A 20-year-old agreement governing development at Terminals 90 and 91 was feted last week at a special ceremony at Port of Seattle headquarters.
Called the "Short Fill Redevelopment Agreement," the landmark accord was signed in October 1983 by members of the Neighbors Advisory Committee (NAC), which is made up of Port staff and board members of the Queen Anne Community Council (QACC) and Magnolia Community Club (MCC).
In part, the agreement involved the filling-in of an open stretch of waterway between the two piers (see photo). However, the agreement also marked an end to eight years of rancorous relationships between the two communities and the Port, along with an end to a lawsuit filed over Port plans for the terminals.
NAC and the short-fill agreement both set precedents used in other negotiations between the Port and neighborhood organizations, according to Alice Shorett from Triangle Associates, a mediation and public-involvement company.
"In 1983, there weren't a lot of situations where community groups and a large institution had come to an agreement without litigation," added Shorett, who wrote a case study about the agreement.
"For the Port commissioners to step forward to talk to community groups, it was real scary," she said. "There was no roadmap on how to do this."
According to a summary of Shorett's case study, the NAC organization was formed in 1975 as part of a Port policy statement that came to be known as the "Treaty of Magnolia."
The so-called treaty included a Port agreement to turn over to the city land that became Smith Cove Park, but the agreement also called for NAC to review development plans for T-90 and 91.
The Port was facing deep mistrust in Queen Anne and Magnolia at the time, said longtime NAC member John Cain from the MCC. That's because the grain terminal the Port built at T-86 in 1970 turned out to be about twice the size the two communities were told it would be, he said.
Port commission president and chairwoman Patricia Davis acknowledged that mistrust at the anniversary celebration. "The Port didn't have a great reputation for working with communities," she said.
Davis also conceded that change didn't come easily to the Port. "It's a difficult thing to do to transform the culture of any organization," she noted.
The relationship between the Port and the two neighborhoods didn't get any better in 1981, when the Port published a Draft Environmental Impact Statement on four possible levels of fill and 16 possible uses for Terminal 91, according to Shorett's case-study summary.
"The original idea was it was going to be container facility," said Jim Smith, a longtime board member of the QACC and self described "charter member" of NAC.
The contain-er idea was dropped because there wasn't enough room for one, according to a Power Point presentation that continually flashed photos of the terminals and 1983 headlines from the Magnolia News at the anniversary celebration.
Later that same year, the Port also asked for permission from the State Commissioner of Public Lands to vacate the Smith Cover waterway between the terminals so it could be filled in, Shorett wrote.
MCC board members promptly sued in King County Superior Court, charging that the Draft EIS was inadequate and that it didn't address the full fill the Port had requested.
That's when negotiations began in earnest, remembered Port Commissioner Paige Miller, who was QACC chair at the time. The commission wasn't accustomed to treating neighborhoods seriously in negotiations, she added. "And it was a real recipe for disaster."
Miller caught flack from both sides of the issue as she tried to facilitate talks. She was berated by a "cantankerous commission" for being an enemy of the Port, Miller said. "I was accused of being a traitor for even talking to the Port," she added.
Aside from procedural matters that included separating non-negotiable issues from negotiable ones, the short-fill agreement defined "the black box theory," Cain from Magnolia said.
"We don't care what you do in there as long as we can't see it or hear it or smell it," is how he described the communities' attitudes toward activities on the Port property.
A consultant was hired to analyze the noise issue as part of that approach, and it was determined that the probability for a worst-case noise scenario came down to three days in 1,000 years, according to the case-study summary.
"These wild, unlikely events were the ones we'd been arguing about. We had to stop splitting hairs," the case study quoted one negotiator as saying. Still, the short-fill agreement included a provision for monitoring noise and setting up a complaint process.
Lighting at the terminals was likewise examined, but the Port would not agree to absolute limits on traffic. Instead, according to the case study, "trigger levels" on traffic were set up, along with a traffic-monitoring system.
The agreement also set up a dispute-resolution process that would lead to mediation, counseling from an independent consultant or arbitration, according to the case study.
The agreement has worked out pretty well, according to Smith from Queen Anne. "I think it's been effective. It worked the way it was supposed to," he said.
It was a comment echoed by Kirk Robbins, a longtime QACC board member on the NAC, which still meets every month. "Our relationship with the Port of Seattle is the most trusting one we have in the city," he said.
