PORT ANGELES — Local, state, federal and tribal officials will gather Tuesday in Tacoma to start negotiations over the future of the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard.
John Bickerman, the Washington, D.C.-based mediator hired to conduct the formal sessions, will meet with principals in the dispute that started in August 2004.
That was when graving yard excavators uncovered human remains from an ancestral Native American village on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Since then, the state Department of Transportation’s $86.8 million investment in the project has vanished, most of the work has been shifted to Tacoma and Seattle, and repairs to the bridge won’t be finished at least until 2009.
The graving yard, a giant onshore dry dock, would have built giant concrete anchors, pontoons and decks to replace the crumbling east end of the bridge that is the lifeline of the North Olympic Peninsula.
Bickerman was hired after Gov. Chris Gregoire and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles agreed last December to begin formal negotiations.
They dropped the informal discussions that had failed to decide if the yard will become a historical cemetery off-limits to development.
They also agreed to freeze the tribe’s lawsuit and the state’s countersuit over remediating the site.
