OLYMPIA — Washington transportation commissioners accepted the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard audit Wednesday — but they didn’t accept responsibility for the $87 million fiasco.
In a new twist to the blame game that has raged since construction stopped in Port Angeles 19 months ago, Commissioner Edward Barnes of Clark County said Port Angeles City Hall bore responsibility for not revealing that the site overlay a Native American cemetery at the ancestral Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen.
After the project unraveled late in 2004, Barnes said, a member of the Port Angeles city engineering staff told him that accounts of building the Red Lion Hotel in the 1970s told of the burial ground that ran along the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
“I don’t think it is right to come back and lay it all on the Department [of Transportation],” Barnes said during a presentation on the investigation.
Told of Barnes’ statement, Port Angeles Mayor Karen Rogers asked, “So?”
She added:
“I really have no comment. I’m moving on. I’m not going to get into finger-pointing or whatever.”
Rogers has repeatedly criticized Transportation for not sharing information with city officials before it ceased construction at the urging of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.
Audit briefing requested
Commissioners in Olympia requested a briefing on the audit — which was made public June 30 — because they were in charge of the department throughout the graving yard debacle.
Political outfall from the aborted project included criticism that they had no political accountability.
The Legislature subsequently made the department answerable to the governor, relegating the commission to an advisory role.
Commissioners said they were uncomfortable at the presentation.
“Issues such as this tend to be over-reviewed and over-discussed,” said Commissioner Rob Distler of San Juan County, who was not on the commission during graving yard construction or its aftermath.
The audit largely blamed Transportation’s archaeological consultant for not finding the cemetery beneath 6 feet of industrial fill.
It also said the department’s June 2007 deadline to finish concrete anchors, pontoons and decks for the bridge resulted in hasty decisions.
