PORT ANGELES — Social media is buzzing this week as online voting has propelled Port Angeles into a leading position for the right to the term Best Underground Attraction in a USA Today contest.
Port Angeles will duke it out for the rights to the best underground in the nation until April 11 — just about the same time the city’s landmark underground tour will change hands from its current owner, Don Perry, to Black Ball Ferry Line and a contractor, Bruce Erlwein.
Erlwein, a Port Angeles native, will take over operation of the tour from Perry on April 1.
Black Ball Ferry Line, operator of the MV Coho, will own the name and marketing rights, said Ryan Malane, vice president of marketing.
Taking off
USA Today contacted Perry about getting involved in the online contest a few weeks ago.
The national newspaper told Perry it was going to have a contest and was compiling a list of the top 20 underground tours in the country.
“I told them I’d love to do it,” Perry said.
The contest is part of the paper’s 10 Best Readers’ Choice for 2016. Among the other voting categories are Best Flower Festival — in which Sequim Lavender Weekend is in the running — Best City Park, Best Botanical Garden and Best Underwater Attraction.
While USA Today doesn’t make numerical results public, it displays the current rankings.
Users can vote in each category once every 24 hours.
To vote for the Port Angeles Underground, go to http://tinyurl.com/PDN-10bestpaunderground.
Port Angeles’ tour soared to No. 1 earlier last week in the voting but had slipped to third place by Saturday.
Excitement building
“We’re pretty excited about it,” Perry said.
The Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce is promoting the vote, he said, along with some members of the Port Angeles Business Association.
A big concern is that a tour from a larger city than Port Angeles will get the weight of its community behind it via social media.
Last year, members of Revitalize Port Angeles led an organized effort to promote online votes in Outside magazine’s 2015 Best Town Ever Contest.
That resulted in Port Angeles taking second place, behind only the much larger Chattanooga, Tenn.
Perry noted that the Seattle Underground Tour is in 15th position, and as the Emerald City is somewhat larger than Port Angeles, with a greater population, it could be a problem.
Still, the Outside contest was evidence that Port Angeles can “whoop anybody in front of us,” said Perry, and he’s confident the local underground will come out on top.
Black Ball Ferry and members of Revitalize Port Angeles are ratcheting up their promotion of the contest, too.
Revitalize
“Revitalize is definitely promoting it,” said the group’s leader, Leslie Robertson.
“The Revitalizers found it somehow and posted it on their Facebook pages. It just kind of caught on.”
If Port Angeles is expecting a mega-promotion effort like the group mounted for the Outside contest, that is currently not in the cards, though.
While Robertson said her group was happy to promote the city in every way, the stakes were higher in the magazine contest: The winning city ended up on the cover of a national magazine and had a feature article written, a major coup for any promotion effort.
“You just never know what people will get excited about,” she said.
“One thing about this one that makes it a little more special is that it’s about having an underground,” which not many cities have.
Robertson said she has not heard of other cities organizing to vote online.
She suspects that might be the case for Havre, Mont., population approximately 9,700. The small north-central Montana town has a Havre Beneath the Streets tour that is currently in first place.
Winning
Taking first place in the USA Today contest would be a coup for Perry, who would love to leave the business with a win.
He just turned 71 and will semi-retire when he turns over the reins of the tour April 1.
He’ll continue to do a few tours, mostly for small cruise ships that come to Port Angeles. Most of the tours will be performed by Erlwein.
Perry started the business in 2000 when Port Angeles was putting in new sidewalks downtown.
During the city’s first Heritage Days festival, he said, he led over 750 people through the city’s underground spaces over two days.
He soon applied for a business license and has been leading underground tours twice a day, six days a week, for 16 years.
“I have really loved it,” Perry said. “I’m really looking forward to going out with a bang.”
Port Angeles’ underground is a window into life of 1914, when the city raised the sidewalks and streets by piping a mud slurry into the dockside downtown.
As the streets and sidewalks rose, businesses built upward and left their old first floors below ground.
Selling the tour
Black Ball Ferry is plugging Port Angeles’ entry in the contest via Facebook, too.
Malane said Black Ball has promoted and sold tickets to the tour to many international ferry passengers, many from Europe and Asia, for years.
So Black Ball could ensure the tour’s continuance, the company decided to purchase it from Perry, Malane said.
He did not disclose the terms of the sale.
“Don approached us about retiring,” Malane said. “We stepped in to make sure it keeps going.”
Most of the changes, he said, will be on the marketing end. Malane expects that Black Ball will create a new tour website, signage and rack cards in the near future.
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Assistant Managing Editor Mark Swanson can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55450, or mswanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
