The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Your coverage of the Town Council’s Beal Street debate was informative. However, my public comment on the issue – a warning about safety and traffic flows near the marina – wasn’t fully reflected in your story. With a large parcel of Town property (the former sewage lagoons) up for redevelopment, the Council should be thinking not only about today’s traffic patterns and usage, but about how Cathlamet’s waterfront might function 10, 20 or 30 years in the future. That isn’t happening.

Indeed, the Town has got two related issues backwards. By moving ahead with Mayor Jacobson’s plan to fund preliminary design of a new public park as an alternative concept to the existing plan for expanding the marina with a new moorage basin, the council is exploring a second option. Not rushing ahead with one plan until the alternatives are weighed makes sense. Given this cautious approach, however, it is illogical to give away a section of street that could possibly be vital when the waterfront is ultimately redeveloped. The Town already allows the new brewery to use part of Beal St. as an informal parking lot, so what’s the rush? Further, what “economic development” would formal transfer of this property deliver? None, I suspect.

The safety issues should be obvious given the spate of large marina fires in the region in recent years. Imagine such a disaster occurring at the height of the Bald Eagle festivities (during which the marina rents every camp site and a large portion of its parking lot to RVs). Currently, with two narrow streets leading to a single marina parking lot, our first responders would be hard-pressed to meet the challenge. This risk will only increase as the waterfront attracts more usage unless road access is improved.

I doubt that the state fire marshal would recommend vacating Beal St. until the Town decides on a redevelopment plan for the waterfront. I also suspect that the Transportation Improvement Board, if asked, would counsel the Town to hold off until future use of the sewer lagoon property is determined. The Town’s all-volunteer Planning Commission has said as much, and two former mayors (Dick Swart and myself) believe no change to the street plan should be made at this time.

My read is that the council is divided. Add that to the conflicts of interest that prevent Councilmember Lea (as brewery partner and spouse of the marina manager) or Mayor Jacobson (as owner of a property contiguous to Beal St.) from voting on the proposed vacation ordinance, and the logical course of action is for the mayor to delay the third reading by seeking a council vote to remove it from the August agenda. That would cause no economic harm, and also give the mayor time to execute a waterfront park design for the community to consider.

George Wehrfritz

Cathlamet