EVERETT — An effort to scrap an agreement exploring ways to save a historic building on the waterfront also threatens a plan to spend $400,000 on history displays, Port of Everett officials said Tuesday.
They were responding to a letter by Chris Moore of the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, who asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to eliminate an agreement between the port and historical groups to explore ways to save Everett’s Collins Building.
The Corps is involved because it made the Collins Building effort part of its approval of a port project to build a new marina for large boats in the area.
The Collins Building is on the register of historic places, and Moore asked the Corps to force the port to re-examine possible efforts to save it. He cited a letter from a public relations company to the port’s private development partner, Maritime Trust, outlining a plan to hasten the building’s removal.
Bert Meers, Maritime’s president, said his company never hired the public relations firm.
Port commission chairman Phil Bannan said Tuesday the port had nothing to do with the proposal and instead entered into the agreement with the historical groups in good faith.
“Washington Trust’s accusation is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst,” he said.
John Mohr, the port’s executive director, said the suggestion that the port acted in bad faith was wrong. “It’s just flat-out manipulation,” he said.
Bannan, who wrote a response to Moore on Tuesday, said his letter was “based on bad facts” and disrespectful.
And he noted that the port showed its good faith in supporting the area’s history by agreeing to spend $400,000 for a series of interpretive displays that will be created on the waterfront to help promote tourism. They would commemorate the city’s lumber, commercial fishing and boat-building industries.
Bannan noted that the displays stemmed from the agreement Moore is seeking to nullify and that dumping it would also nullify the interpretive program.
“Good faith is a value and an obligation that the Port of Everett takes very seriously,” he wrote to Moore. “By making the unfounded and inappropriate allegations against the port as you have in your letter, perhaps Washington Trust does not share that same value.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
