PORT ANGELES — Mayor Dan Di Guilio and Deputy Mayor Don Perry said during a candidate forum Wednesday that they made a mistake by voting to form Harbor-Works Development Authority in 2008.
Both Port Angeles City Council members, who are each running for a second term in the Nov. 8 general election, said they would not make the same decision again, noting they felt pressured by staff to vote with little or no information beforehand.
“It’s never been a secret that the way Harbor-Works was created is something I would not like to see happen again,” Di Guilio told a crowd of about 40 in council chambers at City Hall.
“We were told that evening if we didn’t support Harbor-Works that it would jeopardize a number of state grants in line for the work.
“It turned out to be false.”
But neither of the council members at the forum hosted by the Clallam County League of Women Voters said that forming a public development authority to gain control of the former Rayonier mill site to spur development there — as Harbor-Works was intended to do — was itself a bad idea.
“We made the vote because we as a group wanted to get that property back on the tax rolls,” Perry said.
Harbor-Works dissolved last year after receiving $1.3 million in loans from the city and Port of Port Angeles.
Learn to say no
Sissi Bruch, who is challenging Perry, said following those comments that the council needs to learn to say no to staff and not make decisions under unnecessary pressure.
“That is something that has got to stop,” she said to mild applause.
Noelle Fuller, who is challenging Di Guilio, did not attend the forum, which also included Councilman Brad Collins and his challenger, Andrew Schwab.
Councilwoman Cherie Kidd is running unopposed since her challenger, Cody Blevins, dropped out of the race. She attended the forum as well.
Fuller on Thursday declined to say why she missed the forum.
“It was simply a mistake on my part,” she said.
Bruch, a Port Angeles Planning Commission member and Lower Elwha Klallam tribe senior planner, and Perry were also at odds over the city’s sewage overflow elimination project and Nippon’s biomass energy project.
Sewage overflow
Bruch said the city’s $40 million overflow project falls short of fixing the problem because it relies on storage rather removing stormwater from the sewer system, which causes overflows.
“There’s got to be something better than what we are doing,” Bruch said.
Perry noted that use of a 5-million-gallon tank will eliminate “99 percent” of overflows, and, according to staff, removing all the stormwater from sewers would cost 4.5 times as much.
On biomass, Perry said the project will help support jobs at the mill and that he doesn’t agree with critics of the project who say it’s going to increase air pollution.
“We have a mill out here that means jobs, economic income for our city, for the people who work there,” he said.
Biomass
“The biomass project is part of letting the mill continue to do what it’s doing.”
Bruch said she voted against the project while on the city Planning Commission.
“I do agree we need jobs, but at the expense of our clean air, I have a question of that,” she said.
The Olympic Clean Air Agency has said that, when carbon dioxide emissions are not taken into account, the project will reduce pollution overall at the mill through more advanced pollution controls even though about twice as much wood will be burned.
Opponents of the project have disputed that conclusion.
Collins and Schwab said they agree on several issues, including encouraging energy conservation, but they differed on the biomass project.
Schwab, who owns Anime Kat, said he is against it but almost on the fence, while Collins said he supports it based on data provided by state agencies.
________
Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
