PORT ANGELES — The first task facing Jeff Lincoln, the new executive director of the Port Angeles Harbor-Works Public Development Authority, will be under taken before he officially takes the position.
Lincoln, whose acceptance of the $115,000-a-year job was announced on Monday, is still the director of engineering at the Port of Olympia and won’t officially take the Harbor-Works position until June 1.
But on Friday, he will meet with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Council.
The board of directors of the public development authority and the tribe will hold the joint meeting, which is open to the public, at 10 a.m. at the Tribal Center, 2851 Lower Elwha Road, Port Angeles.
Lincoln said Friday’s meeting is to allow him to understand the tribe’s interests and concerns about the environmental cleanup and redevelopment of 75 acres of Rayonier Inc. land, the site of a former pulp mill, on the east side of Port Angeles Harbor.
Klallam village
The property is the former site of a Klallam village, and human remains and tribal artifacts are buried under portions of the site.
The tribe is a partner with the state Department of Ecology and Rayonier in the cleanup of the site.
“I know that the tribe has cultural resources there,” Lincoln said.
“It’s absolutely essential to make sure, whatever we do, we do it with close coordination with the tribe.”
Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.
Previous experience
Lincoln said he has previously worked cooperatively with a tribe while he was the facilities development director for the Port of Tacoma from 1993 to 2004.
Development and cleanup at the Port of Tacoma had to comply with a settlement agreement with the Puyallup tribe, he said.
“We had a very positive relationship,” Lincoln said.
“Everything we did, we worked productively with the Puyallup tribe.”
While at the Port of Tacoma, Lincoln said he supervised the cleanup and redevelopment of the Sitcum and Hylebos waterways, which were designated as Superfund cleanup sites by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and four Ecology cleanup sites, which included three log yards and a rail yard.
Cleanup of the Hylebos waterway is ongoing.
Harbor-Works is funded by the city of Port Angeles and Port of Port Angeles, which created the public development authority last May to direct the environmental cleanup and redevelopment of the former Rayonier mill site, which has been a state Department of Ecology cleanup project since 2000.
Purchase of site
As the executive director, Lincoln will be responsible for negotiating a purchase and sale agreement with Rayonier for the property — worth approximately $5.2 million, according to the Clallam County Assessor’s Department — and creating a 2009 budget.
Orville Campbell, board chairman, has said that the budget will include additional funding requests from the city and port, which have each loaned Harbor-Works $150,000.
Acquiring the property, which could take a year after the agreement is signed, will make Harbor-Works liable for cleanup of the property.
As a public entity, Harbor-Works eventually could receive an Ecology grant to cover up to 50 percent of the cleanup cost if it acquires the property. Cleanup has been estimated at tens of millions of dollars by Ecology staff.
Ecology staff said in January that they are not considering allocating such money to Harbor-Works within the next two years because of budget constraints.
The city’s main impetus in forming Harbor-Works was to help it acquire a 5 million-gallon water tank that still stands on the mill site from Rayonier at no cost — in exchange for the city taking part in the cleanup of the property through Harbor-Works — although this wasn’t disclosed publicly by city staff until a City Council meeting in December.
The water tank would be used by the city to store untreated sewage during heavy rainfall in order to keep it from overflowing into marine waters.
The city is under an Ecology order to nearly eliminate overflow events by 2016 or face a fine of $10,000 a day.
Potential costs for acquisition of the tank haven’t been discussed publicly by Rayonier or the city.
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
