AUSSIE BOAT PLAN SINKS
PLANNING AHEAD
City officials, stakeholders assess future of Bellingham’s center
Marine firm won’t use waterfront site for new facility
By Evan Marczynski evan@bbjtoday.com
R
ob Camandona believes in a simple mantra for the futurity of downtown Bellingham: Growth is good. “The thing I want more than anything else downtown is people,” said Camandona, executive director of the Downtown Bellingham Partnership. “This is one of the crown jewels of Whatcom County, and I feel like we need to act soon.” Along with Bellingham city officials and local nonprofit groups, the partnership is reaching out to downtown stakeholders, property developers, business owners, residents and others to refocus the area’s master plan. Organizers hope to identify barriers to downtown development and determine the best approach to maintain vitality in the city center. They plan to present a new Sub-Area Plan for the downtown core to the city council by spring 2013. It is one the first major attempts at strategizing downtown planning since Bellingham implemented its 2002 City Center Master Plan. Darby Galligan, a development specialist for the city of Bellingham, said one major goal of the process was to define the borders of a downtown area amid other surrounding neighborhoods and districts. Various regulatory overlays have sectioned off Bellingham’s center into a mosaic of zones all with differing rules, restrictions and master plans. Galligan said zone overlaps
Year 20 No. 6 $1
June 2012
BELLS IN BUSINESS, P.4
By Evan Marczynski evan@bbjtoday.com
A
An arching sign on Holly Street serves as a gateway to downtown Bellingham. (Right) The Bellingham Towers, left, and Mount Baker Theater, are two of the district’s iconic historical buildings. EVAN MARCZYNSKI PHOTOS
have made it more challenging for business owners to figure out which development areas they fall into. “That’s a big part of the discussion,” Galligan said. “Let’s figure out where the Downtown SubArea boundary is.”
Survey highlights the good and bad Organizers spent the fall of 2011 gathering input on various aspects of the city center from local residents and business owners with the help of an online
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survey dubbed “myDowntown.” They released the results in March. Of the 230 survey respondents who said they had business interests downtown, 81 percent said it was a “good” or “fair” place for commerce. The downtown’s central location, its character and its proximity to services were the top factors business owners cited in the survey that drove them to set up shop in the area. On the other end, parking, permitting fees and land or buildinguse codes were picked as the three biggest barriers to downtown business development. Camandona said since the
fter Aluminum Boats Australia picked the Fairhaven waterfront to base its new American subsidiary, the Port of Bellingham stood ready to gain a job-generating tenant with an international footprint. However, less than one month after leasing plans were drawn up for Building 7 in the Fairhaven Marine Industrial Park, the company backed out saying it would be too expensive to use the facility. The reversal was a total surprise for port officials as a sevenmonth wooing process, once thought a done deal, was dashed in early May. “I think that everyone involved believes we all gave it our best shot,” said Shirley McFearin, the port’s real estate development manager. “It came down to just our facility did not meet the needs of ABA.” Company owners found the property unsuitable mainly due to federal salmon habitat and tidelands protections restricting them from building a facility in the bay waters that would give them
BOAT | Page 5
DOWNTOWN | Page 6
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