EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a three-part series on the 75 acres owned by Rayonier on the Port Angeles waterfront. The land, once the site of a pulp mill that closed in 1997, is the largest undeveloped waterfront parcel on the North Olympic Peninsula.
PORT ANGELES — It is impossible to say if the site of the closed Rayonier pulp mill can be developed, company and state officials say.
The 75-acre industrially-zoned parcel includes a usable 4-acre dock and sits on prime waterfront property on a protected harbor three miles east of downtown Port Angeles.
It is the largest undeveloped waterfront parcel in Clallam and Jefferson counties, and is among the largest available in the Pacific Northwest.
The site is undergoing a complicated environmental cleanup already nine years old. The property was contaminated with toxic chemicals left by the mill, which operated there for 68 years before closing in 1997.
Although the property is not actively on the market, the city of Port Angeles and the Port of Port Angeles formed Harbor-Works Public Development Authority in May to facilitate redeveloping it, with the possibility that Harbor-Works might acquire it.
Once the cleanup is completed — sometime after 2012, according to the sate Department of Ecology — another equally imposing challenge faces any developer lured by the parcel’s potential: extensive Native American archaeological deposits.
They could be so vast that extensive digging could unearth human remains and ancient artifacts in numbers that would far exceed those painfully discovered in 2003-04 at Tse-whit-zen, three miles west on the same shoreline, state Archaeologist Rob Whitlam said.
After the first remains were found in 2003, when excavation began for a state graving yard on Marine Drive, more than 337 intact burials eventually were unearthed. Some 13,000 artifacts — stones or bones or pieces of wood that were worked for human purposes — also were discovered. Some date as far back as 2,700 years.
The discoveries resulted in abandonment of the development.
Village underneath
Rayonier is the site of the village of I’e’nis, which is considered to have been contemporary with Tse-whit-zen. Remnants of I’e’nis now lie under 10 feet of fill.
Lower Elwha archaeologist Bill White estimated that between 120 to 330 Klallam lived in the 1800s at I’e’nis, which he said was “much, much bigger” than Tse-whit-zen. Potlatches — large ceremonial feasts — were held there, and the village included at least one known burial ground.
That should be a prime concern of any potential developer, Whitlam said.
The Rayonier site straddled Ennis Creek, next to which I’e’nis thrived as its era’s Native American version of a metropolitan area.
“If they thought Tse-whit-zen was large, it was just like a suburb of I’e’nis,” Whitlam said. “There’s a potential for substantial archaeology there.”
Frances Charles, Lower Elwha Klallam tribal chairwoman, said she has high hopes about the possibility of development of the Rayonier site.
The site is among the first in the United States — if not the first — to be cleaned of toxic wastes in partnership with a Native American tribe. Ecology, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the tribe have regulatory control over the cleanup.
Charles is encouraged by the sensitivity toward the site’s history shown by the city of Port Angeles and Ecology.
But she has doubts, too, about the site’s future after cleanup, “just because of the experience, mainly, of Tse-whit-zen,” she said.
“Everyone is being real cautious,” she said. “We don’t want to see what happened at Tse-whit-zen again.”
The ancient village was discovered during the first days of construction of a graving yard, a giant, tub-like staging area where pontoons and anchors were to be built for the new eastern half of the Hood Canal Bridge.
A year passed. The digging continued. As the discoveries mounted, Charles finally said in late 2004, “Enough is enough.”
Nothing found
Rayonier has already trucked off 20 tons of contaminated soil from the site, with no artifact or human remains found, said Dana Dolloff, Rayonier’s now-retired environmental affairs director who oversaw the removal, which was monitored by an archaeologist.
“We never ran into anything,” said Dolloff, who retired Jan. 1, 2008.
There’s also an added complication: Artifacts there may not be solely Native American.
Puget Sound Cooperative
The site of the village is just east of the site of the former Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, a collective-minded community established in the late 1880s as a “utopia of sorts” by Seattle anti-Chinese movement leader George Venable Smith, according to Port Angeles, Washington: A History, by Paul J. Martin.
At the time, with 400 residents, it was larger than the town of Port Angeles, though by 1904, the Cooperative went into receivership and was abandoned.
The Rayonier property also was home to two generations of sawmills, one built by the Cooperative and the other by the Olympic Forest Products Mill, which was further modernized and became Rayonier.
The property is layered, Whitlam said.
The top layer supported industrial development. Under that is fill dirt, and under the fill is the original surface.
“We know that substantial portions of the original surface are under 10 feet of fill,” Whitlam said.
“Once you go down 10 feet, what are the manifestations of I’e’nis that are significant, and for the matter, the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, also?
“You’ve got that layer cake covered by 10 feet of fill, more or less, depending where you are on the site.”
Historic register
The Rayonier property also lies within a vast, ill-defined area listed on the state Register of Historic Places.
The listing identifies the archaeologically significant area only as “Hollywood Beach east of Lincoln Street on Port Angeles Harbor,” but it does include the Rayonier site, Whitlam said.
“You’re going to have to have a fairly sophisticated probing to establish the true boundaries of archaeological deposits,” he said.
The historic-places listing also means that a developer will need to obtain a state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation permit, which requires an archaeological survey.
That will be among about nine city, state and federal permits that will be required of any developer, including potentially three archaeological permits, said Nathan West, Port Angeles economic and community development director.
Also required will be an environmental impact statement, according to a February 2008 Redevelopment Policy Analysis commissioned by the city of Port Angeles from Maul Foster Alongi Inc., environmental and engineering consultants based in Vancouver, Wash.
And that’s only if the property stays within the highly restrictive heavy-industrial zone designation.
That designation allows limited retail operations, such as nightclubs and pool halls only as conditional uses, and does not permit residential development or parks.
Any higher level of use beyond heavy industrial would require a higher level of cleanup, said Rebecca Lawson, Ecology’s regional toxics cleanup program manager.
In late 2003, Palm Desert, Calif., developer Jerry Ward proposed building there a 322-unit timeshare condominium resort, water park, aquarium performing arts center, and docking the aircraft carrier USS Ranger at the site’s 1,100-foot pier — a $120 million project.
Ward abandoned his proposal a few months later, blaming Rayonier for not telling him how much he would have to pay for cleanup work.
Harbor-Works
Harbor-Works board Chairman Orville Campbell said he could not answer how confident he is that the site can be developed.
Cleanup boundaries must be established, as well as “the asset values and liabilities,” he said.
Archaeological research must be conducted, a final cleanup plan must be written and an economic analysis conducted, Campbell said.
“All we are doing is going through this whole thing to determine whether or not this whole thing is feasible or not,” Campbell said.
“No one can say it’s developable or not developable until we’ve done all that, Projects have gone forth in Washington on all kinds of sites that have cultural issues.”
On Monday: An archaeological survey provides a detailed look at what lies beneath the surface of the Rayonier pulp mill site, once the location of the bustling Klallam village of I’e’nis.
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
