Death of a dream

Published 12:01 am Friday, June 3, 2011

EVERETT — It isn’t often that you get a chance to buy a golden shovel, but the auction Thursday at the Port of Everett was anything but usual.

What was sold were the last remnants of a plan for a $400 million development on the city’s waterfront, one that would have eventually included construction of 660 condominiums.

Sold Thursday were items from the only condo ever “built,” a model put together inside a port banquet facility with furniture, accessories, appliances, bathroom fixtures, cabinets and counters.

In the hallway on the way to the condo was a sign declaring: “A new waterfront community comes to life. It’s like the perfect little town. Here, when you need to run to the store, you can actually run to the store.”

The vision was the dream of the port and its business partner Everett Maritime, a subsidiary of Chicago developer Maritime Trust. Everett Maritime went bankrupt earlier this year, and the port is still working on where to go next.

“We were trying to figure out what to do with this stuff and I decided to handle it by auction because I wanted to have a clear, bright line between what had taken place in the past and what was going forward,” Port Director John Mohr said.

He called Thursday a sad day.

“They were good people,” he said of Maritime. “They put a lot of their own money in the project and it boiled down to an auction of all the things they had spent money and imagination putting together.”

The port and Maritime began their project in 2000. It fizzled in 2009 when Maritime filed for bankruptcy protection after it was unable to get financing.

Mohr said that turned out to be fortunate.

“It could have been worse,” he said. “If they had gotten financing it would have been under construction when the housing market collapsed. Timing is everything in these deals.”

Maritime’s Bert Meers was in charge of the Everett project.

He was a well-known developer in the Chicago area and was lauded for development of the historic Market Square in his home of Lake Forest, Ill. Meers died of an apparent heart attack in March about the time Everett Maritime was placed by a judge into involuntary bankruptcy.

Mohr said port commissioners are engaged in what he called a “pretty aggressive planning process to solicit ideas from the community on how to go forward.”

The commission has formed a planning group to develop ideas and will be holding a series of public hearings.

An ad hoc marina district planning group will meet all day on June 10 in the port’s Blue Heron Room.

“They’re taking advice from local experts and looking at how to go forward and revise the plan,” Mohr said. “It should be something that can be done over a period of years because nobody knows just how it will be developed.”

Many of the items auctioned by J.G. Murphy went quickly Thursday.

Among those items were several gold shovels used to toss up some dirt during the May 2007 ground breaking for the project. They went for $125.

That surprised Mohr.

“You’d think we would have saved those for the next ground breaking,” he said.