Bainbridge Conversation

Citing the challenges of working at Bainbridge City Hall and the lure of a new job, Jalyn Cummings announced on Thursday that she’ll resign from her post as city’s water resources manager.

“Simply put, this is a tough place to work,” she said, noting several other recent resignations. “Now it’s just my time to go.”

Cummings, who will leave the city on Nov. 4 for a job with the National Park Service, has led high-profile efforts to determine the limits of the island’s groundwater supply and investigate contamination along its shorelines.

Focused on water quality and quantity monitoring, the water resources program Cummings leads is considered a vital city service by many local officials and residents. A recent community priorities survey ranked “ensuring adequate water supply” and “protecting water quality in Bainbridge’s streams and shorelines” as the city’s first and second priorities.

While she enjoyed the work and her coworkers, Cummings said “there is a fair amount, as a city employee, of defense you have to do.”

She said public “distrust of city employees” makes the job difficult, as does “everything on the list” noted by her former co-workers who have resigned in recent months. That list has included infighting and indecision on the part of elected officials, and an overall nasty tone to Bainbridge politics.

“All the controversy, it takes a toll on the average worker,” she said.

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The city could lose about $5 million worth of grants for the Winslow Way utilities project if the lawsuit with the Bainbridge Ratepayers Alliance isn’t settled in just over a week.

Whether the city and alliance, which have been in negotiations for over two months, can come to agreement depends on who you ask. Some are hopeful a compromise can be reached. Others predict the project will be delayed or canceled and that the grants will have to be paid back to the feds and the state.

Read my story here.

Not a whole lot happened this week. Some political signs were stolen, a drunk drove and a road rager raged. Read on…

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City Harbor Commission member Bob Selzler sent in a guest column explaining the development of a long-proposed open water marina for Eagle Harbor. The plan is the only one of its kind in the state and is aimed at striking a balance between preserving the harbor’s century-old liveaboard community and meeting state rules. Read Selzler’s column below.

Very soon the Bainbridge Island City Council will take up the matter of whether or not the city should establish and manage an offshore marina in Eagle Harbor along with determining its size and number of vessels it will accommodate. The impetus for developing a marina (consisting of buoys only) has been to provide some number of permanent, legal mooring locations for long-term use by local citizens. Long-term use (simple definition) describes any boat staying in the harbor longer than 30 days.

Other than a thin ribbon of tidelands around the perimeter of the harbor (owned by adjacent waterfront property owners), Eagle Harbor belongs to the state of Washington and is subject to its use laws as established by the state Legislature. State rules require that publicly owned property being used for private purposes can only occur through the approval of the state’s property manager, the Department of Natural Resources, and that fees for such use must be paid. Additionally, DNR rules state that any proposed offshore marinas can only be developed by municipalities.

Eagle Harbor happens to be heavily populated with boats on moorings or at anchor that have been in the harbor for longer than thirty days. In fact most have been in the harbor for several years. Some of these boats are used as full time residences (liveaboard vessels) and others are only used occasionally or not at all (long-term unoccupied vessels). The DNR has been encouraging the city to actively manage this ongoing private use of public lands through the establishment of a municipally operated offshore marina that would, among other things, collect fees from long term moored boats that would then be forwarded on to DNR in the form of a property lease. Under such a lease the city would commit to a fixed monthly payment to the state for the use of a designated (and very specific) portion of Eagle Harbor. In that leased area the city would install new mooring buoys and rent them out to boaters wishing to stay in the harbor longer than the 30 day state and local mandated time limit. The remaining state owned portion of Eagle Harbor not leased by the city for use as a marina would be vacated of all long term boats and any remaining illegally placed mooring balls not otherwise removed by their previous owners would be pulled out and disposed of.

A recent letter from DNR to the city has put us all on official notice that a lease must be established with them before the end of this calendar year otherwise all long-term boats in Eagle Harbor that are currently anchored or moored on state-owned property face eviction and would be required to either leave the harbor or find legal moorage in a private shore based marina or move to a legally permitted private mooring.

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