OLYMPIA — A meeting among Port Angeles government, business and tribal leaders and state transportation officials Wednesday night contained “blunt” talk.
But the session apparently led to no consensus over the future of the abandoned Hood Canal Bridge graving yard project in Port Angeles.
Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said the 3½-hour meeting underscored the tribe’s need to educate non-Natives about its culture.
Charles said the Port Angeles government and business leaders apparently cannot take “no” for an answer.
“Their perspective was, ‘What can we do to make you change your mind?”‘
Still, Charles said — as she has since December — “Enough is enough.
Port Angeles leaders weren’t available for comment following the meeting, which ended at about 10 p.m. at state Transportation Department headquarters in the state capital.
‘Cannot continue’
Charles said “the graving dock cannot continue” on the Port Angeles waterfront, where excavators uncovered evidence of a 2,700-year-old ancestral Klallam village called Tse-whit-zen.
She characterized the meeting as “pretty hard, blunt, straightforward.”
“We gave them a different perspective of the reality we were dealing with,” she said.
“There is a lot of education that needs to be done about our existence, I guess,” she said.
Tim Thompson, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks who mediated Wednesday night’s meeting, said that if there wasn’t acceptance of the tribe’s position, there was acknowledgment of it.
He called the meeting’s outcome “an agreement to disagree on the graving dock decision.”
“It was a first step. It was the beginning of a dialogue,” Thompson said.
“I think people committed to trying to open up dialogue of where we can go in the future.”
