The Sitka Assembly has cleared the way for a salvage company to buy the former pulp mill utility dock at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park.
The assembly, acting as a judicial body at a special meeting Monday (4/22/19), overturned a notice of condemnation for the utility dock issued by the city Building Department in January. An otherwise routine matter, there were nevertheless some fireworks along the way, over the jurisdiction of park property.
Lee Hanson of Hanson Maritime Company brought his plan to purchase the utility dock to the GPIP (gee-pip) board in October of last year. The project went out to bid in December, and the board chose to sell the dock to Hanson. But four days before closing, the structure was condemned by city building inspector Pat Swedeen. The GPIP board then appealed the condemnation.
Hanson told the assembly on Monday that he’s aware that the dock is in poor shape. If the sale is finalized, he plans to repair it.
“I’m also not trying to argue that this dock is in good shape,” he said. “The whole point of my proposal is that it’s in terrible shape. And, you know, to be folksy, it’s a fixer-upper.”
Hanson said the utility dock has “good bones,” and much of the structure is salvageable. After he and GPIP board chair Scott Wagner presented the appeal, city attorney Brian Hanson, representing public works, began his presentation with an apology.
“I really didn’t want this to turn into some kind of hotly contested, adversarial type of thing,” he said. “This is an uncomfortable situation where we essentially have one department of the city pitted against the other. Frankly, I don’t think it has to be viewed that way.”
Brian Hanson said that at the end of the day, there was a miscommunication between city departments, and the “notice of condemnation didn’t mean the structure couldn’t be used — just that it needed to be assessed by an engineer to determine what repairs needed to be made, and those repairs must be made in order to have the condemnation lifted.” Now, Hanson said, whatever sale agreement is drawn up must require that (Lee) Hanson get a proper assessment of the structure from a qualified engineer and then promise to make the necessary repairs.
Several assembly members asked about the process of condemnation and wondered why the utility dock was declared condemned when other sales of park structures, like the sale of the pulp dock and warehouse to Silver Bay Seafoods in 2008, occurred with less scrutiny? Assembly member Richard Wein suggested it could be because there was concern that Hanson’s project could interfere with other business opportunities.
“Part of what is not brought out in this presentation was the notice that there were concerns about docking a cruise ship there and how this might interfere with that,” he said. “So that indicates to me that there’s kind of a back conversation as to this utility dock.”
But city administrator Keith Brady said city staff wants the sale to happen, and the “condemnation” was merely an attempt at transparency.
“We want to be business friendly. This condemnation came up because of the bidding process and we wanted to make sure that those who were bidding knew what they were bidding on,” he said. “We didn’t want something on the front end to become a back end business deal.”
After deliberation, assembly member Aaron Bean made a motion to grant the GPIP board’s appeal, overturning the notice of condemnation. The motion directed the municipal attorney to draft a sale document that included stipulations for Hanson Marine to get a certified engineers report, make the recommended repairs, and report back to the city quarterly until the dock is fully renovated. The motion passed 7-0.
