PORT ANGELES — Mayor Karen Rogers insisted Tuesday that negotiations over the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard site aren’t “secret meetings.”
Still, she was reluctant to reveal when and where the next session would be held.
The negotiations are led by Washington, D.C., mediator John Bickerman.
He has admonished participants — the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, city of Port Angeles, state Department of Transportation and others — not to talk about the discussions, even off the record.
Rogers upbraided a man who called the negotiations “secret meetings” during Tuesday’s meeting of the Port Angeles Business Association.
“I take issue with your calling them ‘secret meetings,”‘ she said.
“They’re part of the legal process.”
Lawsuit frozen
The negotiations have frozen the tribe’s suit against the state over the 22-5-acre graving yard location — the site of the ancestral Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen — and the state’s counterclaims against the tribe.
But when asked by Peninsula Daily News when the next negotiation session would be held, Rogers asked: “Why do you need to know that?”
Eventually she said a session would be held this week in Port Angeles, but added, “It doesn’t matter when or where the meetings are. Just let us [the negotiating parties] do our job.”
Rogers’ comment echoed statements made by state transportation officials during the graving yard’s death spiral in 2004 — statements that Rogers bitterly criticized for ignoring the city’s concerns.
