PORT ANGELES — If you’re tired of the candy, roses and restaurant routine for Valentine’s Day, take your true love to the meeting on the Hood Canal Bridge graving dock.
He or she may not speak to you again, but you’ll get all the talk you want at the gathering.
City and civic leaders, union members and representatives of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe will bring opposing cultural and economic interests to the Monday gathering, hosted by the Washington Transportation Commission at the request of Gov. Christine Gregoire.
The Feb. 14 session in the upstairs banquet room of the Port Angeles CrabHouse Restaurant, 221 N. Lincoln St., starts with a 90-minute “open house” at 4:30 p.m., followed by a meeting of four Transportation Commission members to hear from North Olympic Peninsula residents starting at 6.
Frances Charles, chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam, said the tribe will make a visual presentation of discoveries on the property that overlies an ancestral village known as Tse-whit-zen.
Transportation staff will outline events that started with choosing Port Angeles for the project and ended after $58.8 million had been spent on it.
Informal discussions
Participants at the earlier “drop-in, open-house-style” session can speak informally with Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald and other staff of the Department of Transportation.
The “more formal, sit-down” 90-minute meeting at 6 p.m. will allow people to question Transportation Commissioners Dan O’Neal, Edward Barnes, Elmira Forner and A. Michele Maher.
MacDonald said his first choice of location was Peninsula College, but that space was unavailable.
As for the CrabHouse banquet room — which can sit down only about 150 people — “we’ll make it work,” he said Thursday.
Concerning Valentine’s Day, MacDonald and Commission Chairman Dale Stedman chose it to satisfy Gregoire’s request for the meeting to be held as soon as possible, he said.
They “spread out the calendar” and sought the best possible date, he said.
“It was settled by process of elimination. It had to be Valentine’s Day, unless it was going to go out two or three weeks later,” MacDonald said.
Olympia meeting next week
Jennifer Ziegler, administrator to the commission, noted that commissioners will hold their regular meeting in Olympia on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“I think one of the reasons (for choosing Valentine’s Day) was that the commissioners were going to be coming this way anyway,” she said.
The four commissioners at the Port Angeles meeting will travel from Mason, Clark, Chelan and Spokane counties.
The timing doesn’t please everyone, however.
Port Angeles City Councilwoman Karen Rogers already has bemoaned the impact the meeting may have on Valentine’s Day restaurant reservations.
Roger Daignault agreed.
“They sure didn’t pick a very good time,” the business agent of the Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters said Thursday.
“An awful lot of people will be getting home from work and getting ready to go out to dinner.
“I don’t know how many people would change their schedule to go talk to the commissioners.”
Labor turnout encouraged
Although he cannot make it to the meeting himself, Daignault said his union and others were urging members to attend the session.
“I’m hoping that we get 75 to 80 at least,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll fill that room with union members. I’m hoping that we make a good showing and pack the place.”
Gregoire wrote in a Feb. 4 letter to MacDonald that she hoped a Port Angeles meeting would be “a group dialogue exchanging information and ideas, thereby furthering a common commitment to a positive path forward.”
A Feb. 2 meeting among Port Angeles parties, including tribal representatives, in Olympia produced no consensus on what to do with the abandoned site on the Port Angeles waterfront.
The state had hoped to build replacement components for the aging eastern half of the Hood Canal Bridge.
At that meeting, tribal leaders declined to consider reviving construction at the yard that once was home to the village named Tse-whit-zen.
Non-Native city and civic leaders said they would not relinquish hope of restarting the project, although the Transportation Commission and Gregoire have said it cannot be done without the tribe’s consent.
Klallam beliefs say disturbing a burial disturbs the ancestor’s spirit — sometimes with serious consequences for survivors.
Transportation officials and the governor have called for the project to move to another location and move on before the bridge deteriorates to the point where it must be closed to traffic.
