Fixing Strawberry Plant / Cannery Cove Park

by Rod Stevens

This is the story of how a staff-driven planning process would have put much of a $1.5 million park off-limits to public use. It’s the story of how sham public involvement can lead to a citizen revolt. It’s also the story of possibility, of how, under a new form of government, we might be able to back up and do things right. This story of possibility also includes a trust fund with $30 million that can only be spent here, which might be used to leverage community-driven projects for environmental restoration.

1. History

Until the turn of the century, Eagle Harbor was a thinly-settled place. People living in Madrone, which is what Winslow was then called, had to row across the harbor and walk to Port Blakely to get their mail. Port Blakely had the mill, the Hall Brothers Shipyard was still located there, and there was an operation that made telegraph and telephone poles. As the mill operations wound down, some of the Japanese workers there moved out into the cleared fields of the island and started growing strawberries, which required little capital. Around 1909 Sakakichi Sumiyoshi acquired land at the corner of Wyatt Way and Weaver Road and started growing berries.

Sumiyoshi and others formed the Winslow Berry Growers Association and at first canned their berries in his kitchen. Their operations grew to the point that by 1915 they were hiring Canadian Indians to come down and pick. In 1923 they built a strawberry cannery and dock at the end of Weaver Rd., and in 1932, in the middle of the Depression, they replaced the first building with a larger one. Their packing and canning continued until 1941, when they were deported to internment camps. The building was used again after the war and for almost another 50 years by a variety of people and companies, including a fishing company, artists and music teachers, boat builders and manufacturing companies. It burned on the morning of January 9, 1997, just twelve years ago.

In 2002, the Open Space Commission recommended the purchase of the strawberry plant site. In November, 2004, the City acquired the site through the exchange of property near Vineyard Lane that had been given for a park, and the City and the Park District agreed to plan the new site together until the Park District took ownership. The agreement between the two envisioned the creation of a rowing, sailing and kayaking center and the “clean up” of the shoreline.

2. The Planners Take Over

The City put Peter Best in charge of representing the City in planning the site. Best is a mid-level environmental planner in charge of the shorelines stewardship program who has a reputation for being zealous in the pursuit of environmental protection. Best began looking for grants to “clean up” and restore the shoreline at the Strawberry Plant.

In the fall of 2007 Parks Commissioner Ken Dewitt let the City know that he was concerned that too much of the site was being planned for shoreline restoration, and too little for recreation. He emailed councilor Debbie Vancil, “To completely preclude the (center of the site) from active use consideration without proper public process, in my opinion, not only unrealistically constrains the site, it deprives an area near downtown of a much needed active use space, and results in the poor use of tax payer dollars.” At its acquisition, the property was valued at $1.5 million.

3. The Will of the Council

Council member Nezam Tooloee reacted strongly to Dewitt’s words, writing the mayor and staff, “When in the world did the City Council make the decision that the Strawberry Plant would be devoted to passive uses rather than active recreation?” Libby Hudson, a staff planner, wrote back, “You should know that no formal decisions regarding the use and development of the property have been made at this time”.

Perhaps not formal decisions, but certainly informal ones. A week later the staff came to council for acceptance of Salmon Recovery Board grants that would convert much of the uplands to shoreline use off limits to active recreation. Peter Best made the presentation, which was characterized by words like “limitations”, “encumbered”, “restricted”, and “are allowed”.

The plans for “restoration” included removing all of the pilings left over from the old dock, and Council member Jim Llewelyn asked Best if some of these should be retained to make it easier to add a new dock later. The mayor forestalled Llewelyn’s questioning by saying that this was not the time to get into the detail of the park plan. The city took out all of the pilings later.

Tooloee came prepared with a resolution to formally redirect the staff’s efforts towards more recreational use of the site. This motion stated:

The best and most appropriate uses of Pritchard Park and the Strawberry Plant property are for active recreational purposes, and (we) direct the city to make its best efforts in working with the BIPRD to develop the designs for those properties that allow for active recreational uses to the maximum extent that is possible under all offices of the law and devices such as variances and exceptions.

Tooloee had obviously done his homework, for the last three words of his motion, “variances and exceptions”, provided an opening for more active use of the shoreline. It is worth noting that the grants do not preclude such use.

Speaking in favor of Tooloee’s motion, the normally-understated Llewellyn said that the staff often presented plans on a “take it or leave it” basis, and that he wanted to express the will of the council. You can see these exchanges on video here.

To find the right portion of the meeting, set the slider under the screen to just above the fast forward key and hit the blue triangle to the extreme left.

4. The “Charrette”

Last fall the planning department invited a select number of people to come help them plan the site on the afternoon of Saturday September 27. They called this event a “charrette”.

Done properly, a planning charrette involves a great deal of preparation and compresses much analysis, decision making and design into several days or a week. A planning charrette is supposed to bring together all of the various personalities and points of view, without taking months to do so. The typical cost for a good charrette is about $150,000 to $250,000. Charrettes can work well when they are properly organized and led, but the concept has become so used and abused that the National Charrette Institute now trains and accredits charrette leaders. Its guidelines for community planning efforts include:

* The early public kick-off workshop creates trust and educates a community.
* The multiple-day charrette maximizes the opportunities for members of the public to participate- day or night, weekday or weekend.
* Multiple days provide the design team time to work through concepts with key stakeholders and to respond to the unexpected.
* The post charrette phase provides a safety net for engaging those who may have missed the charrette.
* Follow up meetings provide another chance for stakeholders to participate in a design feedback loop.

The Strawberry Plant charrette was invitation-only, there was no kick-off work-shop, it was held in a single afternoon, and there was no public “feedback loop” for making changes.

The Bainbridge Review, not invited or informed, wrote in an advance editorial: “There is a public process underway, but it is a quasi public process… What is frustrating is the façade of open public interest that many of our public employees and officials espouse while they are manipulating the process in a way they allows them to do what they want.”

Libby Hudson, a senior planner for the city, wrote an op-ed piece that scolded the Review for not knowing about the event, although it had not received an invitation. Hudson accused the Review of forcing the city to waste “valuable resources” in responding to its editorial, of “unnecessarily harming well-intentioned projects”, and of “affecting the public credibility of the city”. This was about the same time that the petition drive for a change of government collected its last signature.

After the charrette, the Review put out a second editorial which called the stated need to keep the event intimate “a lame excuse”:

This was about what is best for the city and the planners… Arguably the most important part (of the planners’ job) is to ensure that the people who pay their salaries are encouraged to become part of the process in a meaningful way. Especially those who have a difference of opinion. In this case, the city made a calculated decision to do just the minimum.

The Review wrote yet a third editorial after the report on the charrette came out:

Were the design charrettes that the city has been conducting during the last few months on the restoration of Strawberry Plant Park a waste of time? It appears so.

…Not one single item that people suggested be part of the revised park plan were included in the two options now offered by the city. …

It’s been the city’s stance for months that it was open to the public’s suggestions, but it now appears that was an illusion.

5. Money Makes the Wheels Turn

Much like the controversies at Grow Avenue, at Wyatt Way and on Winslow Way, it was both the planners’ own goals and the availability and conditions of grant money that drove their plan for the Strawberry Plant. The City sought money for this project from two sources: the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board, and a trust set up with money from the Wyckoff settlement.

For decades the Wyckoff plant operated on Bill Point, on the southern point of the entrance to Eagle Harbor, treating pilings and telephone posts with creosote and polluting the water in the process. Part of the money from a legal settlement went directly into clean-up of the site, and part went into a special trust intended to restore ecosystems that had been harmed by the plant.

There is now $3.05 million in this trust fund, down $335,000 from the original amount. Most of the money spent so far has gone for studies, including an environmental assessment that includes a list of priority projects. Peter Best worked closely with the NOAA official who manages the trust day to day, and the Strawberry Plant is at the top of this list.

But, like the planning efforts for the park, there appears to have been little public involvement in the preparation of the environmental assessment, which included only one public meeting. This could either be a case of the public not caring about the money, or not knowing it was there.

The assessment states that the purpose of the fund is to “restore critical habitats in Eagle Harbor”, but this is not technically correct, for the real purpose is to restore “damaged resources”, and these are all along the shores of the island. When it comes to finding food, a perch or a salmon might skip urbanized Eagle Harbor and head to the beach off Fay Bainbridge or the waters of Port Madison. The possibility of using this money elsewhere is one of the major, unexplored aspects of the Strawberry Plant controversy.

6. Friends of Cannery Cove

This past February, about five months after last fall’s charrette, the former mayor convened a joint, unadvertised meeting of the city council and park board at which the two agencies decided to proceed with the plan. No public comment was taken.

Nezam Tooloee may have gone off the scene, but Jerry Elfendahl had not. Elfendahl, who may know more about the island’s history than anyone else, felt that the plans threatened local history, and he started writing emails. Soon he had attracted a group around him that included a variety of talent. He and others soon named their group Friends of Cannery Cove and compiled a more complete history of the use of the site. When the city tried to hurry its plan through the state environmental review process by issuing a “declaration of non significance”, Elfendahl and his group appealed the finding. This group has also started a petition drive to reconsider planning for the Strawberry Plant, and has so far collected about 800 signatures.

City council members like Hilary Franz, who have defended the current plan on environmental grounds, should give serious consideration to the comments of Conrad Mahnken, a member of Friends of Cannery Cove. Mahnken, a former director of the NOAA Manchester Fisheries Lab and a member of the Washington State Fish and Wildlife Commission, thinks the money could be spent far more effectively on restoration efforts. He suggests preserving and enlarging large parcels with good habitat, instead of “small, isolated, human-altered sites” like the Strawberry Plant.

Mahnken also believes that wherever the money is spent, the project should be subject to peer review, and that there should be measurable outcomes and targets. He writes, “The (Strawberry Plant restoration) project is designed primarily as a convenient off-site mitigation recovery project for NOAA, with too little regard to be user-friendly to the people of Bainbridge Island… It is difficult for me to give a high priority to such a limited but expensive project in the midst of an urban bay, when so many other significant environmental issues go wanting”.

7. The City Steps Back

This last Wednesday night a number of people showed up at the city council meeting to make comment, wearing orange life preservers to identify themselves as Friends of Cannery Cove. Some people also showed up to speak in favor of the current plan. The comments ran for almost an hour.

As people with different points of view were making their comments, I was struck by the conflict and level of distrust that this project has sown, particularly in a community where so many people share the same interests in history, water and the environment.

After the comment period was over, city manager Mark Dombroski asked the council to allow him to put a brake on the project, to hold an informational meeting and to bring the city council and park board together to discuss it again.

Dombroski says that he is prepared to let the grants go if this is necessary to creating a plan that more people agree on. This will test his ability not only to work with elected officials but to manage his own staff.

It is not clear the planning staff know how to reach out and involve people, even if they wanted to. Dombroski himself may need to get involved, both to heal old wounds and to set a new relationship between his staff and the community. The most important part will be the first five minutes of the first public meeting, when he states the goal of the new effort. This could be one of two things: 1) creating a new plan by a certain date, regardless of agreement, or 2) creating agreement, regardless of the amount of time it takes.

There are several key interests at stake here. One is environmental restoration, on the island in general, if not on this site to the previous extent planned for. Another is historical preservation. A third is recreational use, and the fourth, not well recognized, is the relation between community use of this site and the local neighborhood’s need for privacy. The paramount interest is the community’s ability to get along with itself and make decisions.

A re-worked plan can meet all these needs, and a very good plan could capture the imagination of the island. We are back in a time of “small is beautiful”, and the blending of these considerations could result in something special.

8. New Possibilities for Community-Led Action

The opportunities go beyond this site.

Conrad Mahnken’s questions raise the possibility of using the Wyckoff money for environmental efforts elsewhere on the island. What if we took a more creative approach to not only where these projects are located, but how they are carried out?

This place has many people who care passionately about the land and water. One of the stories in “In Praise of Island Stewards” is about John and Ned Thorne, two teenagers at the time, who worked to restore salmon runs on Issei Creek near Miller Road.

What if we used the money for more projects like theirs? What if we could use the money to restore streams and wetlands around the island, at places like Manzanita Bay, with citizens carrying out the work? That would not only restore nature but build community.

The tension here is letting people be heard, and creating a wonderful place out of the resolution of what is now a conflict between recreation, restoration, preservation, and privacy. Some of the great places in the world have been created out of such tensions.

For example, the Spanish Steps in Rome are basically a way to get from the top of a steep hill to the bottom and to link one section of the city to another, but they are obviously far more than that. We can create a great place at the Strawberry Plant if we take the time to do it right. This will be an interesting test of the new form of government and its ability to let the community lead.

Rod Stevens
206-780-0553