PORT ANGELES — The Port of Port Angeles should establish an economic development zone to foster new businesses in Clallam County, port commission candidate Mike Breidenbach said Tuesday.
His opponent for the District 3 seat, Connie Beauvais, proposed a barge dock or an oil rig moorage as directions in which the port might grow.
Breidenbach, 63, and Beauvais, 64, pitched their ideas to about two dozen members of the Port Angeles Business Association meeting in Joshua’s Restaurant, 113 DelGuzzi Drive.
The face-off, first in a series of candidate forums the business group will host prior to the Nov. 3 general election, was low-key, with neither candidate challenging the other’s opinions.
Breidenbach’s ideas included adding skilled-trades classes at Peninsula College to create a workforce for potential port-based employers.
He also advocated attracting timber mills that would manufacture cross-laminated timber (CRT) components.
Cross-lamination is one type of so-called mass-timber products that also include laminated veneer lumber and laminated strand lumber.
The technology produces superstrong wooden columns, beams and trusses. Although a CRT mill could cost $60 million to build, Breidenbach said, Port Angeles is surrounded by 2 million acres of harvestable timber.
Beauvais’ economic development ideas included making the port’s vacant buildings “key ready” for new tenants.
“We need to get the buildings open and get the dandelions out of the gutters and get the buildings painted,” she said.
Adding people to the port’s maintenance staff would increase local employment without the danger that out-of-town contractors would get the work, she said.
Breidenbach said such work could be kept local by using the port’s small-works roster of contractors.
Breidenbach, a former Rayonier senior manager now in his seventh year as a Forks city councilman, and Beauvais, manager of the Crescent Water District and a Joyce-area alpaca rancher, agreed that the port should be an economic engine.
They also agreed that the port should not sell waterfront land, as Platypus Marine Inc. has asked commissioners to do so the boat-builder/repair yard could double its facilities and its 75-person workforce.
Such real estate is in trust for taxpayers, Breidenbach said.
“Property on that waterfront should never be sold,” he said. “It’s not criminal, but it’s awful close.”
Beauvais said the port could sell or swap upland tracts, “but all that property on the waterfront needs to stay in the public trust.”
Breidenbach and Beauvais also shared the opinion that the port should encourage a reliable, sustainable timber harvest, and demand that the state Department of Natural Resources catch up with timber sales that were allowed but never made.
The resulting so-called “arrearage” amounts to 200 million board feet worth $60 million in revenue to taxing districts in Clallam County, Beauvais said.
The Forks office of the state DNR does not determine what is be cut, Breidenbach said. Those decisions are made in Olympia.
“This isn’t something where they make their own minds up,” he said about Forks DNR employees.
“The port should be politically involved in Olympia.”
Forestry on the Peninsula must change, Breidenbach said, but it won’t die; even log exports to Asia, currently in a slump, will recover.
“China’s a big country,” he said. “It still takes a lot of wood products.”
Both candidates praised Westport Shipyard, which houses its cabinet shop at William R. Fairchild International Airport, for outgrowing those quarters and moving to the former Walmart building.
“I look at government basically as a facilitator, as a bridge for businesses,” Breidenbach said, adding that Westport is an example.
Westport’s move creates a “perfect opportunity” for the port to improve the heating/ventilation/air-conditioning equipment in its old building and make it ready for a new tenant, Beauvais said.
“I say kudos to them,” she said.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
