Representatives from Jefferson County businesses and organizations warned of catastrophic financial impacts from the planned four-weekend closure of the Hood Canal Bridge during a special meeting last week of the Board of County Commissioners.

Commissioners met with officials from the Washington State Department of Transportation Thursday to get more details on the closure of the bridge for repairs, as well as to make a plea to consider other options for shutting down the span — Jefferson County’s main link to Kitsap County and the Seattle area.

The meeting followed the recent announcement of critical closures of the Hood Canal Bridge this summer for repair work.

State transportation officials have said the span will be completely closed from 11 p.m. Fridays to
4 a.m. Mondays for four consecutive weekends starting Friday, July 28.

The closures will continue through the first three weekends in August, a timeframe when thousands of visitors head to the Olympic Peninsula and provide a vital influx of tourism dollars.

“There’s really no way around it. It’s going to be a busy construction season,” Steve Roark, Olympia Region Administrator for the Washington State Department of Transportation, told commissioners and others at the Feb. 23 special meeting.

The summertime construction includes not only work on the Hood Canal Bridge, but projects to remove barriers to fish passage on streams throughout Jefferson and Clallam counties, the installation of multiple roundabouts on state highways in Jefferson County, and the normal seasonal repair work.

“It’s not lost on us here at DOT. There’s no good time to do construction work. People love what we do when it’s done, but not while we’re doing it,” Roark said.

The work will also stretch beyond the busy summer and autumn months.

“We’ve got two years of heavy construction coming,” he said.

REPAIR WORK NEEDED

The Hood Canal Bridge repair work revolves around the replacement of the center locks on the span. Pontoons on the floating bridge are held together in two sections by those connections, but those pieces are aging out and need to be replaced.

“I liken this to putting a new roof on your house,” Roark said.
“Every so often we need to just invest to keep this bridge in good working order.”

The work has to be done sometime in the May-through-September timeframe. 

Roark noted earlier outreach efforts with entities on the Olympic Peninsula before the decision was made on what weekends would be used for the total shutdown of the bridge.

A schedule provided by the North Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission detailed major events from May through September, including the potential visitor impact.

The schedule was heavily weighted toward Clallam County events, with 12 events listed. Only four events in Jefferson County during that fourth-month time span, all in Port Townsend. (The list also included three holiday weekends in both counties; Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day.)

Roark said the commission asked WSDOT to work around that schedule.

He also noted the bridge project had originally been planned in the late May-June timeframe.

“They asked us to see if we could avoid some of those activities,” Roark said.

Summer traffic volumes on the Hood Canal Bridge also decline in the months following July, according to the state.

Officials have been getting feedback on the schedule, Roark added.

He said transportation officials would meet this week with the contractor for the project to talk about ways to adjust the bridge closure schedule, including an option that would see traffic “flushed” across the bridge during the weekend closures, from 8 to 9 a.m. and again at 4 to 5 p.m. every day.

Implementing that option, he added, is far from certain.

“We haven’t made any decisions on this, so don’t write this down,” Roark said.

He also noted that it would be difficult to get agreement on the right time to put those gaps in place.

“At some point we’ve got to call the dates and the times,” he said.

The project requires specialty work, and the state must work around the contractor’s schedule because that company does projects across the country.

“We’ve got some work to do to sort this out,” Roark said.

Doing the project during nighttime hours is also not possible, he said.

ECONOMIC IMPACTS FEARED

Many of those offering input at last week’s session pressed for changes to the proposed closure schedule

“The June dates seem less impactful ... than July and August dates,” said County Commissioner Kate Dean.

Rob Birman of Centrum said their events, such as Jazz Festival in July and the Blues Festival in August, were left off the events list provided to the state.

“We do $600,000 worth of business on just those two weeks,” Birman said.

Centrum is already expecting guests from 17 countries, all 50 states, and 77 percent of counties in Washington, he added.

Birman shared a world map with the locations of visitors who were coming to Fort Worden from around the globe, from Europe to Australia.

“We’re trying to be creative in trying to see if we can shift our dates so that people leave on Monday,” he added.

Birman suggested creating a one-week gap in a five-week construction schedule.

“Everybody’s willing to bear some of the pain,” he said.

CRITICAL WEEKEND BUSINESS

Andrew Byers from Finnriver Farm & Cidery said the Chimacum business has 60-plus employees and their revenue is largely dependent on weekend visitors.

“The vast majority of our revenue is generated on weekends. We have about 15 top weekends of summer revenue,” Byers said.

“And we’re looking at eight of those days not being available to us,” he said.

Ferry service is also limited, he noted, and no mitigation is not being suggested to deal with the impacts.

The economic burden to Finnriver is estimated to be $30,000, he said, and “maybe more of our summer income being impacted by this particular plan.”

“And what we’re not feeling is that any other sector of the economy gets to help us bear this burden,” Byers said.

Finnriver is a branded destination, he added, and this summer is the first full chance to take advantage since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For those of us that have managed to hold on and maintain employment of our workforce in the region, this is like the best-looking summer we’ve seen in four years,” Byers added. “And then to see that sliced in half.”

Finnriver was hoping to emerge from the summer with $25,000 of profit on its end-of-year bottom line, he added.

Byers wondered how small employers could look at their workers and say they would be able to make payroll.

NO MONEY FOR MITIGATION

Roark said there is no money for mitigation measures in the budget for the bridge project, and added that expanded ferry service is also not likely due to crew staffing constraints systemwide.

State transportation officials were also asked if there was a chance to delay work on US Highway 101 to lessen the impacts of the summertime work.

“We don’t have a choice. The work has to get done and we’re constrained legally by when we can do it,” Roark said.

Arlene Alen, executive director of the Chamber of Jefferson County, said the local economy and quality of life is impacted by access that the Hood Canal Bridge provides.

She said she hoped some modifications could be done to the bridge closure schedule.

Alen said the summer has been viewed as an important rebounding time; some businesses have been failing due to impact from the pandemic.

“So many of them are on the edge. And this potentially could push them over. We can’t afford to have all of those businesses fail.”

Roark said the Hood Canal Bridge project has a budget of $2 million, with none to spare for mitigation.

“It’s high impact. I get it. We all get it,” he said.

“But ... we are not funded to do mitigation and we are barred from paying for any kind of monetary mitigation for construction projects.”

“What we’re trying to do here is get out ahead of this here in this forum, and other forums, so folks can plan ahead.”

“And we’re willing to shift that schedule; we’ve done that once already,” he added.

“We’re getting to the point where we need to lock that in and make the best of it,” Roark said.