|
 |
|
|
|
Community Profile: Port Angeles Pushes Toward Prosperity |
|
|
|
Written On: March/April 2005 |
|
|
|
Written By: By Ron Dalby |
|
|
|
Dan Gase, president of Uptown Realty and current president of the Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce, opened the Chamber’s January 31 luncheon by announcing, “There are 51 homes for sale in Port Angeles — and 105 real estate agents trying to sell them.”
What’s more, for the first time that anyone can remember, Port Angeles was taken off Washington’s distressed communities list in 2004, according to Jim Haguewood, executive director of the Clallam County Economic Development Council. “The unemployment rate,” he said, “is 5.6 percent, the lowest it’s been in 30 years.”
This all points to a lot going on in this town of less than 20,000 residents located between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the northern edge of Olympic National Park. Incidentally, the park happens to be the third-most-visited facility in the National Park system, behind only Yellowstone and Yosemite.
Park visitors means tourists, particularly from May to September, but tourism ranks only third on the list of industries contributing to the town’s industrial base. The number one industry in town, according to Haguewood, is health care followed by forest products as number two.
And the forest product gaining precedence in Port Angeles probably isn’t what you might think. Alder, generating $600 per ton, represents the growth in the forest products industry.
Haguewood uses alder as an example of how Port Angeles figured out to help itself economically. A few years ago, school enrollment was dropping, sales tax revenues were flat or declining, and an average wage in Port Angeles was a mere 66 percent of the Washington average. Community leaders put their heads together and came up with a plan.
“The approach was internal as opposed to external,” Haguewood said. After assessing existing industries, action plans were developed to enhance each one that was deemed viable, and Port Angeles decided to “leverage its in-place assets.” Alder was one of the assets stumbled upon to leverage the already-existing forest-products industry.
The demand for alder is primarily to make furniture. Most of the alder being harvested was being shipped out of the area and processed elsewhere. Now, according to Haguewood, “we should have a hardwood mill up and running in Port Angeles” by the end of the year.
Another notable success was gaining Westport Shipyard’s yard for building their new 164-foot yacht. It took a little doing, competition with some other communities, and finding some space along the waterfront, but the shipyard is now part of Westport’s luxury yacht-building business and employs Port Angeles residents with high-wage manufacturing jobs.
“We created an environment of opportunity,” Haguewood said, “opportunity in value-added product production. I’m not sure where we’ll end up — we’ll have some growing pains — but we’re going places.”
Gase and his associates at Uptown Realty know full well that Port Angeles is going places. His firm is the largest real estate agency in town with about one-third of the market. In 2003, according to Gase and his staff, residential properties went up 21 percent in value and land values jumped by 46 percent.
“Last year we broke all of our records,” Realtor Kathy Love said. “You could not take a day off to save your soul.”
In contemplating the sparse number of properties currently available, Love said, “We now have very frustrated buyers.”
“We’re short of houses to sell because so few were built in past years,” Gase said. Now there’s “optimism in the area and you begin to feel like there is real potential here.”
Both Gase and Love like their city for the small-town atmosphere. Gase notes this makes for a much lower cost of living, and Love says the “lack of people and lack of traffic” appeal to her.
Part of that quality of life relates to downtown Port Angeles. No big-box stores here, just block after block of locally owned businesses that are open and successful. And, of course, one is that business every small town must have — a general store. Swain’s General Store is located toward the east end of First Avenue.
General stores are special for a lot of reasons, mostly for what you can find in them. For instance, a few minutes of wandering around Swain’s yielded the following eclectic mix of products among thousands of others: muck boots, valentines, Teepee Creepers™, seed and fertilizer, TV trays, scrushers, sling shots, and a blowgun paintball repeater. This is not a downtown Seattle department store.
“The downtown is definitely thriving,” said Russ Veenema, executive director of the chamber of commerce. His office is in the visitors’ center, an easy stroll from the ferry dock. He attributes the ferry dock being right in the heart of town as a major reason the downtown area does so well. The ferry dock is the anchor that creates the traffic needed by the stores in the downtown core area.
Veenema talks at length about tourism. Some 3.5 million visitors find their way to Port Angeles in an average year, mostly concentrated into a five-month block from late spring to early fall. And, without a doubt, Olympic National Park is a prime draw.
“A million-acre park is just the start,” is what Veenema says will be the theme for this year’s visitors brochures.
Besides the park, Veenema points out a number of other attractions such as the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration Visitors Center, a marine sanctuary interpretive center and a splendid fine arts center, all of them right in town.
But, sharing space downtown are year-round businesses and industries as well. Easily visible from the ferry dock at the end of January was an ocean-going oil tanker tied up for repair. The port at Port Angeles can handle deep-draft ships and one of the business opportunities recently recognized and leveraged was the availability of topside repair to vessels.
There’s some obvious reasoning involved here. Port Angeles is the first deep-water port for ships using the southern entrance to Puget Sound. It’s also the last deep-water port these same vessels will pass outbound into the Pacific a few days later. Thus there’s a steady stream of deep-draft traffic into and out of the port for various repairs. While the tanker was being repaired at dockside, a loaded container ship was anchored in the bay waiting its turn. Several tugs seemed to be in constant motion, coming and going from the port and scurrying around the bay for one reason or another.
Finally, as you drive past the ferry docks, the repair facilities and Westport’s shipyard, there’s a large paper mill on the west end of town. Drive right up to and through the mill site out onto Ediz Hook. There’s a Coast Guard base out on the end you probably won’t be allowed to enter in your vehicle, but in between the base and the paper mill a couple of miles of road with frequent turnouts on the narrow spit offer superb views of Port Angeles to the south and Vancouver Island to the north.
Standing on the spit you can sense the reality of Port Angeles. The Olympic Mountains, the prime draw for 3.5 million visitors a year, dominate the skyline south of town. The ocean to your back carries trade for our nation and repair work for the marine shops in town. Rafts of logs floating in the bay between you and the town await processing at the paper mill at the base of Ediz Hook. It is a location at once beautiful — stunningly so — and functional, the perfect mix, insofar as possible, of esthetics and industry.
|
|
|
|
