“That is fairly standard for this sort of thing.”
The authority, created by the city and Port of Port Angeles in May, wants to acquire the Rayonier pulp mill site, oversee and hopefully speed up its long-stalled cleanup and eventually market the property.
Revenue from sale of the mill site, which is still owned by Rayonier, hopefully will pay back the $300,000 in loans, said Orville Campbell, chairman of the Harbor-Works five-member board that was formed in June.
The Harbor-Works board also hopes to acquire grant funding from state agencies.
Since 2000, Rayonier Inc. — which owns the 75-acre site — the state Department of Ecology and the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe have supervised its cleanup.
The waterfront site , which includes a buried ancient Klallam village on its eastern half — is contaminated with pockets of PCBs, dioxin, arsenic and other toxins left by the pulp mill which operated there for 68 years before closing on March 1, 1997.
The Rayonier site is “moderately contaminated,” perhaps 2 or 3 on a scale of 10, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in 2000.
