Kalakala group declines city's offer

The Kalakala Foundation, which oversees the famed, Depression-era Seattle ferry (its name means "flying bird" in Chinook), has politely turned down a request from Port Angeles civic boosters to make their city the home port for the vessel.

While recognizing the "enthusiasm, warmth and fondness" Port Angeles has for the boat, "to commit now to the possibilities of future funds being raised in Port Angeles doesn't seem practical," Kalakala Foundation executive director Peter Bevis wrote in a Jan. 5 letter to the boosters.

"We're somewhat saddened," said Bill Zynda, a spokesman for the Port Angeles Kalakala Steering Committee. "We think they are missing a real good bet here.

"We still think we can make restoration of the Kalakala a reality, but we will also pursue alternatives while this plan is on the shelf."

Port Angeles launched its movement to explore acquisition of the vessel as a tourist and community centerpiece for its harbor last fall.

The group offered Port Angeles as a home after the Kalakala ran into trouble in September. Seattle building inspectors said the vessel, a Seattle icon between 1935 and 1969, had to be moved from the North Lake Union berth it has occupied for two years or face $75 a day fines for poking 32 feet too far into shipping lanes.

The city since has held the fines in abeyance, trying to work with the Kalakala Foundation to find a new home.

But although the Kalakala has lots of fans, a new home has been as hard to find as the $700,000 in private funding needed to get the rusty boat into dry dock for repairs.

Bevis, meanwhile, said the letter to the boosters doesn't completely rule out Port Angeles as an option. In fact, the foundation would like Port Angeles to have representatives on its board and include the town as a destination for the boat.

"It's just way too soon to commit to Port Angeles with several other possibilities for the future of the Kalakala to consider," Bevis said.

At least four other expressions of interest in the boat, three from Seattle and one from San Francisco, need to be explored, he said.

If none works out, the foundation can fall back on various options, including Port Angeles.

Port Angeles wants the Kalakala Foundation to commit to permanently berthing the boat there. The city wants to have something to show when it shops around for restoration and development funding.

But Kalakala Foundation board members don't want to risk having those plans hit a snag, causing the boat to sit around in corrosive saltwater for a long time, Bevis said.

Zynda said the Port Angeles steering committee already had committed funds for a feasibility study, expected to be followed by a business plan and appeals to local government for help.

The group backed off a desire to immediately acquire the Kalakala, in part because the work to dry-dock and remove the boat's lead-based paint can't be done in Port Angeles, he said.

Both sides got a better picture of what it might take to renovate the boat in December, when Port Angeles boosters asked Tony Carter, special project coordinator for the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association, to inspect the Kalakala.

Carter came away with mixed reviews: The boat shouldn't sail again, which Bevis envisions, and would fare better permanently berthed, as Port Angeles envisions.

But tourist traffic is the key to the health of any historic ship. Although a "guesstimate" from the Port Angeles boosters is that they'd be able to attract 10 percent of the 3.5 million people who flow through the town each year, Seattle's waterfront is a busier place than Port Angeles, Carter said.

Carter put the cost of renovating the boat conservatively at $5 million, but figures it isn't worth it.

Bevis, however, said Carter's observations are nothing new to the Kalakala Foundation. Although the organization doesn't yet have a business plan -- upon which dry-docking depends -- estimates from a construction company in 1998 put total costs at $5.9 million.

"It's still my vision to moor the boat at Pioneer Square and to have it sail around Puget Sound. And I'll say it -- it sounds illogical," he said.

"But if I had followed logic, the Kalakala wouldn't have been returned to Seattle two years ago," he said, remembering when the rusty, forgotten hulk was removed from a mud pit in Alaska, where it had rested for three decades, and towed 1,700 miles to Seattle.

"People then said it would never float, that it would never make it across the Gulf of Alaska in November. But we tried anyway," he said.