City, port near waterfront deal

Compromise seen on street plans, density

JOHN STARK

E-Mail

Text Size:

tool goes here

BELLINGHAM — The city and Port of Bellingham appear to be close to agreement on redevelopment plans for 220 acres of central waterfront property.

Mayor Dan Pike and Port Executive Director Jim Darling said Friday that consultants and port and city officials are putting finishing touches on plans that will be rolled out next week, with a preliminary discussion at Monday’s City Council session and a full presentation at a special port commission meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday at Harbor Center, 1801 Roeder Ave.

Tuesday is the deadline that port and city officials have set for themselves to resolve their differences on street layout and density of development on the site. It appears that both the port and the city have compromised on those issues.

MEETINGS THIS WEEK

Waterfront redevelopment plans will be discussed:
Bellingham City Council, 7 p.m. Monday, 210 Lottie St.
Port of Bellingham commissioners, 9 a.m. Tuesday, Harbor Center, 1801 Roeder Ave.
Waterfront Advisory Group, 6 p.m. Wednesday, Harbor Center.
Bay Street could be site of new library

“I think we are getting to where we need to be at the end of the day,” Pike said. “At the end of the day there might be a little mixing and matching.” Darling agreed.

“I think we’re closing in on an agreement pretty quickly,” he said.

On the street layout issue, the port and its consultants, CollinsWoerman, have advocated a plan that would bend existing streets to enter the site on an east-west alignment, although they already have modified that proposal to address city concerns about its cost. Pike and his staff are not ready to abandon the idea of simply extending existing downtown streets into the waterfront property.

The compromise: The port’s alignment shift will be labeled the “preferred alternative” in the final environmental impact statement, but the simpler plan will get the same amount of economic and impact analysis, as a basis for comparison.

“The city doesn’t have a strong feeling either way,” Pike said, adding that the analysis of the simpler street alignment will give port and city officials the information they need to make choices.

“We’re going to be driven by the data,” he said.

On the density issue, Pike said the city had agreed to “a little bit of a compromise.”

Port officials want a master plan that allows 6 million square feet of new building space, while Pike has suggested 4 million. Pike said the environmental impact statement will focus on 6 million, as the port prefers.

He downplayed the significance of the number.

“We are decades away from the 6 million,” Pike said. “I’m really more focused on getting off to the right start.”

In the short term, the port and city face decisions that are more concrete, in both senses of that word: where to build street and bridge access points to open the site up for construction of the first redevelopment projects.

“The reality is, there are things we can do immediately … to get us to about 2.2 million square feet,” Pike said. “That’s a lot of development.”

Pike said the port and the city need to focus on finding the best spots for new street access to the waterfront, at locations that won’t be dependent on the timing of a railroad track relocation project planned by BNSF Railway.

One such possible access point would be at the northern end of the waterfront property, near Bay Street or Central Avenue.

“The reality is that a lot of the changes in the (street) grid are going to be predicated on the moving of the railroad,” Pike said. “I do not expect that to be a quick process.”