A Port of Bellingham meeting turned tense when one commissioner introduced the idea of hosting a public forum for the community to learn about port decisions, and another commissioner’s argument against it included a profane rebuke of a recent port critic.
Commissioner Ken Bell, during the regular meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 17, raised the idea of hosting a public forum in the late winter of 2025 to share the port’s “story” with the wider Bellingham community.
“I want to have an open public dialog in a setting where we have a professional to do it,” he said, suggesting small groups could break out to discuss the port’s plan for the log pond area, the shipping terminal and the work being done in the waterfront area. “… Just to basically lay down our story to the city, to the county, to the people in our community, so that we are more transparent than we’ve been in the past.”
Commissioner Bobby Briscoe took strong issue with the idea, pointing out the port had just earmarked $100,000 for a public relations campaign with a local PR firm and questioned why a public forum was needed.
The stated purpose of the campaign was to improve the port’s image following months of criticism over its decisions involving ABC Recycling, a Canadian scrap metal recycler; Irish developer Harcourt’s inability to finish three luxury waterfront condominiums on time, and the sudden termination of the Bellingham International Airport aviation director.
“I almost feel like, all of a sudden, we’re on a defense here,” Briscoe said.
Briscoe took the opportunity to call out Scott Jones, a founding member of Save the Waterfront and vocal port critic, who sent an email to the commissioners regarding the PR campaign.
“It gets personal with people that we’re a bunch of idiots sitting up here, we don’t know what we’re doing,” Briscoe said. “When the case is Mr. Jones is a pathetic dumbass, as far as this commissioner is concerned in what he’s doing, what he said about our staff, what he said about the port.”
Jones told Cascadia Daily News late Tuesday he considered portions of the email “tongue in cheek” and that Briscoe’s treatment of him was egregious and breathtaking. CDN reviewed the email, which showed Jones was not critical of port employees but rather the commissioners.
The letter at times mocking the port commissions’s decision to hire PR help, may not have been written in an “ultra-professional” tone, Jones said. But he defended the content, saying ” … these port commissioners are not acting in a way that is of benefit to the community that they have been elected to serve.” He said he didn’t expect an apology from Briscoe about his remarks.
Briscoe continued at the meeting: “And I’m not a politically correct guy, so I really don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about what I’m saying. I’m saying what I feel. He said what he felt, and I’m replying. If he doesn’t like it, that’s his problem. Come on down here, sit in this chair. Get up and speak and tell us how stupid we all are that we don’t know how to run a port, because that’s what you said in an email, and if people don’t believe that, it’s public information. You’re welcome to look at it.”
Briscoe noted when he first started as a commissioner, community members would pack the commission room with complaints about the port. He gestured to the nearly empty room around 5 p.m. Tuesday, filled with only a small number of employees from the port and outside observers.
“Dan [Tucker from the Whatcom Working Waterfront Coalition] shows up and maybe one or two other people, and that’s it. If people are that upset and that uninformed about what we’re doing, why aren’t they here now?” Briscoe asked. (The meetings are also available to watch online and can be accessed on YouTube.)
In response to the question about the PR campaign, Bell said he felt the campaign was more one-on-one whereas a public forum would bring together the city, the county, the port’s partners (such as the BoardMill Group and Mercy Housing) and community members to have an “honest dialogue.”
The forum, possibly one day or a weekend in February or March, would also allow the community to weigh in on shaping the port’s vision for the future. The forum would not reevaluate the master plan or sub-area plan.
“To do it on a massive scale will build support with them,” Bell said. “They’ll be able to argue on our behalf.”
Briscoe asked Bell to consider what has happened to the port over the past few years, including the Harcourt loss of redeveloping the former Georgia Pacific site, and past heat the port has received when it hasn’t executed a project exactly like what the community was envisioning.
“Don’t you have to have a pretty solid vision to do something like this? Do we have that? We have a sub-area plan but I don’t think we have a solid vision of exactly what we’re doing,” Briscoe said.
Bell responded: “That’s the whole point. The whole point is that we don’t know what we’re doing and we need some community input. We need the city’s input; they have a vision. I don’t ever want to get crossways with our partners so I want all of them involved.”
Briscoe also weighed the consideration of asking port staff to do extra work to put together the public forum.
Brian Goruan, the director of environmental and planning services and waterfront project manager, said his staff had already thought about holding an open house-style event to inform the Bellingham community about going-ons at the port.
“A lot of people just don’t know,” he said. “They see things, they’re curious about whether we’re keeping the pump track or are the portals going away or not. There’s a lot of good things that could come from this.”
No formal decision was made on the public forum during Tuesday’s meeting.
This story has been updated to add the email Scott Jones sent port commissioners and other details.
Annie Todd is CDN’s criminal justice/enterprise reporter; reach her at annietodd@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 130.
