Two in one-hundred chances are what Peninsula labor leaders say they’ll chase in hopes of keeping the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard project on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Those were the odds quoted to them at a meeting with state Department of Transportation officials in Olympia on Wednesday, said Roger Daignault, business representative of Carpenters & Pile Drivers Local 1303 of Port Angeles.
“The DOT told us there was a two-in-one-hundred chance that it gets built here,” Daignault said, “and that’s up to the Lower Elwha Klallam (tribe).”
But if the odds are long, the stakes are large, he told about 70 people who gathered Thursday night for a union rally in the Carpenters & Pile Drivers Hall, 416 E. First St., Port Angeles.
At risk aren’t only the 100 or so jobs the graving yard would bring, but the whole Port Angeles waterfront that could be banned to developers because of ancestral burials beneath it.
Discovery of remains
The discovery of human remains and Native American artifacts at the 1,700-year-old Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen stopped work on the graving yard along Marine Drive in August 2003.
That’s where the state had hoped to build concrete anchors, pontoons, and road decks to rehabilitate the crumbling east end of the Hood Canal Bridge.
Political representatives who addressed the rally Thursday said the project must stay on the Olympic Peninsula.
Beneath a banner reading “Save Our Graving Dock,” they told the crowd that they cannot accept the fact that there isn’t compromise on graving yard issues.
Their message, though, didn’t use the word “jobs” so much as it repeated “respect.”
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, which urged that the project be stopped, are key to even the slimmest hope that it could be restarted, said state Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce.
“The tribe thinks they’re alone,” he said. “The tribe thinks we don’t care.”
Any successful effort to keep the graving yard on the North Olympic Peninsula, Buck said, will be a community concern.
