BREMERTON — The Port of Bremerton has no intention of eating the nearly quarter-million-dollar cost of environmental cleanup at the Olympic View Industrial Park.
The Port commissioners accepted cleanup contracts from two different companies to complete the necessary remediation at the Olympic View Park Building. One was Three Kings Environmental, located in Battle Ground, for $49,000. That contract covered the removal of a variety of toxins from floors, office spaces and exteriors.
The other contract went to Rivers Edge Environmental of Maple Valley. The group billed the Port $95,000 for cleanup of the office building’s ceiling, walls and mezzanine.
Those contracts were added to various projects in which the Port had work performed on testing, cleaning and disposal of dangerous on-site waste materials.
The tenants using some environmentally sensitive materials in their businesses included Art’s Custom Chrome LLC. Metal plating — particularly with chrome — is a rapidly disappearing specialty, at least partly due to the noxious chemicals like arsenic that are required.
Although the office building, located on Imperial Way, had to be left unoccupied for the past year, the space has attracted interest from local developers.
Commissioner Axel Strakeljahn acknowledged the importance of the Port obtaining reimbursement for the work.
“We’re not a big port, unlike Seattle,” Strakeljahn said. “We can’t absorb an expense of that size.
“We couldn’t do this before. We simply didn’t know how big the contracts would be.”
Rothlin said now that the work is complete, the Port can begin the process of billing the businesses responsible for the contamination.
“The commission has instructed the Port’s legal staff to facilitate billing and collection,” he said. “If we’d had this information six months ago, we could have started the process then.”
The Port Commission will next meet at 6 p.m. on Jan. 10 at the Port’s Bremerton National Airport offices.
Mark Briant is a reporter for the Kitsap News Group. He can be reached at mbri ant@soundpublishing.com
