PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce is unable to find a charter boat service willing to provide Port Townsend-Seattle passenger ferry service, the chamber director said, as the board indefinitely tabled the idea on Thursday.
The chamber board voted not to move forward on the proposal that former chamber manager Tim Caldwell had long promoted: to provide Port Townsend-Seattle passenger ferry service for extended weekends during the peak summer tourist season.
“A passenger-only ferry to Seattle and back requires good marketing, it requires a fast ferry, and our research showed there is not any interest on the part of ferry operators,” Rod Davis, chamber executive director, said Thursday after the chamber board met.
Davis said he contacted P.S. Express, Port Townsend’s whale-watching charter service, Victoria Express in Port Angeles and Victoria Clipper in Seattle.
Caldwell was unavailable for comment Thursday.
Won’t endanger grant
Linda Streissguth, Puget Sound Energy government communication and relations manager and a chamber board member who could not attend Thursday’s board meeting, said the decision did not put a $15,000 PSE grant to the chamber in jeopardy.
“The money could still be used for some other chamber project,” she said, adding that she believed that Caldwell would be heart-broken that it was not going to be used to establish a weekend fast ferry between Port Townsend and Seattle.
She said the chamber would have to go through the city of Port Townsend and Main Street, both of which are chamber partners in the passenger-ferry project, to formally kill the effort.
During a Puget Sound Ferry Coalition meeting last May, Caldwell told an audience of Puget Sound regional leaders discussing passenger-only ferry operations on the region’s waterways that the Port Townsend chamber had $100,000.
“That’s our life savings. And we’re willing to wager it all” to launch passenger-only ferry service between the Port Townsend and Seattle, he said then.
He had been invited to speak as a key player in advancing a regional network of low-wake, high-speed passenger-only ferries for Puget Sound.
Caldwell had said that a consultant recommended that Port Townsend be included in the program as a recreational route for passenger ferry service.
He had said that officials confirmed the chamber’s position that a Port Townsend-Seattle passenger ferry run, scheduled each Thursday through Monday, would require a fare box recovery rate of between 40 percent and 60 percent, plus contributions from community stakeholders.
After the May presentation, Caldwell said he came away believing that a Puget Sound regional partnership of counties and cities, including Port Townsend, could come up with a solution to the expensive water transportation problem.
He recently said he still believes that could happen.
The 149-passenger Snohomish, then owned by Washington State Ferries, was called in during the holiday season of 2007 to fill the Port Townsend ferry-service gap left after the 80-year-old Steel Electric vehicle ferries were pulled from service permanently for safety reasons.
The vessel has since been sold to a company providing passenger service on San Francisco Bay.
Transportation funding for state passenger ferry service has fallen off significantly since state voters in 1999 approved Initiative 695, limiting car tab fees to a flat $30.
Still, passenger ferry interest is growing regionally and Washington State Ferries has proposed to state Legislators a plan giving Puget Sound counties the go-ahead to provide passenger ferry service while the state focuses on building up to four new car ferries, including a 64-car ferry loosely modeled after the Island Home serving Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
King County has formed a passenger-only ferry district to operate the West Seattle Water Taxi, the Vashon Island-Seattle foot ferry and demonstration routes on Puget Sound and Lake Washington and the Port of Kingston received a $34.5 million federal grant to begin passenger-ferry service to Seattle.
Cascadia Center launched the Puget Sound Passenger Ferry Coalition nearly five years ago with the aim of developing alliances to expand passenger-only ferry service on the Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
