Land deal could reshape the future of North Kitsap

If a deal brewing between the county and Pope Resources is approved, 7,000 acres of North Kitsap timberland and a 1.5-mile stretch of Port Gamble Bay will become public parks. The plan also would bring a dense new housing development to the town of Port Gamble and land to the south.

Many in the North End are intrigued by the plan’s potential. Most are just hungry for details.

“This came as sort of a surprise,” said Art Ellison, chair of the Greater Hansville Area Advisory Council.

North End County Commissioner Steve Bauer and Jon Rose, president of Pope’s Olympic Property Group, have been collaborating on the plan. At the heart of the proposal, Pope would exchange timberland for the leeway to add a housing development in Port Gamble.

Bauer and Rose hope to have the agreement in place within two years. First the county and Pope will need to sort through a tangle of details.

Bauer and Rose have been meeting with business and environmental groups and will present the “North Kitsap Legacy Partnership” to councils in Kingston and Hansville in February. Bauer said response has been good since the proposal was made public in January.

“I think there are a lot of people who see this as a great opportunity, see it as a legacy,” Bauer said. “People are wise enough to know that there will have to be some tradeoffs.”

Seeing greenways

For the county, the agreement would be massive in scale and effect.

The 7,000 acres would more than double its holding of parkland, which includes of 6,000 acres spread over 70 parks.

In Hansville, a 2,000-acre block of land south of Driftwood Key would form a corridor to the Port Gamble S’Klallam reservation and connect with an existing 265-acre greenway.

To the south, a crescent of public land and trails would connect Kingston’s Arness Slough to a 3,000-acre expanse south of Port Gamble.

Pope would transfer the property in several ways, including land grants and conservation sales.

Even lightly developed open space comes with a cost, as volunteers maintaining the Hansville Greenway and North Kitsap Heritage Park already know.

Bauer said the county would use selective timber harvests and sell permits to commercial plant pickers to pay for upkeep.

His plan would continue an uneasy relationship between North End residents and loggers, said Ellison, who was trained as a forester.

Some North End residents have been upset by Pope’s timber harvests Ellison said, but usually because they weren’t given notice. A key for the county will be keeping people informed.

“Because of my background, I’d say ‘yes,’ but a lot of here would say ‘no,’” Ellison said. “Communication is really, really, really important.”

The harvest would also have to work in the concert with wildlife habitat preservation, which is a goal of the partnership.

That can happen, if the selective harvest is done unobtrusively and protects the forest canopy, said Sandra Staples-Bortner, executive director of Great Peninsula Conservancy, which holds land easements throughout Kitsap.

Staples-Bortner is optimistic the plan can preserve swaths of North Kitsap while preventing scattered development.

“That might be a tradeoff that can be made depending on how the open space is managed,” Bortner said. “I think it has tremendous potential.”

Writing a new history in Port Gamble

Olympic Property Group wants to realize the economic potential of Port Gamble.

Rose said timber harvests have been increasingly more difficult as the North End becomes more suburban.

Olympic could take a piecemeal approach to development under the county’s contested Rural Wooded Incentive program, which allows light development on timber land. It could also sell off the land in chunks to other developers.

Instead it hopes to keep the bulk of the land in open space, while focusing its developments in the planned Kingston Arborwood neighborhood and in Port Gamble.

Since it was rebuilt as a destination following the closure of the sawmill in the 1990s, Port Gamble has been picturesque but not profitable. Olympic heavily subsidizes the town.

Through the new development, the company hopes to create a self-sustaining tax base in Port Gamble. Rose said the company would add as many as 1,000 homes to the townsite and property to the south.

That density would require the county to make an exception, something it would do in exchange for some open space in the partnership agreement.

The new Port Gamble community will require water upgrades and a sewer treatment plant. Rose said he hopes new service businesses will move to the town, along with new industries on the waterfront.

The historic look Port Gamble covets would still be a priority.

“It’s only going to be augmented as an authentic village rather than a postcard place,” Rose said.

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe will be watching the plans warily. The reservation, based in Little Boston, is bordered by Pope property and tribe members harvest shellfish on Port Gamble Bay.

Tribal Chair Jeromy Sullivan has spoken with Bauer about the proposal and wants the tribe to be more deeply involved moving forward.

There is great opportunity for education and recreation the new open space, Sullivan said, but he’s concerned the Port Gamble development could hurt the harbor.

“Of course I like having 7,000 acres of land right by here,” Sullivan said. “But I also worry about the health of the bay that my people depend on. I can’t really swap one for the other.”

The North Kitsap Legacy Partnership will be presented at the Kingston Citizen Advisory Council meeting at 7 p.m. Feb. 3 in the Miller Bay Road fire station. The proposal will be presented to the Greater Hansville Area Advisory Council at 7 p.m. Feb. 9 in the Greater Hansville Community Center.

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