Right pool? Questionable. Wrong place? Absolutely.
More than 2,000 people in our town/county signed a petition in support of an aquatic center a few years ago.
At that time, Make Waves …
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Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park is Port of Port Townsend property, leased to the City of Port Townsend, and adjacent to Haines Place Park and Ride. Photo by Patrick J. Sullivan, airplane piloted by Tim Snyder
Right pool? Questionable. Wrong place? Absolutely.
More than 2,000 people in our town/county signed a petition in support of an aquatic center a few years ago.
At that time, Make Waves approached the school board hoping to acquire the Mountain View pool and refurbish it.
The school board, however, had other ideas for the property, so Make Waves had to find another location.
I wonder just how many of those signers would have signed that petition had they known that the preferred location would become Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park?
And now that there is no longer a school at Mountain View, it seems like a no-brainer.
A few (instead of many) million dollars later, a somewhat watered-down but perfectly functional aquatic center could exist at an already developed site. There would be far less waste of resources, and far more innovative ideas put to work.
But for some reason, the port has been carrying on a love affair with Make Waves and is literally paving the way for this huge, costly undertaking to take place at Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park. There is an ongoing history of the port being uncomfortable with Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park remaining open space in the form of a passive nature park.
Over the years, there have been attempts to locate our skateboard park there, then an art center and now that magnificent specimen of modernity – a 40,000-square-foot aquatic center – on pilings (or a facsimile of), like Safeway.
The whole area is landfill, which means unstable earth (think earthquake).
It is also Port Townsend’s major stormwater drainage basin. Make Waves likes to talk about how green this building will be. No building is as green as not building it at all. Ask the 100-plus species of birds sighted there.
Throughout our history there have been certain visionaries such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir who had the foresight to preserve land for outdoor recreation for generations of Americans to enjoy. Certain Port Townsend citizens in the '80s had similar ideas. They wrote grants, did landscape restoration and worked hard to see that Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park be preserved hopefully in perpetuity for outdoor recreation.
In the future, there will be more and more infill of our city proper as dictated by our city’s comprehensive plan. It would behoove us to hold onto this precious gem as is. It will become our Central Park.
NORA REGAN
Port Townsend
