PORT ANGELES — Three state transportation commissioners will lead a community discussion on the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard on Valentine’s Day.
The meeting this coming Monday will satisfy Gov. Christine Gregoire’s request for such a session and continue the exchange of opinions that began during a Feb. 2 session in Olympia.
That meeting drew about 40 Port Angeles city and civic leaders, labor representatives, and members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe to what was the first confrontation among all parties to the controversy.
Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald, whom Gregoire asked to call the meeting, on Monday said the Port Angeles gathering — at a location to be announced — will address two facets of the continuing controversy:
* “Giving everyone who has a question the chance to ask it.”
* “Giving everyone with an opinion the chance to state it.”
MacDonald said the meeting probably would start at 4:30 p.m. The Olympia meeting was closed, but MacDonald told Peninsula Daily News on Monday that the Port Angeles gathering “may take the form of an open house.”
Commissioners attending
In addition to MacDonald and Transportation Department staff, commission Vice Chairman Dan O’Neal of Mason County and Commissioners Edward Barnes of Clark County and Elmira Forner of Chelan County will attend, he said.
Because only three of the seven commissioners will attend, the discussion will not be an official Transportation Commission meeting.
In her Friday letter to MacDonald, Gregoire requested that members of the commission and staff hold the second meeting.
It should be “a group dialogue exchanging information and ideas, thereby furthering a common commitment to a positive path forward,” the governor wrote.
Such a commitment didn’t emerge from the first meeting, where participants agreed only that they would agree to disagree, several participants said afterward.
At that session, Lower Elwha Klallam tribal members declined to consider reviving construction at the graving yard that overlies a 2,700-year-old ancestral village on the Port Angeles waterfront.
The project slowed almost as soon as it had started in the summer of 2003 after workers discovered burials on the Marine Drive site.
It stopped in December 2004 after hundreds of burials and thousands of artifacts had been exposed.
Tribe’s consent
For their part, Port Angeles political and civic leaders did not relinquish their hopes of restarting the project, although the Transportation Commission and Gregoire have said it cannot be done without the tribe’s consent.
The Feb. 2 meeting was attended by Port Angeles’ legislative delegation — 24th District state Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, and Reps. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, and Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam — who expect to be at Monday’s gathering.
Kessler said Monday: “I think we needed to continue that conversation. If both sides aren’t involved in that decision, nothing is going to happen down there (at the former graving yard site.)