PORT ANGELES — State transportation and Port of Port Angeles officials expect to begin negotiations within a week on 24 acres of waterfront property for a dock yard to build Hood Canal Bridge components.
The “graving yard” dock would be the construction site of such floating bridge parts as the massive pontoons and anchors for the eastern half of the span that links the North Olympic Peninsula with the Kitsap Peninsula.
The eastern replacement is scheduled to be done over eight weeks in 2006.
Environmental process
“We are to conclude by the end of this week or early next week,” Randall A. Hain, Transportation’s Olympic region administrator, said of the state’s environmental permitting process now under way with the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Hain, accompanied by project engineer Jerry Moore, addressed about 100 people attending a Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce luncheon Monday at the Port Angeles CrabHouse restaurant.
Their talk featured a PowerPoint presentation that showed animation of how the graving dock would worked.
Hain oversees nine project engineers in Clallam, Jefferson, Kitsap, Mason, Grays Harbor, Thurston and Pierce counties.
Moore, based in Port Angeles, will be joined by state consultants to help with project design, Hain said.
The state Transportation Department cannot start negotiations with the Port of Port Angeles — which owns the waterfront acreage on Marine Drive just east of Daishowa America’s offices — until permits are secured, Hain said.
The agency is under a tight time frame to seal a deal with Port commissioners by Jan. 27, so Transportation can call for bids by early February.
“Some of the biggest-name contractors offices in the world” are expected to respond to the call, Hain said, and will be shown what work needs to be done and where.
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