Flash: Downtown Bellingham In Recovery!

David Camp is a CPA by trade and a sailor by inclination. This is his first monthly installment of Portknocker Notes.

Portknocker (noun, slang): artisanal miners typically operating without permits.

Portknocker Notes is a collection of port-related thoughts, facts, ideas and random complaints from your faithful Port of Bellingham reporter. The opinions in this column do not necessarily reflect those of Whatcom Watch.

The “Olympic Coordination Center”: Our esteemed Senator, Patty Murray, has requested that the “Olympic Coordination Center,” remodled at vast expense under “emergency” purchasing guidelines, be “maintained” permanently. I suppose she believes we need to have squads of federales in brand new SUVs permanently parked at the Hampton Inn looking for terrorists or something.

I’m guessing here because despite a phone message and an e-mail to Senator Murray I have received no information other than that printed in The Bellingham Herald as to why she thinks this is a good idea, who requested her to carry the ball on this, or how exactly she thinks the country can afford to pay for yet more federal law enforcement officers with nothing to do on the northern border.

I mean, we already have paramilitary Homeland Security agents in fancy new speedboats boarding and searching local sailboats in Hales Passage and daily flyovers by black federal helicopters—why not just billet a federal law enforcement officer in every house in the county and have total homeland security?

This was supposed to be a temporary command and coordination building to enhance security during the Vancouver Olympics (which ended in February, I believe), not some permanent boondoggle to justify yet more unaffordable non-income-producing federal agents riding on the backs of us poor taxpayers struggling to make ends meet.

The Bellingham Shipping Terminal—at every port commissioners’ meeting this year, several people have been in attendance representing the marine trades, who in all the excitement over the past few years over the GOP lands, feel they have been given short shrift by the port.

I think they have a point—the Bellingham Shipping Terminal, which is an actual deepwater facility, has been close to unused these past few years. I mean, marinas are nice, but they don’t produce jobs for working families like a working port facility does. Surely the port has a duty to the community to cater to all its stakeholders, not just retired oligarchs with trophy yachts.

Federal Recovery Zone Economic Development Bonds: The assumption by the port of unused federal recovery zone bond capacity from the county (approved by the commissioners at the March 16 meeting, vote number 49) gives the port the ability to allocate tax-exempt federal bond-issuing authority to private entities for the purchase of depreciable business property within a “recovery zone.” And, mirabile dictu, the entire downtown and Georgia-Pacific lands of our fair city have been designated a recovery zone.

So—this gives the port a tool to attract industrial and commercial companies to town and actually create new jobs. Or to help an existing employer expand with tax-free bond financing. How about starting by attracting new businesses to the Bellingham Shipping Terminal?