Chief Executive Officer Cary Bozeman said Tuesday that the Port of Bremerton is still hoping to use at least some of a $2.58 million grant the Economic Development Administration awarded the agency to build part of its defunct Sustainable Energy and Economic Development project.

“They’re giving us more time to come up with a proposal,” Bozeman told the port’s Board of Commissioners during a study session Jan. 12. “We’ve asked staff to give us some options — one of which is to give the money back, but we don’t want to do that.”

The port board voted in late 2008 to accept the EDA grant, which was to help construct an incubator building for SEED. Whatever federal funds the port does use, however, it will have to match with an equal amount of its own money.

Tim Thomson, the port’s director of Real Estate and Industrial Park Development, presented three options for redirecting the grant money:

• building a commercial aircraft maintenance hangar;

• building the already designed incubator building, but not as an incubator and not necessarily for tenants that are clean-tech; and,

• providing space and facilities for the Bremerton Motorsports Park.

Thomson said the maintenance hangar would be a 30,000-square-foot building that could house two MD-80 jets and already has a likely tenant: Dugan Kinetics. The aeronautical engineering firm flew in an MD-80 to Bremerton National Airport last year as part of its work modifying the planes’ engines to burn fuel more efficiently.

“A hangar makes a lot of sense,” said Commissioner Roger Zabinski. “It is playing to our strengths, and we already have a tenant. It seems a logical plan to move forward on.”

Commissioner Larry Stokes agreed that the hangar plan made sense, but he wanted to make sure there would be a backup plan.

“If we build it for a hangar, and that didn’t work out, is there a way we could use it for RV storage?” Stokes said.

Bozeman said the building would not simply be a hangar, but a maintenance facility that could service jets, which the airport doesn’t have.

Airport Facilities Director Fred Salisbury said such a facility would allow the crews to work inside, out of the rain, and that having other equipment such as “tugs” would help, too.

“We do not have the capability at our airport to move MD-80s,” Salisbury said. “Right now, there is no way to move the jet without firing up the engine.”

Salisbury said the firm included people who were “born and raised in Kitsap County, and want to stay here.”

Thomson said the upsides to building a hangar are that the “potential” tenant would generate 25 family-wage jobs — perhaps 100 in the future — and the lease revenue would help “offset the port’s bond service.”

However, the downsides are that the port would be “starting from scratch” as far as the building design and the sewer, stormwater improvements, Thomson said, explaining that staff will be investigating the scope and cost of that option.

If the port decided on the second option, Thomson said the upsides are that the 7,000-square-foot building has already been designed, and could be tailored to meet the needs of potential tenants.

The drawbacks are that it is a “speculative project, (and there) are no tenants lined up to lease space,” he said.

As for the third option, working with Bremerton Motorsports Park, Thomson said he had yet to receive an official proposal, and he was not sure the EDA grant money could be used for a project potentially involving a racetrack and RV park, or if it would be the proper use of property near an airport.

Thomson said all three options were presented as “food for discussion.”

He said to use the grant money, the port must begin construction by Aug. 15, and construction must be completed by April 15, 2013.