PORT ANGELES – The City of Port Angeles and Clallam County Commissioners are submitting objections to the current proposal for cleaning up the Rayonier Mill site in Port Angeles Harbor.

The deadline for public comment, already extended once by Ecology, is Tuesday. Rayonier’s proposal to clean up polluted sediments above and below the shoreline involves, in part, scraping the top layer of tainted soil from the most polluted areas.

Port Angeles City Manager Nathan West says, as far as the City is concerned, that’s where the problems begin.

“The scraping is actually scraping it to one consolidated location, and that location that has been selected to consolidate that pollution and those contaminants is on the most viable portion of the site and to us that is unacceptable.”

To make matters worse, that section of the property would then be fenced off permanently, with no public access.

West says the second major issue is that the proposed level of cleanup rules out any future uses of the property other than industrial use.

“As Rayonier has proposed the solution, it would only be a temporary fix. So that if someone wanted to come back and apply something to that site in the form of a land-use that deviates from industrial, they would probably have to go back through a new clean up process.”

West says the third point of objection is one of timing. Discussions on how to clean up pollutants at the site have been ongoing for 22 years. He says the City wants a more thorough cleanup than proposed, but he does not want to see Rayonier and Ecology going back to the drawing board to do so.

“In essence, we do not want Department of Ecology to go back to the drawing board, we simply want them to redesign it and redesign it right. Redesign it so that it is something that the community can live with for the long term and that respects the fact there will be a desire to have a mixture of uses on the site.”

Department of Ecology photo: Rayonier dock.