PORT ANGELES — The City Council took the first step this week toward selling the Morse Creek hydroelectric plant, declaring it and the approximately 800 acres it sits upon as surplus.

“This does not commit the city to sell it,” Craig Fulton, public works and utilities director, told the council Tuesday night.

Instead, he said, staff will present plans for getting the highest value for the property.

That means someone else could purchase the plant, harvest the trees for sale and produce their own electricity, Phil Lusk, deputy director of power systems and telecommunications, said Wednesday.

But any buyer who intends to restart the hydroelectric plant would have to renovate it, Lusk said.

He estimated it would cost at least $100,000 to get the plant up and running.

“It would have to be relicensed, and they may find it could be of economic benefit to them,” he added.

Council members voted 5-1 Tuesday, with Cherie Kidd dissenting and Mayor Dan Di Guilio absent, to take the action, which was recommended by the city Real Estate and Utility Advisory committees.

“I look forward to how we’re going to market this,” Councilman Lee Whetham, vice chairman of the Utility Advisory Committee, said at the meeting.

The project, built in 1985 and brought online in 1987, provided about 0.3 percent of the city’s electric usage.

It was shut down from 1997-2004 because of increased costs of providing electricity and the need for repairs.

It ceased operation in April 2012 after a generator shaft bearing started to fail and needed to be replaced.

The generator is rated at 465 kilowatts, enough to power about 450 average-usage homes .

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The city now purchases cheaper power from the Bonneville Power Administration.

The city would retain its Morse Creek water rights if the property and plant were sold.

Kidd said Wednesday she was not ready to set the process in motion to sell the project.

“I’m not ready to give up that asset until I have some ideas about where we are going forward with it,” she said Wednesday in an interview.

“I won’t let go of an asset that might benefit us down the road.”

Whetham said the property consists of several individual parcels, about half of which is a former military ordnance range.

Councilman Dan Gase, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker-Uptown Realty in Port Angeles, is a member of the real estate committee.

“This is probably one of the most complicated pieces of property that I have been involved in analyzing,” he said at the council meeting.

“This would not be to the benefit of the city to continue ownership.”

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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.